I repeat, we have a piper down.

Grey's Anatomy is dangerous

Grey's anatomy is dangerous. Yesterday I was facing physical harm and, little did I know, eventual digital harm (not my fingers... they're ok).

Early Saturday morning, I promised Katie that we'd watch the Grey's Anatomy season premiere on the big TV, which is now hooked permanently up to my PC. She'd missed it Thursday since she had to work late thursday night while LSUS bussed in students to work the "call center". So, she was two days behind on one of the most important events in her universe and was very excited by the prospect.

Katie and Emma went dress shopping (Emma stayed with us this weekend), so I took the opportunity to be sweet and download an HD version with no commercials. When I downloaded it, it was compressed to make it download faster.. and when I uncompressed it, I found that it had a virus and trojan embedded in one of the files I tried to access. Computer down.

Unfortunately, I wasn't alerted to the virus by a virus scanner... I don't have one of those on that computer. I found out when a "fake" virus scanner I hadn't installed popped up, along with 30 other messages about viruses.

It disabled my control panel, regedit, the task manager, and made IE almost unusable. I was facing impending doom. I stood between Katie and her Grey's Anatomy. Firefox was my only way out, and allowed me to search for a fix... downloading some lame malware scanner which deleted a gang load of files and jacked with a bunch of stuff in Windows. I scanned, and after 21 minutes, I had to restart.

I restarted and found that Windows no longer thought my version of XP was activated. Nice. I couldn't log in to windows, or even safe mode with networking. I could, however, get in to Safe Mode with Command Prompt, then launch explorer.exe to access the usual windows functionality. After much searching online (from another computer), I found a solution... and applied the fix.

After getting back into XP, we tried to load ABC.com in Firefox and IE, and was denied any video pleasure. It just never loaded. I downloaded the player, clicked everywhere I was supposed to... but got nothing. This was way too much work for a show I don't even like...

With that in mind, I brokered a deal involving the new episode of The Office (hulu.com never lets me down), the truffle shuffle, groveling, and the fact that I cooked Chicken Tiki Masala for lunch. Crisis averted.

Anywho, as we speak, Katie's watching a different version of Grey's Anatomy on the big TV and I'm free to listen to my music on the other computer and tippy-tap at the computer. Life is good again for her, and thus for me.

Resigned to change

Photo by: Cobalt123

Yesterday Morning, I resigned from my current position as a software developer. I'm not happy about leaving the people I'm working with, and to be honest, there were a few projects that I was able to complete on my own that I'm sorry to have to leave behind - I'm just plain proud of 'em.

My main point of pride is a scanning application that I was able to plan, design and implement from start to finish. It was meant to replace another third party application, Kofax Ascent Capture, which is a beast of a program with more features than our clients would ever need, and a price tag to match that large set of features (we're talking one or more $3k scanner, plus a several thousand dollar license, plus costs per page scanned). It was a top of the line product, and took a great deal of configuration, knowledge and more importantly time to support.

I saw that we were spending what seemed like 20% of our time trying to support client questions, and troubleshooting scanning problems. So, I went to the owner of our company and told him I thought we could save a lot of time and money (currently spent fooling with Kofax) by writing our own custom scanning application. We'd know exactly how it worked (which would make support easier), and could tailor it to our customers' needs without all the complexity. Additionally, we could sell it for much less, saving our clients money and making our proposals look cheaper than competitors whose proposals were sometimes bloated with thousands of dollars for Kofax.

So, he went for it and I spent a couple months developing the scanning application and making sure each of our applications was set up to take advantage of it. So far, I think it's been a success. We get very few calls on it, and are selling it rapidly to clients who are tired of paying hefty license renewal fees for Kofax and want the simplicity of being able to have little desktop scanners on each workers desk, rather than having one big scanner that the office shares with Kofax.

Though there were products and projects like these that made me love my job, there were other aspects of the company that made my job more difficult. The best way I can explain it is to say that it's like being an assembly line worker. As an assembly worker, it's my job to assemble widgets as they come down the assembly line. Things are fine as long as the assembly line is moving at the right speed, and has all the parts that I need to assemble a widget. When that assembly line is malfunctioning, though, it's moving too fast or too slow, is shaking and knocking parts onto the floor. I have to work much harder, picking up pieces of the floor and running up and down the line to find what I need. That's how I felt most of the time. The organization within the company was getting in the way of me doing my job.

I was looking for a place where I could come to work and focus on doing my job well. I wanted to come in to work, know what I'd be working on and know that the company around me was set-up to allow each person to succeed, not hinder them... and I think a few of my former co-workers had found those qualities with another company here in town. So, when I got an e-mail asking if I'd be interested in meeting their boss for lunch, I said, sure.

We had a nice chat at lunch, he explained their business and "what they were about", and I explained what I was looking for, and those two ideas seemed to match well. So, I accepted the offer.

I'll be an ASP .NET web developer now, something I've had very little experience with... and I tried to be up front about that. I let them know that my strength is in Windows Forms programming, and that it may take some time to become proficient at being a web developer on a professional level. They were understanding.

So, I'm making the big change in two-weeks time, and will be starting over. I'll not have any programs or a reputation to rely on, and will also have no predisposed notions about how the company is being managed. It's a fresh start, and that's exciting to me.

Ron Paul - Lecturing Ben Bernanke on the Bailout

I love this man... I stand by my statement that I would've voted for him.

Random Happenings - August/September edition

Image by: S Migol

It's been an interesting month...

I had to let the yard guy go. Yes, we had a yard guy. Yes, I'm a perfectly capable, non-wealthy 20-something. I was, however, fed up with weed eater re-stringing, broken pull-string handles (ouch), and mowing in general. It was worth my time to pay someone $30 to weed eat and mow every week or so.

However, the weed eating was few and far between, he wanted cash only immediately after finishing (after coming unannounced), and gave a couple sob stories about gas getting cut-off... after which I "advanced" a few weeks' mowing pay, which did get worked off. Anyway, the last straw was the level of mowing in the front yard. Missed strips in a yard my size (1/8 acre total, if that) is craziness. After that, we had a talk.

We cancelled DirecTV a few weeks ago. Digital Antenna service gives us all we need, except ESPN, in HD, for free. DirecTV didn't take kindly to my disconnection and decided to charge me the full termination fee ($300!!) instead of the prorated 5 months' fee I actually owed. DirecTV reps and I talked the issue out quite a few times, and finally yesterday (after initially calling my bank to dispute the debit card charge, and my bank leaving me with DirecTV's CSR's again) they relented.

I hate being one of those people who is mean to CSR's, because they're just doing their job... but in DirecTV's case their job is to get me off the phone without listening, and definitely without taking any action. I basically had to keep repeating "I need to talk to someone who can help me. If you're unable or not authorized to help me, you need to transfer me to someone who can". I feel bad... but it worked.

My computer is now lodged directly behind my TV, plugged up permanently to the TV and home theater system... primed and ready to watch all our TV shows (and Divx movies) for free (Hulu, USANetwork.com,etc.) and surf the web from my world famous man chair. $70/mo. saved.

I lost a Mario Kart tournament at work this week... and was utterly devastated. I took the championship last time, but this week I made a fatal mistake, turning the wrong way into a moving car in the last seconds of my race. I lost the respect and free lunch that accompanied the tournament title.

Our dad's parents are here this weekend, so we'll be doing the family thing with them tonight. Last night we went to Jason's Deli with Taylor and KatieMac, then Starbucks, then came over to play some Wii Fit and Mario Kart. Good times.

In the last bit of news worth mentioning, I warmed up the Simpson think tank (my family, used as a sounding board for business type idears) again with a new iphone application idea. I don't think I'm going to pursue it, but it had to do with being able to price compare and manage grocery lists with in-store UPC's, etc. Iphones are ripe with possibilities... and having just read a story about an indie developer who made $250,000 profit in 2 months with a $5 video game... I'm convinced I need to come up with a better smart phone app. Android (the google phone platform) is more my style (Java, no Mac required for development), but the iphone people are throwing money at Apple like Wall Street dollars to the Obama campaign. I'd like to get in on that.

I have some yard work to do. If I don't post again, I caught west nile or died suddenly from a massive anger induced aneurysm at the hands of the following creature:

Wii fit - finally got one

This week, while Katie was in Monroe on a business trip, she stopped in to the mall and ended up finding a Wii Fit there in a Gamestop.

We've been wanting to try it out for a while, since it sounded like fun, but weren't sure whether we'd actually use it enough to justify the price. When Katie called and said she'd found one, though, I told her that if we didn't end up using it every once in a while that we could always put it on Ebay.

Thursday night when she got back we broke it out and played for 30 mins or so, and tonight Katie and her little sister (Sneak) played... and are still playing.

Basically, it's what we thought... and just as much fun as we'd thought. I have no idea about the replay value, or whether we'll find motivation to try to stick to our "goals" in the game... to lose a certain amount of weight (which we choose) by a certain date.

I do know, however, that the Wii Fit is quite depressing. Within 10 minutes of being on the thing, it told me I was overweight, had bad balance, and had a fitness age of 42! After 20 minutes of being on the contraption I was sure that I need help with my leg muscles and balance... and I hadn't even tried any strength training exercises yet (push ups, lunges).

For those unfamiliar with the Wii Fit, it's basically a board that you stand on that hooks up to the Wii (a video game system). The board can sense pressure in different spots, and is able to judge weight. So, if you lean a certain way, it knows... So, there are different yoga positions, balance activities (to improve posture) and strength training (lunges, pushups, ab crunches) that you do on or around the machine.

Anywho, hopefully we'll continue to use it. It could make exercise more fun.

This xkcd web comic is pretty good