#1) Whitney:

#2) Kelly Clarkson -

#3) Jordin Sparks:

#4) Marvin Gaye:

I meant to post as soon as I got back in to town, but like the Nebraska legislature found, good intentions don't always count for much.

Where was I, you ask? In New Orleans. I went down to N.O. for a Hornets game with some friends from work (current and former company, both). It's a 5 hour drive from Shreveport, and I was questioning whether it would be worth it - 10 hours in a car over two days (with my stomach craziness) didn't seem like fun, as well as a distaste for bourbon street festivities. I went, though, since live basketball is a great thing, and I had been craving something new and different to do.

We had tickets in Section 119 on row 7 (*mouseover), which was closer than I imagined we would be. It brought me back to being court side at the Louisiana Tech's Men's basketball games, which were some of the best live sporting events I've ever attended. We were maybe 10-15 yards away from the court, behind the goal, and even though the game wasn't a great game, it was a good time.

On the way down, one of the guys I went with, Thomas, was playing music in the car through his Zune (thank you, Camry auxilary port). We got to talking about the virtues of the Zune Pass, and he won me over to the dark, scummy, Microsoft side. I won't be buying a Zune antyime soon (I'm starting to rhyme and I like it), but the sound of a subscription based music service with a large catalog, pre-defined playlists and channels (all of which can be broken into individual downloads) sounded like something I should at least try. So, I'm giving it a 14 day trial.

Previously, I'd been listening to a lot of Pandora, which is great for a while... until you start to get comfortable with it and settle into a rotaiton of a few stations. The same songs keep cropping up, and then you hit the licensing restrictions (no more than 4 songs by any artist in an hour, only 10 or so (by my estimation) song skips per hour, etc.). Granted, I listen at work for a good 3 hours a day, but I usually try to mix up the stations. Anywho, that just got old, so I'm going to try to get my music house updated with some fresh tunes. Hopefully the Zune pass can assist there.

I also wanted to get a question out about why the Microsoft Zune Windows application is designed so much more thoughtfully than iTunes. iTunes makes me angry. It's unintuitive and slow, while the Microsoft Zune application is attractive, less cluttered and fairly responsive. I almost feel guilty about enjoying it. Anywho, it just struck me as odd since Apple is supposed to design mind blowing UI's.

One last note, I'm glad I'm too old for the bourbon street scene. Maybe in college I would've been more inclined to hang out after the game, but I don't find that stuff to be as much fun anymore. Maybe it's the miser in me :-) $7 for a beer? That drink better put a smile on my face and a shine on my shoes for $7.

I told the fellers that I wasn't going to go out, and on the 5 hour drive back, I think everyone in the car regretted their decision from the night before except me. I went back to the hotel (Hilton Riverside) and watched some random cable on the 42" LCD in the room there. That's what a hotel room should be like, by the way. Clean sheets, nice furnishings, flat screen TV... but for goodness sake allow the curtains to be drawn all the way. I woke up at 7 or so with the sun in my eyes and couldn't draw the curtains all the way, the light weight curtains were drawn, but the heavy curtains left three feet of sleep smacking sunshine in.

So, today, in preparation for hosting Pie Night, Katie's family's Wed. night pre-thanksgiving tradition, I painted (along with my Dad). We listened to the Zune songs... most of the time, set to play the Ultimate Sing Along Collection playlist - a pre-selected list of 100 songs or so. Good times. We'll have 20 people or so over tomorrow night for pies, games and all of them will hopefully admire our newly painted living areas.

November's almost over and I've not made a post this month (unless you count that last one), but quite a few things of note have happened.

First, my wife made an attempt on my dog's life. That's right, she attempted a coup for my affection. With a new pair of nail clippers, and an idea to test them out on a notoriously spastic 80 pound dog while at my parents' house, Katie clipped a nail far too short on Pluto's front right paw. The dog must've lost a pint of blood on various parts of my parents' house (really, it was a surprising amount of blood), and Katie a pint of salt water - feeling bad for being the cause of the dog's impending demise. Death didn't want Pluto yet, though (and I think Death's better for it), and we managed to stop the bleeding with corn starch and pressure (through a sock filled with corn starch, worn by the dog-beast himself, pressure applied by yours truly).

Unfortunately, the dog will never allow his nails to be clipped again. On the other hand, behavior issues are much more easily solved by showing the dog nail clippers when he gets out of line.

On the job front, Katie had a job interview this week for a Director's position within her university. We think that it may be a position that was intended for another person since the application posting period was only a week long (state jobs with short application/interview periods are notorious for being used as a means for fulfilling the public posting requirement without actually getting too many qualified applicants - allowing the predetermined candidate to get the job). There is hope for her, as the people in the university like her, and have showed gratitude for the work she does (and rightly so :-) )... but the hope is slim.

Mentioning the job makes me think to write about the budget we've undertaken here in the Youngster Simpson household. At first, we'd budgeted amounts for each spending category (bills, entertainment, fast food, groceries, gas [which being a Simpson, is normally tied to the fast food category], etc.), but soon realized that we'd probably fail at such a drastic change in spending, and the commitment required in that change. So, we decided to just focus on our Savings goal, transferring money to savings immediately upon getting paid. I think that suits us just fine.

Other random thoughts -

• Rear Window (watched last night) - great movie. Blockbuster is going to be providing us a large collection of classics after being underwhelmed by most recent mainstream comedies (a la, Strange Wilderness, Pineapple Express) and dramas as well (There Will Be Blood). I can sit through a lot, but I stopped all three before finishing.


• I have a strong desire to create, and be creative. I also have little energy these days, especially outside of work. I'm looking for an outlet... and the energy to commit to that outlet


• We need to finish painting the rooms of our house, and find a fix to our TV mounting problem. Anyone have experience mounting TV's on lathe and plaster fireplaces? There are no studs back there as far as I can find (just one out front...me). We need to mount the TV to free up space so we can get another couch and love seat in here...


• If our family (no casualties of the poor economy) is cutting back Christmas and converting from consumerists, I expect the economy to stall for a while.

Proof:

Need I continue?

Tonight was brought to a stand still when I found this:

and of course this...

Weird Al is a genius. I love the man, and I'm not ashamed.

Normally, I like to think I'm a decent person. I go to church, help people out when I can, respect my elders, give to charity, kick every cat I see ... just the kinds of things that "good" people do. I've recently been thinking about a bad trait that I've developed, though.

Don't worry, I'm not addicted to smack, pornography or Michael McDonald music - figured I should address that before moving on further. It's relatively harmless. I love to do absolutely nothing when I should be somewhere.

This morning, I got to thinking about this again. Katie and I played hookey from church to catch up on sleep, which is easy to do when it's 65 in the house with wood floors and 85 in the sheets. I slept in, avoided showering, sat in my man chair and watched tv and surfed on the internet - basically did nothing... all the while with a giant smile on my face.

This is very strange for two reasons - First, I'm accustomed to doing nothing. Ask my wife. I practically bathe myself in the tao of do-nothing - it's the Tao of Jordan, if you will. Second, I am not an unnecessarily happy person. Again, ask my wife. I have mastered the frown, and by the time I'm 40 I will have developed frowning jowls that could rival Joe Lieberman. For some reason, I just really enjoy the idea that I should be somewhere doing something, but instead am in my boxers in my man chair with a mouthful of lemon heads at 10:30 AM watching TV. It's shameful, but it's me.

The first incident I can remember was in high school. I was supposed to be taking this ACT prep course (forgive me, parents, if you read this) on Saturday mornings for 6 weeks or so (as best I recall). The only thing I remember about this course was the fact that one weekend my parents went out of town and I was able to skip it. That's right... hookey. When the time came to go to class, I got up, threw on a sweatshirt (note the lack of shower, it's important in these scenarios for some reason) went to McDonald's and had the best sausage biscuit of my life... and smiled the whole time I was there... much to the dismay of the parents in the play area with me.

Anywho, I couldn't help but to think back to that time this morning, while playing hookey again. Most of college was spent in similar fashion, ditching this class or that class... and smiling like my brother looking at a recent presidential election poll. Maybe that's why I was there for 7 years... who knows... I don't like to linger on little details like that.

My point of putting fingers to keys here was just to say that there's hardly a thing sweeter than ditching mundane responsibility here and there to daydream, sleep in, watch scooby-doo re-runs... whatever. Today was sweet.

The new company is a great place, so far. The people seem nice, the manager is definitely a change (finally, a real "hands off" manager), and the environment is low stress. So, I think I'm going to enjoy it.

Of course, I said similar things in the past (about my last two jobs, links below), but I'm hoping this one keeps me happy. I've looked back and found a few posts that chronicle my path, and see that I'm still moving up... and as long as that keeps happening, things are good.

Resignation from LA Tech and Moving:
http://www.jojometal.com/archives/2005/01/i_broke_the_new.php
http://www.jojometal.com/archives/2005/01/the_big_move.php

Resigning from Edgear and 'Moving On' post:
http://www.jojometal.com/archives/2006/01/new_year__new_e.php
http://www.jojometal.com/archives/2006/01/a.php

First Week with SNS and resignation from SNS:
http://www.jojometal.com/archives/2006/01/i_made_it_through_a_week_witho.php
http://www.jojometal.com/archives/2008/09/resigned_to_cha.php

Foster Brooks... hilarious (the second guy to speak here in Roasting Johnny Carson).

The place looks like a hole in the wall burger joint (and maybe it is... thanks google maps for providing street view), but I don't care. If it were a travelling, mule drawn burger stand, I'd still be writing about it. What matters is the food... and more specifically the burgers.

Three main burger virtues:

1. Size - this burger is the size of my face! I don't know when that became a proper measurement, but when describing meat, I always compare it to the size of my face. It helps if you yell the words MY FACE!.. and by help I mean it scares people into agreeing with your outlandish opinions on meat


2. Texture - This is no grainy, gritty burger. It is a ground meat burger. There are no random bone pieces - a la Sonic Cheeseburger. Didn't we genetically remove bones from cows anyway?


3. Taste - A bit smokey, a bit flavorful (Random Griddle Goodness™ flavored, I believe). The fresh bread , which is a bit sweet, complements the burger well. I eat mine without many vegetables - just mustard and mayo. They're vegetables, trust me.

In addition the virtues listed above, the burger has added appeal. Papa and Company looks like a dive, is always busy, and is only open half a day (11-8 Mon.-Sat.). These are quality ingredients in the making of a good burger joint. If the best burgers were served there, would they be fancy? Would there be an empty dining room? Would they even have to serve their burgers all day? No, I say.

As a man, I see utility in this burger and the burger joint. They serve to satiate my man hunger for meat, and do it without frilly signs and hostesses. The only hostesses I want at a burger joint are the hostess cupcake crumbs on my shirt from breakfast. Instead of hostesses and fanciness, at Papa and Company there's a guy at the counter taking orders in a hurry, and a few big guys behind the counter barking out orders as they're ready and grilling up goodness.

I couldn't end the day without mentioning the burger. I had this burger for lunch today... in my car, in my driveway. I'm not ashamed. I had the other half again tonight (graciously, they cut it in half so small children and old ladies don't herniate themselves picking it up).

Try them out. I don't recommend burgers hastily.

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.

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.

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:

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.