After many threatening phone calls and a few letters to Nadu Construction Co. complaining that they never bothered to finish some work in our house (or do it properly for that matter), we finall got somewhere with them. They sent someone out this morning while both Karen and I had the day off (pre-planned), and got a lot of things accomplished in a matter of only 2 hours. He showed up at 7:00, just as promised, and took care of all of the minor work that could be done around the house including caulking the window wells (which was never done), fixed the doors upstairs that don't shut, and fixed the front door. There are still a bunch of things that need to be done, but they are things like regrading and seeding the backyard, replace the door frame between the kitchen and garage, and I'm waiting for new seals for our doors to the outside.
After the GC left, I got a call from the drywaller, and we set up a time for him to come out today and do the first of 3 appointments to get all of the walls and patch work ready for the painter. He was here for 2 hours, and got all of the cracks filled and retaped, including the crack in the drywall above the door to the master bathroom (the rest were all along seams). He will be back tomorrow morning at 9:00 while we are both at work to do another round of patching and sanding. I had to have E come out so there would be someone at the house since I don't like the idea of a complete stranger having free reign of our house while we are not home.
I am finally impressed with the way we are being treated and their responsiveness today. We'll see if that all holds up as we go through the rest of the process.
Yesterday, I helped John and Claire pick up, transport, and assemble their new deck furniture. I also got a truck full of dirt fom John in return for my assistance, which I am using today and tomorrow to plant my 2 new dogwood trees that I got from SKH today. Woohoo!
We were the invited back to John and Claire's house last night for their first official new deck/kewl firepit party. We had a lot of fun playing in the fire and just hanging out with good friends. Pictures of the firepit are available here.
As I sit here on my last day at Target Systems, I am overwhelmed with a multitude of emotions. I have learned a lot of things, and met a lot of great people over my tenure here, which I will miss sorely. It is a bittersweet feeling, knowing that this is my final day in this office, although, I know that on Tuesday, I will be beginning my new job with AOPC. I look forward to the new and exciting challenges that lie ahead, but know that I will always remember this place and the numerous friendly, compassionate faces that I have met here.
Thank you Target Systems for a wonderful 2 years, a 2 years which I will not forget!
Over the past 2 days, there have been inquiries into the possibility of preventing the terrorist attacks on America on 9/11/2001. From what I've been reading on my favorite media site, it looks like both the Clinton and Bush (2) administration failed the American people miserably. According to the ex-counterterror chief, Richard Clarke, he had warned both administrations on numerous occasions about the possible threat from al-Qaida, and was repeatedly ignored.
Now that Clarke has decided to come forward and make public what he has known about the White House's refusal to see al-Qaida as a prominent threat, he has come under numerous attacks from both sides of the political fence. I realize the need for both sides to "save face", and not take the fall completely for the lack of proper action, but the Bush White House has done nothing to debunk any of the facts laid out by Clarke, but have engaged in a rebuttal of character assassination. This does nothing for me to "prove" that the Bush administration actually knew nothing about the threats posed by al-Qaida.
I for one have speculated from the beginning that the current Bush administration had plans from the beginning to "finish the work daddy began" back in the early 90's, but failed to do. This is the basis of the tesimony from Clarke, that he warned the Bush administration on numerous occasions, and was ignored. They wanted to pin everything on Iraq.
I personally don't believe that 9/11 could have been prevented, but we need to learn from our mistakes, and grow up and admit them. Hopefully, we will learn from our mistakes, grow up and take some culpability, and prevent any future horrific events like what happened 2 and a half years ago.
According to an article at MSNBC, scientists have concluded that there was at one time pools of salt water on the surface of mars. They drew this conclusion from the sedimintation patterns, although, they had previously "prooven" that there once was water on the surface, they just weren't sure if it was standing or not.
I think this is the discovery that they had hope for when the planned the MER missions a number of years back. I think it's fascinating that they can take such trace evidence and conclude that conditions may once have been right for primitive life to develop. Now they just have to find the fossils :)
This morning, I got a phone call at about 8:00, before I normally wake up, from Karen. Of course, that scared me because I figured something was wrong or she was in an accident. I don't need that kind of stress now! We only have 3 more months until we become parents, and I don't want anything to happen to jeopardize that.
Anyway, she called to tell me that she spotted a bald eagle along side route 23 eating at some road kill. Now, I've been fortunate to see a few of them in the wild over the Susquehanna river and the mud flats, but I've never seen one that close, except for in captivity. Unfortunately, she did not have the digital camera on her, or she would have been able to get some excellent pictures I'm sure. Hopefully, the eagle will return for more food at the same time tomorrow and she can get a few pictures.
I'm jealous!
Upon a recomendation from Carlos, I am installing Xine and GXine so that I can watch streaming video from MSNBC (even after my disappointment with their site). I started the emerge, and got the following error:
libtool: link: `/usr/lib/libGL.la' is not a valid libtool archive
make[3]: *** [libogl_spectrum.la] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `[...]/work/xmms-1.2.8/Visualization/opengl_spectrum'
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/var/tmp/portage/xmms-1.2.8-r4/work/xmms-1.2.8/Visualization'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/var/tmp/portage/xmms-1.2.8-r4/work/xmms-1.2.8'
make: *** [all-recursive-am] Error 2
!!! ERROR: media-sound/xmms-1.2.8-r4 failed.
!!! Function src_compile, Lin"e 138, Exitcode 2
!!! (no error message)
After a bit of research, I found out that it's related to my NVidia card (go figure), and I found this patch. Baisically, it involves editing the libGL.la file like below:
Quote
This is a problem with the libGL.la generated by the nvidia-installer. Please edit /usr/lib/libGL.la, and replace the line:
# Generated by nvidia-installer: 1.0.5
with
# Generated by nvidia-installer: 1.0.5 (for use by libtool)
libtool greps for "^# Generated by .*libtool" before using .la files.
End Quote
For the past several years, I have been reading my news for MSNBC. I have liked their layout, their journalistic style, and their partisan slide to the stories that they run. But lately, I have become disappointed with them. I have recently switched from M$ IE to Mozilla Firefox as my primary browser on both my linux box and my desktop at work. It seems that either Firefox has trouble loading the MSNBC website, or there is something different about the site (that they do intentionally) that hinders the proper rendering of their site. There are times when I can't even view the website at all while using Firefox, but if I switch to IE, it comes up fine.
I have not taken the time to do any research, and this is all merely speculation, but the fact of the matter is that I have trouble viewing their site using a non M$ product. Anyone else experience the same issues?
Yesterday was my lovely wife Karen's birthday. I decided to do something special for her and surprise her with dinner with all of our friends. Over the past several years, her birthday has been lost in amongst St. Patricks Day celebrations, and I decided it was time to celebrate her birthday.
I sent out a feeler email to a bunch of people and got a very warm response to it. I decided to take her to her favorite restaurant, The Outback. She had no idea! We walked in, she walked right past the table where everyone was seated and put our name in for 2. Only after I walked her over towards the table where they were seated to "wait" for our table, did she realize what was going on. She was quite happy!
I'd like to thank everyone who helped make this a special occasion for her! Thank you all!
UPDATE: 3/17/2004: Pictures are available here.
Well, I knew they were calling for snow today, but I don't think anyone expected what Mother Nature has brought us so far. They were calling for a total of about 6 inches in certain areas over a period of about 14 hours total. Well, when I left for work this morning at 8:15, we had 3 inches on the ground in front of our house already! Let's just say that made for a very interesting morning.
About 1/2 mile up the road from our house, on our unplowed state owned road, I hit a slick spot and started sliding across the road, into oncoming traffic, and ended up in the corn field to avoid hitting the car coming at me. That's the simple/nice part. The bad part is that in the process, the only way I could get out of the way of the other car was to slide into a sign that was along the side of the road. I ended up taking off my drivers side mirror and denting the wheel well on the rear drivers side. Neadless to say, I was pissed. I probably would not have ventured any further in after that had it not been for my boss's decision to suspend my "work at home" priveledges yesterday because they don't trust me. (That's another post for another time).
I got to work about 30 mins late, and have spent the rest of the time filing an insurance claim, which is going to cost me my $500 deductible. This all really sucks!
UPDATE: 3/17/2004:
Photos of the damage are available here.
This past weekend, 3/13/2004 @ 3:00 PM to be precise, my great friends Todd and Megan were wed. The wedding was very eloquent and very well planned out. Everything looked great from my perspective. I had a blast with everything that we got to do with and for you guys and wish you all the best in your many happy years ahead!
Pictures from before the ceremony and the reception are up here.
I just spent the last 10 minutes cleaning up the comment spam on my blog! When I started, I had 120 comments, I now have 102! As if spam email isn't frustrating enough, now I have to watch my comments and delete them! I also need to carefully watch the baby website because I definately don't want the kinds of spam comments on there that I've been getting here.
I did block the 2 IP addresses the movable type reported them coming from, so we'll see if that helps at all.
A lot of the postings in the category are for my personal benefit, but if you have any comments on what you read, feel free to post a comment.
I found this article with tips on performace tuning a J2EE application that I can add to my long list of articles to read.
Pictures are up from Todd's bachelor party this past weekend. We got a bit toasty. Take a look!
I've seen a lot of this lately on java.blogs, and frankly, as a user of both technologies, I'm not sure what to believe.
Personally, I love the J2EE platform. Partially because it is more complex (not a bad thing), and that means some job security and in theory, higher pay. It's not something that anyone can pick up, especially when you start to throw third party tools, like XDoclet, into the mix. As the lead J2EE developer at work, it is my responsibility to help other employees with their transition from previous experiences (mostly VB6) into the Java world, and I really see them struggle. But then again, I know that the transition from VB6 to C# (VB .NET is worthless in my mind), was not an easy one for me, nor for other people either. I tend to pick up a language quickly, and love learning new stuff. For those who struggle, it's tough, no matter what platform.
I came across a question posted to a forum asking for advice on selling J2EE to management, with .NET being another viable option. It's a tough sell. I had to go through it when we made a transition from all MS and .NET to half and half. I am very pleased that we were able to give this technology a shot, and I have been very fortunate to be able to lead the way, and show off some of the really kewl things that can be done with it. The only thing I would caution is that I am constantly being reminded that all of our J2EE development takes longer than the .NET development. I'm not sure if that is because of a difference in developers working on the projects, or the difference in architecture, or what it really is. But I constantly hear about it from my management. They have bought into the idea that J2EE is a wonderful technology and we did not make a mistake by deciding to use it. I just hope now that we are hiring a couple of experienced J2EE programmers, that we can turn that notion around.
Another article for me to read in my spare time. This one talks about migrating from a .NET environment to a J2EE environment.
Pictures are up from Todd and Megan's party at Dave and Busters in Philly on Saturday.
I heard a story the other morning on NPR about the randomness of a coin toss. Well, I also came across an article about the same subject while reading slashdot today.
It's an interesting read, and goes along with what I've always suspected, that a coin toss is not 100% random, but that there is some mathematical reasoning behind how it actually turns out. Turns out, if you toss a coin, in EXACTLY the same manner time after time, it will ALWAYS land with the same side up. Also, there is a slight shift towards the coin landing the same way in which it started, before being tossed. Read the article and let me know what you think.