English summer rain seems to last for ages

Current music: Placebo - Sleeping With Ghosts

That was my fastest dentist visit yet. Turns out that my bite was off and making my nerves mad so I just had my filling filed down a little and off I went.

Just revised my work estimate for a new project. That should make my boss happy because the original estimate I gave was 80 hours. Just changed it to 40! I guess I should get back to it if I am gonna finish it in 40.

Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable.
Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
-- Gilb

I didn't see you comin out of the corner of my eye

Current music: The Promise Ring - Wood/Water

I think one of my fillings came out. I'm not really sure because it is hard to see that far back in my own mouth... It hurts like crazy when I drink anything though. I'm gonna hit up the dentist at noon and see what he can do for me.

Damn, all I did was sleep last night. Still sick...

Tests

Conscious self	Overall self

Take Free Enneagram Test

Yeah, it's mostly accurate except for the sleep part...

Chinese Monday celebrations begin in a few minutes

Current music: Jimmy Eat World - Clarity

So while I am still waiting for this crap to compile I decided to start looking at why my firewall has a load of 9+. For non-geeks please stop reading here...

Looks like there was some sort of rpm thing that Mandrake decided to throw into the daily cron. It was running some rpm query command, then sorting them all. Well, since there was one rpm hangup I think I have a corrupt rpm database and none of the jobs were finishing. They kept stacking. So I started killing them. Now my load is back in normal ranges... I am gonna have to look into what is corrupt about the database soon, but the celebrations have begun!

Cold

Current music: The sound of a co-worker blowing his nose

Hope I didn't give my co-workers this damn cold that I have. His kids were sick last week too so maybe he got it from them. Anything to take the blame off me right?

Nick and Sarah's wedding was fun. It was cool to see all those guys again. I hadn't seen them in so long. I'm glad Jennie had fun too... I was worried she would get bored, but I guess I shouldn't have because she knew a lot of people there and she always finds a way to have fun anyway.

My grandparents came up from Florida a day earlier than expected. They got in late Saturday afternoon. That was really cool because I miss them. They are in town for two weeks. My grandfather went to my dad's softball game with us on Sunday. I'm glad to see him doing so much better than he has been for several years now.

Don't know if I am gonna bowl tonight. I really want to, but being sick blows and I need to sleep. Maybe I will sleep when I get home from work until about 10 then bowl... Maybe this new build of wxWindows will finish soon and I can get back to work.

I ran out of Kleenex.

Current music: Cursive - Driftwood

So I have been sick all week. I am still sick now and it is the weekend. All I have done all week is go to work then go to sleep then go to work again. I am feeling a bit better today, but I am still stuffed up and pressure in my right ear.

I gotta drive to Rochester today to go to Nick's wedding. Hope I feel better by tonight so I can get down and party.

On a brighter note, I did watch a lot of movies while I was sick. I saw Once Upon a Time in Mexico. It was really good. I recommend it to all.

Work is weird

Current music: The Eagles - Desperado

So last night when I was leaving work about 7pm, I was one of hte last people in the building. As I was leaving I saw a guy dart into a cube carrying a big box and wearing a pink shirt. It was one of the lower managers. Now, last time somebody was carrying a box around after normal hours they were the upper management putting boxes into the cubes of the people to be laid off the next day., so naturally I got scared.

This morning when I came in I found a folded pink slip on my chair, but it had a kazoo attached to it. It says "Let's Make Some Noise!" On the inside it is an invitation to a party at 4pm today in the break room.

I just saw the HR director and her assistant in the break room with balloons and champagne glasses. This is really weird. Some people think it is the end of the fiscal year celebration since our fiscal year ends at the end of this month.

The "logo" or whatever for the party is "Ring out the Old, and Ring in the New." Not sure what that means, but I never take that as a good thing!

Sick

Current music: None

I hate being sick. Yesterday I had a sore throat all day and now I have a stuffy nose. Hopefully I will get get better soon eh.

Wanting to sleep...

Cars are shitters

Current music: Jets to Brazil - Perfecting Loneliness

Ok, so I have a few things to say here. I had to take my car in last night and they said it was not a warranty problem so it cost me $228 for 2 sets of pads and a rotor. Damn car. On top of that big kick in the nuts when I started walking the five minutes to the dealer it was sunny. By the time I got half way there I was running because it was thundering and pissing down.

Bowling was cool last night. Matt drove me there because I didn't have a car. It was only Matt, Jay, Dave, and me, but still pretty sweet.

So now I am at work. Didn't get here until 10:30, but its ok. I guess I won't be leaving until after 7 tonight. So some non-geek read about my geek troubles with wxWindows and UDP/Datagram sockets. Yesterday I finally figured out the problem after a week. Here is the solution (once again, non-geeks need to stop reading here unless you are JayzorBeard):

I put in some new accessors in many levels of the wxWindows code so that I could do setsockopt and change a socket from streamed (TCP) to unstreamed (UDP). Once those were in place I thought it should work, but it didn't. So I ported the changes I made in wxMSW to wxX11 and tried compiling my code in Linux. It worked fine and I could do broadcasts. So I had to figure out why Winsock wouldn't let this broadcast through. Finally I found this site which described how to use Winsock2 to do broadcasts. I realized they were using SOL_SOCKET as the 'level' parameter to the socket constructor. So I changed my ctor to use that instead of IPV4. Now I can do UDP/Datagram broadcasts in wxWindows through Winsock2. Exciting isn't it? Turns out that SOL_SOCKET makes it so that all flags are enabled I guess... Not really sure. Anyways it works.

Current music: None

I hate waiting for wxWindows to compile, especially on a 600 MHz P3. So slow... Then right when it finishes, thinking I have changed directories, I type 'make clean'. Now I have to compile all over again. On top of that...the stock market is DOWN today which sucks and I missed my investors' meeting last night, I have to take my car in for brake work, and it is raining. What a crap Monday.

Can't wait to bowl tonight. Matt is gonna come!

back to work

Current music: Ester Drang - Infinite Keys

Another Monday, another weekend gone. I won the Chinese Monday challenge today...

There's something happening here,
What it is, aint exactly clear.
There's a man with a gun over there,
Telling me I got to beware.
_____________________________________________________

I knew it...
Missing lyric: I think it's time we stop.
Artist: Buffalo Springfield
Song name: "For What It's Worth"

Now I provided this challenge for next Chinese Monday...

The same old story,
But it's worth telling just once more.
It's all fun and laughter.
They lived ever after in ecstacy.
________________________________

Who knows it? I do...well, I made the challenge. I better know it. You need to tell me missing lyric, artist, and song name to win!

weekends are better than weekdays even when the Bills lose

Current music: DCFC - The Stability EP

Party on Saturday was pretty sweet. What a weekend. I'm ready to go back to NZ. Today was Gareth's 21st I think. I missed that by about 12,000 miles. Met a girl this weekend who looks like Brooke and I just wanna go back now - party with Gazzy and Brooke. Gotta get my work visa sorted.

Update: Nope, his birthday is next weekend...

Damn cars

I don't want a car any more. My brakes are messed up. The pads in the rear are gone and I only have 21,000 miles. Gotta take it to the dealer on Monday night, but I can't drive until then. I don't wanna ruin my rotors.

Went out last night to the Pink with the lurker and the moose. The lurker and I played serious pool and lurked in the pool corner all night kicking everyone's butt. From what I hear I might be going to a party tonight with Kris and Erica. That would be cool because Erica is a cool chick and I haven't seen her in ages.

I sometimes feel a little strange, a little anxious when it's dark.

wx-whatever

Back to grinding away at wxWindows. I am beginning to understand really how the internals of this framework/API/library works and I really like it. I am gonna have to contribute my changes to the UDP sockets back to the project as soon as I get them finished. I will once again be an open source developer. Maybe I will stick with this project. I really like it.

Rode my bike up to the SPCA last night to look at dogs again. Lost my waterbottle on the way somehow. Got rained on when I was riding back but it was really not bad.

Bend It Like Beckham is really a pretty good movie. Keira Knightley is so hot.

wxWindows->Compiling() ? wxLenny->BridgeCustomization() : wxLenny->WriteWxDatagramSocket();

Cmoix

So I won 10 tickets to Comix Cafe for filling out a stupid comment card. Sweet huh? Now I just gotta get 10 people to go...

Pizza Thursday

Today is Pizza Thursday! Mmmm...less than an hour til white pizza with Canadian bacon and tomatoes!

Jennie is so smart.

Who likes Cursive anyway?

Last night I went down to Nietzsche's to see Cursive. I already knew the tickets were sold out, but Tim and I thought maybe we could get in. Tim got there before me and went in and had a drink. He ended up staying in there and seeing the show. I got there just after him and people were already lining up outside. I waited in line until about 8pm, but they still weren't letting people in that didn't have tickets. Jeff showed up and we said screw it and went to Pano's. Wasn't that bit a deal to miss in anyway...

I don't want to work on this R&D project anymore. I don't know what the hell I am doing and I keep running into dead ends. This is getting frusterating. I guess that is the only way to learn though.

Jeff (not the same as above) is moving into his condo today. I think I'll go over there after work and help him out.

Too much stress

I hate when bugs in other people's software (ie. Microsoft) makes me look bad. Do not read farther if you are not a geek...

XHTML1.0 spec says the alt attribute shall be used for all img tags. The alt attribute specifies what shall be displayed when the image cannot be displayed. The spec also states that the title attribute is optional and can be used in nearly any tag and will provide a tooltip on mouseover.

Standards compliant browsers like anything based on the Gecko engine or the KHTML engine do this properly. Of course, MS Internet Explorer has decided that the alt tab will be used for tooltips instead. Since I do not use IE, I developed a website for one of our embedded products and used the alt attribute as it should be used and did not use the title attribute because it was extraneous.

Today we received a call from a customer complaining about this. I put in one of the alt attributes "not much" since not much would be missed if the image was not displayed. Now it has turned into quite the hoo haa around here.

Aaaaahhhhhh! I make software compliant with open standards and get blamed when uncompliant software that MS wrote misbehaves.

Drool

The new (drool) powerbooks (drool) are out. Damn, now my keyboard is all wet.

On a different note...Cave In rocked last night. I missed half of ETID's set though. From what I saw they looked pretty good. I'm so glad that Cave In has gone back to their old stuff.

Cursive tonight, but no ticket. Sweet Baby Moose and I are gonna go try to work our magic and get in.

Wok22 = sickness

I really need to stop ordering food from Wok22 on Chinese Mondays. I feel like crap afterwards. US financial markets are set to dive this afternoon. The upcoming end of Q3 usually has some nice warnings for us all. Back to coding...C++ is my life lately.

Hmmm...

This one is from gnome-blog. I had never seen this one before in all my searchings. Then as I was looking at LinuxToday.com for some linux news this morning I saw a release notification. Apt-get worked and now here I am. This is a much cleaner interface and when I start using Gnome it should be sweet. Currently I have been dissatisfied with desktop offerings and I am using WindowMaker. Maybe I will switch back to Gnome now that 2.4 is out.

Well, I figured I would give a shot at some blogging clients. I am using Chronicle Lite right now. It is a pretty standard Java app. Not sure if I like it... Feels kinda clunky. I wish LogJam supported Blogger!

The one of me...contraband and my bike

18+ miles. That is a bike ride.

Happy Deathday!
Your name:	lenonblog
You will die on:	Saturday, October 15, 2033
You will die of:	Drive-By Shooting

When will you die?

The King and I

Hit up a pretty awesome Thai restaurant last night with Jeff and Beth. I think I might have some left over roasted duck for breakfast.

Getting oh so tired

Made it to Becky's party after a cup of coffee and met some kerang. Now the coffee is leaving me and I am getting tired. Good night.

Accidents

This is the 2nd time in about a month that a car has been run into on my street. Damn, glad it wasn't mine. Maybe I should start parking in my driveway more...

new G5 at work

So I was just over in the test lab to get a snack and I noticed that one of the test guys was setting up a G5. Yes, this is a dual 2GHz G5. He said he was about to run some benchmarking on it so I stuck around for a few minutes. He was only running SCSI data through one of our HBA's out to two disk arrays, but he said normally he gets 189 MB/sec on a dual 867 G4. This time he got 364! Impressive...

Anyways, I have been working on getting UDP sockets working in wxWindows all morning. I think I just found the option to do it. Damn, all this time and all I had to do was pass the wxSOCKET_DATAGRAM flag.

UPDATE: We changed the config a little bit and let the drives in the disk arrays spin up all the way and we can crank now! 480+MB/s

First post!

Whoa. This is almost like getting a first post on Slashdot.

I wanna be in a flash mob...but I am at work right now, so I should do some.