tbradshaw.net

It finally happened. Last night I finished cleaning my room. Several weeks in the making, this is a pretty big deal for me. I’m already a hundred times more comfortable and twice as productive (even when just coding), because this spectre of disorganization is no longer looming.

I’ve also gotten all of my laundry done (other than the load or two that was generated while I was doing the rest of the laundry), which is nice. I really need to go clothes shopping sometime, but that’ll have to wait until after I can afford some food.

What I really liked about this particular room clean was that it was a genuine room clean. I didn’t just box stuff up and move it somewhere else, just about everything was cleaned and then actually assigned a place that it belonged. I ridded myself of a lot of stuff that I just don’t need anymore (like my old hats, sniff, sniff) and ended up with tons more room than I had before it was cleaned. Now I feel free to really focus on other tasks that need to be completed, like the qcvs-2 code. (That’s the QuakeCon Volunteer System.)

The one real exception is that my bathroom hasn’t been cleaned at all yet. Hopefully it will soon, we’ll see.

I read on SlashDot today that today is Systems Administrator Appreciation Day. Sounds pretty cool, since myself and quite a few of my friends are systems administrators in one regard or another.

So to any of my friends and family that are systems administrators, Happy Systems Administrators’ Day!

(Also, I highly recommend checking out http://www.sysadminday.com, bit’s quite funny.)

So I’ve been noticing a very interesting side effect of being so broke lately. I’m kind of slimming down.

This is a little bit counter-intuitive to what I was expecting. Usually going hungry doesn’t really work for dieting of any kind, since the typical panic response of the body is to hoard fat and just let the muscle wither. But the lowered calorie intake and the increased exercise (mainly from ultimate frisbee) has really seemed to do a number on my love handles. I would guess that I’ve lost a good two inches of the sides, a very welcome development.

I attribute this to several things. First is the lower calorie intake mentioned earlier, second is the increased exercise I already mentioned, and finally is the diet shift that has came with it. I’ve inadvertently cut out all beer and fast food and greatly increased my intake of vegetables. When I do actually buy food (which is getting to be extremely rare), it’s almost always a salad from the union. Not because I’m trying to diet or anything, but because I really like salads and the fresh veggies really hit the spot.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with this outcome. It’s like going on a diet and exercise kick, but completely on accident. I think I’ll try and keep this up, although I certainly would like to figure out a way to keep this up and not be hungry all the time. But there’s a lot of potential here, for sure.

While my first large attempt at getting stuff done on the Jeep project was a big waste of time, after I gave up on the touch screen and just continued with the installation, things got much much better.

First through careful observation and measurement, Dad and I were really able to improve on the original design. Rather than removing the airbag and relocating the door/light/computer display to the passenger side dash, we manage to fit the HVAC just below the door/light/computer display and instead just cut out the ash tray, lighter, and power outlet.

Then it was realized that the screen could, indeed, fit into the center dash without having to modify the vinyl dashboard cover at all. This was a huge update to the quality of the modification because it meant a lot less custom work for us.

Dad created a great housing for the LCD components out of some oak boards he ripped and assembled into a self contained unit that contained the LCD, lcd/touch controller, and backlight power module. Then he created a great mock-up of the screen out of scrap lumber that matched the dimensions great so that we wouldn’t have to risk the safety of the expensive screen while doing our preliminary test fits.

I then used the drimel tool to hollow out a huge region in the center of the dash for the screen to fit, and then I built some mounts on the LCD module and the interior of the dash out of oak and 2×4 to do the final mounting. There were a lot of last second small alterations to get everything finished, but it looked great.

By far the dash modification process was the vast majority of the labor. Then while I was finishing that up, Dad started working on the computer housing to fit into the console. It was a tight fit, but he fabricated another oak housing to hold all of the components that belong to the center console, including the motherboard, hard drive, regulator, and Morex dc-dc converter. I ran some power back from the power outlet cables to the rear portion of the console.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I was unable to get the computer to boot from the Morex power supply kit that I purchased. I recalculated all of the math and I can’t see why it didn’t boot, it was well under spec for both voltage and amperage. So I went into a backup plan and fell back to an inverter and a 250 watt power supply and installed those. The inverter is below my back seat, spliced into my sub amp power run with a distribution block and some 6 gauge cable. Then the regular “computer power” cable runs from under the seats to a power supply that’s just sitting behind my driver seat on the floor.

After that was handled, the cdrom was installed into the “flip up” door on the console, which was absolutely perfect.

My goal going into the weekend was to have a working system, with GPS navigation operational for the drive home. While I didn’t finish until about 4:30am on Monday morning, that goal was reached. Looking at all of the difficulties had during the installation and the general difficulty level of the entire installation, I’m really pleased with how this has turned out so far.

The sheer ingenuity of the installation just reconfirmed my believe that there are two people that I could do absolutely any project with. Between myself, Dave Plumb, and my Dad, just about any project is do-able and will probably turn out great.

I’ll get some pictures and more updates up soon.

As I mentioned before, working in Windows just wasn’t working for me. But I’m happy to say that after today I’m back in the wonderful land of Gentoo Linux.

And thanks to some help from Cole, it was a trivially easy install and I’m settling in nicely. In fact, it’s taken me tons less time to get reinstalled and get working than it did for me to convert to Windows and try to be productive.

Yay. It’s good to be back.

Using the Copus concert at the Port of Wichita just last Wednesday as an excuse to come to El Dorado to visit my parents, I decided that I would double up on the getting-things-done ratio and spend the rest of the week here in El Dorado visiting the parents and, importantly, working on my Jeep.

The Mobile Bunker project has been a long time coming, with most of the money spent already and none of the actual labor put into the vehicle. These four days of dedicated were to change all that. Of course, I say were.

Because after all the work that I’ve put in in the last two days, I just spent–literally–ten solid hours trying to get the touchscreen controller that I purchase as part of the Touch LCD Kit that I purchased from EarthLCD. I couldn’t be more frustrated and less impressed.

It’s sick, just to start with, because I’ve already had the setup working, in it’s entirety, when I first purchased all of these components a little under a year ago. I just wanted to try all of them to make sure that they worked. And they did. But now that it’s time for the rubber to meet the road, I can’t do anything to get the integrated touch controller on the LCD controller card to generate one freaking bit of data to the computer’s eagerly awaiting serial port. I can’t begin to express my frustration as I suffer over this one component, hour after hour, trying to find anything that could be the problem.

I’ve installed every driver, reinstalled, and tried different versions of everything. Even expanding the attempts into realms that don’t even really apply. So while now the computer has all kinds of great manufacturer provided suped up drivers for the video card or whatever, still not a single thing from the COM port. Every iteration of service packs have been tried. There were sixteen pins arranged in two rows for a four pin plug, and just in case I was somehow mistaken when I aligned the arrow with the pin obviously labeled as 1, I went ahead and tried connecting the resistive touch screen to each of the 10 possible arrangements, then reversed the plug and went for the other 10 possible arrangements. (Of course, a multimeter confirmed that it was in the right spot in the first place anyway.)

I’ve been in and out of hyperterminal, just trying to get some kind of noise from the port, and nothing. Now I’m trying to find some way that I can get ahold of a serial mouse to try that, but I don’t really know where I’m going to find something like that without spending any money to try things. I’m going to drive over to my Mom’s house and pray that her mouse is a serial mouse so that I can do some more testing. Though if the serial mouse works, then I’m just screwed. And if it doesn’t work… well then I’m still screwed. So I’m not sure what good it’s going to do me. Other than let me know if my $300 motherboard is messed up or my $200 touch screen is messed up. Both of which are more money than I can handle right now.

If I can’t figure something out soon, I think I’m just going to say “the hell with it” and install it anyway. Then I can just take it back apart when I get home sometime and try to work on it some more, perhaps when I have some money to replace some components if anything is busted.

This had the potential to be a very productive weekend… it’s getting ruined quick.

For about ten days I’ve been growing myself a beard. It’s going pretty good and is definitely the most facial hair that any of my friends have seen me with. It started out just as a bit of sloth, I just didn’t bother shaving.

But soon the beard became kind of a novelty experiment. I was just growing a beard because I never had before, and I thought it would be neat. Right now it’s still at the scruffy stage, not quite long enough to trim into something more respectable… but close. Quite close, in fact. I could probably pull off the mustache at this point, but I digress.

As a guy that has to shave twice a day if he wants to be clean shaven for the night, going like ten days without shaving my face is a really long time. Most of the time I’ve found it interesting, kind of a neat sensation with a fun texture (visually and tactile). But today it’s not.

The change? For a couple days I’ve had a little bit of a sore throat. Well, not really. More like I’ve had a very slight discomfort that appeared that it might turn into a sore throat. Today, I have that impending sore throat. It’s not that big of deal, it’s really just a discomfort that barely hurts when swallowing. But it’s pretty swollen and a constant annoyance.

Well, put the two together, and I have a very similar sore throat to the one that started me on my downward spiral of health in Spring 2003 and I have nearly the same full beard that I had after falling down that spiral and being unable to shave for weeks and weeks.

Now I don’t think that this sore throat is anything serious at all, but it doesn’t matter. I looked in the mirror this morning and instead of seeing an interesting and visually appealing facial hair, I saw myself–in true flashback style–as a sickly, 130 pound, filthy, disgustingly deformed, depressed, helpless mess.

Well forget that. I’ve got a fresh Mach 3 Turbo Ultra Whizbang Super Duper Extreme Champion blade that says baby smooth facial features are coming in my very near future.

So it’s been a few weeks now with my primary workstation at work being a Windows workstation. (Something that seems pretty intuitive, since I’m primarily a Windows systems administrator.)

For quite some time I had been using Gentoo running GNOME as my desktop environment, despite being a Windows systems administrator. However, I was starting to feel a little bit out-of-touch with Windows. At this point I never used Windows as my primary work environment, and indeed the only time that I did use a Windows environment it was through a remote desktop with a very specific task to complete.

My solution, at least I thought, was the change my workstation at work over to Windows and use it as my primary desktop environment. The process has taught me a lot about how my computer usage patterns have matured.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned:

• Most of my computer use is OS agnostic.

  It turns out that my primary applications that I use for 90% of my everything in is the same no matter what platform I’m on. SSH client (puTTY right now) for remote access and IRC, FireFox for web browsing, mail client (Outlook right now) for IMAP mail boxes, vim (well gvim) for text editing, Gaim for instant messaging, and, well, that’s 90% of my everything.

• None of my computer use is Windows specific.

  The only Windows specific computing that I could do would be gaming, but I don’t do any gaming at work. At least, the only gaming I do is Quake 3: Arena, which isn’t Windows specific.

• I Like GNOME

  And then when I get right down to my regular usage patterns, I really like gnome. I spent hours trying to find a decent virtual desktop manager for Windows (the PowerToys one was painfully inadequate), then I was elated to find a way to turn on sloppy focus, and I still Alt+Click on a window hoping to move it around, but of course that doesn’t work. I really like the window manager and the applications that come with GNOME.

• I don’t tweak things at work.

  The number one way that I’ve learned about my environment is because by working in them all day I continually need to tweak things to get them the way that I want them. But I don’t really do that at work, at work I just… mainly… work. So I really wasn’t learning anything about the Windows environment that I was in.

So why run Windows as my primary workstation at all? I’m not very sure anymore either. In fact, I think I’ll probably move back to a GNOME desktop at work here pretty soon. But I’ve got a couple things holding me back at the moment. First, Cole is currently having a little bit of trouble with the build system for Gentoo in the department. He suggested that I wait a little bit so that’s all worked out. Second, I think I want to install Visual Studio and try out some development inside of the Visual Studio environment. There are some pretty strong opinions that Visual Studio is the best development environment around, so I think I want to try it out before I shun Windows completely.

But all in all, my experiment with Windows was mostly a failure. It’s not nearly as easy to use as my GNU/Linux environment and it brings no real perks to the table. When I get right down to it, I’m just plain more productive in GNOME than I am anywhere else. Eh, at least I tried.

For quite some time, the guys here at The Bunker have had a dream. The dream was simple. After I finished The Mobile Bunker we were going to take a road trip.

But not just any road trip, we were going to take a road trip to Lynchburg, Tennessee thanks to a little rumor that we had heard. We heard that we could buy a barrel of Jack Daniel’s at the Distillery in Lynchburg. Oh glory of glories, what could be a better road trip–what could make a better story for our kids–than a road trip in a tricked out Mobile Bunker to pick up a barrel of Jack Daniel’s.

However, for various reasons we had never really found the exact information for the process. Today, on a whim, I ran across the information on www.jdsinglebarrel.com that layed it all out. At first, it was just too good to be true. The plan goes like this.

You can show up at the distillery for the event. There you meet up with Master Distiller Jimmy Bedford to hand select your barrel of Jack Daniel’s. Just meeting Jimmy Bedford would be an honor, but to walk through the aging storage area with him to select a barrel would just be a life altering event. After that, they take that barrel and hand bottle it into 750ml decanters–around 270 of them–that are each individually marked on the neck with the barrel that they came from, the barrel rick it the barrel was selected from, and the date bottled, and then adorned with a small medallion signifying that these bottles were hand bottled exclusively for “The Bunker”. Next, you receive the actual barrel that the Jack Daniel’s fine Tennessee whiskey was taken from, along with a brass plaque commemorating the moment and a framed certificate.

Sweet wonder of wonders. It’s like being Charlie from Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, only it’s better than chocolate… it’s Jack Daniel’s!

But then the malicious cold and serated teeth of reality rip in with one quick paragraph:

Securing your own personal stock of Jack Daniel’s whiskey is a rare investment. The total price will depend on your barrel’s yield and local taxes. However, you can expect to pay between $35 and $40 per bottle. The barrel price will range from $8400 to $9600.

Oh! Between $8400 and $9600? Our dreams of Jack Daniel’s barrel ownership was lit on fire. It’s not that the fine whiskey and the honor isn’t worth it, I’m not saying that at all. But I am saying that spending almost ten thousand dollars is something that can’t happen for five college students.

Of course, we didn’t give up the dream without a fight. We thought maybe we could take donations at parties, take pre-orders for bottles from the barrel, let people take pictures with the barrel, maybe even set up some of those change collection countertop recepticles, you know… like the cripple jar (Office Space joke). But it only took a few moments of Dave and I crunching numbers to realize that this was a pipe dream, at best.

And The Bunker collectively shed a tear.

For quite some time now I have been annoyed with the keyboard market, but it’s about to get drastic. My keyboard is starting to fail.

For a while now I’ve having periodic problems with a few keys–like ‘i’ and ‘n’, but nothing severe enough that it couldn’t have just been written off to poor typing or something like that. However, it has finally gotten to the point that the problems are undeniable. There are times when I’ll have to deliberately hit the ‘i’ key five and six times before any input is finally send to the computer. For a guy that spends a good portion (if not a majority) if his time everyday in front of a computer, this really sucks.

The only thing that sucks more than my problems with my failing keyboard is the inability to find a decent replacement. I currently have a Microsoft Natural Internet keyboard, circa like six or seven years ago. I love this baby and it has been very good to me, the feature set includes:

• “Split”-style ergonomic layout.
• PS2 or USB
• Embedded 2-Port USB Hub
• Multimedia Keys
• “Normal” arrow keys

It’s glorious work of art, something that I’ve been happy with for years and would love to just buy a drop in replacement to do the exact same thing. Only I can’t… it’s not possible… no one makes a keyboard as nice as this one. The only USB split keyboard that is available from Microsoft (or any other vendor, as far as I can tell) has messed up the keyboard layout. The Microsoft Natural “Elite” has these amazingly stupid arrow keys arranged in a diamond. Now I’ve been using a three button arrow keys layout for over a decade, why would I want to relearn the arrow keys? Most of the other brands have done some amazingly bizarre keyboard changes, no doubt because most split keyboard key layouts are patented… so they have to have some kind of “substantial” change.

The USB hub in this keyboard is underutilized and not really a big deal, but having a USB keyboard is a big deal. It seems that the nicest split keyboard I can not find is PS2 only. I mean… that might have to be tolerable, I guess. But having a keyboard that’s hot swappable is just awesome when working on the expected computer.

What really is the icing on the cake for me, however, is that I can find a number of keyboards that are exactly like mine on sale on eBay. “My” keyboard is going for more money USED on eBay than most keyboards sell for when brand-spanking new!

The closest keyboard that I can find to what I want is this Wireless Optical Desktop Pro. Only I don’t really want a wireless keyboard and mouse. I mean, I don’t have any problems with the wires that I have, at least not enough that I think it would be worth dealing with inherent latency and dead batteries.

All in all, I’m kind of stunned that the entire market for traditional keyboard input devices has narrowed down to just a few devices, none of which meet even the moderate standards that we had seven years ago.

I’m bummed. And I hit the ‘i’ in “I’m” at the beginning of this sentence 4 times.

Last night I finished up the code for Volunteer Registration. The consensus being “it’s about time”. Hopefully Thrax will be moving the code and database schema updates over to the live server here shortly and volunteer registration will go live.

Once again we’re re-inventing the wheel, but not that surprisingly. This year Volunteer registration is completely integrated with the QuakeCon website, which is a real blessing. As soon as the new code goes live, it will just be a matter of editing your volunteer information on the main QuakeCon website to provide all of the necessary information.

Next up is creation of the preplanning management interface, which should be fun. Looking at a nice AJAX style solution. Hopefully it will be a little less boring than the form-management of the volunteer registration stuff. It turned out great, but was crazy monotonous. Thank God for VIM.

Yup, so I’m the big two-four today.

Anyone who knows me very well, knows that I–as Amber put it in an instant message last night–”don’t really do birthdays”. I guess I just never really saw the significance of the event. I mean, I’ve survived another year… but that’s pretty much the default, not an exceptional event. If anyone accomplished anything, it’s my parents that had me.

In fact, until earlier this week, I had forgotten that my birthday was coming up. Lindsay noticed that my birthday was this weekend when she was glancing at a calendar, making plans for the weekend and reminded me via an instant message. My response, “Oh yeah… I guess it is. Crazy.”

As the previous paragraph implied, Lindsay and Rebecca were in town this weekend from their usual summer locale of Kansas City. I was just chillin’ last night, doing some laundry and cleaning up, when Lindsay and Rebecca insisted on dropping by for a happy birthday drink.

I was pretty sure that drink was going to be at The Bunker, but they showed up looking a little bored with Rebecca in a quite bad mood. She wanted to go to Aggieville, so I jettisoned my plans for take it easy for the night, changed clothes really quick, and we headed out to Aggieville.

The time in Aggieville last night was tame, but surprisingly fun. Rebecca, Lindsay and I started at Pat’s where I got to shoot a couple games of pool. (As an aside, this is a big deal for me. With my financial situation the way it is, I’ve stopped going out completely–even though I was only spending $10 to $20 a week on recreation anyway. This was the first game of pool I have played in over a week.) Rebecca and Lindsay bought me a beer, then a Jager bomb after midnight. Both were greatly appreciated.

I received a text message from Dad soon after midnight to wish me a Happy Birthday, and not long after that I received a call from Shannon Winter–who was wanting to meet up at Auntie Mae’s.

We ended up moving to O’Malley’s where we did meet up with Shannon, Pat Milligan, and a new friend I have already forgotten her name. Lindsay bought me a birthday Belfast Bomber which was quickly followed by another Belfast from Shannon and Pat–that is, when they realized it was my birthday. I was kind of flattered, actually, that they were so set on finding me in Aggieville and hanging out when it turns out they didn’t even know it was my birthday. I talked to Katie Hillen–JD’s ultra fun sister–on the phone, who was also born on July 17th, and also had a brief chat with Scott Swain on the phone–who had no idea it was my birthday and asked to see if I could help him move furniture today. We also ran into Janea and Amanda at O’Malley’s before we left for Rusty’s.

“Our” bartender from Next Door on Thursdays, Michelle, is on her way out of town. She’s got about a week left before she heads out, so Pat and I wanted to go say, “Hi”. She bought me a Jack and Coke for my birthday, and we chilled at Rusty’s Other Side for a while, then we headed to Fat’s because Lindsay hadn’t been to Fat’s before. (She’s just recently 21.)

So why type all if this out? I mean, this is a pretty typical night in Aggieville… really. The bar hopping, the familiar faces, yadda yadda.

But over the course of the night and this morning, I realized that it was a special night after all. Even on a night I didn’t really want to go out, I found lots of friends and still had a great time. In a way, for my birthday, Rebecca and Lindsay gave me a reminder of how great my friends are and how much I love this town.

That’s a pretty impressive gift. Thanks.

For whatever reason, I was really pining for Photoshop today. This is that one killer application that has successfully drawn me back to Windows again and again and has never really found a replacement in my life.

The reasons are manifold, but the core reason Photoshop has stayed so important to me is clear. I have almost exactly a decade of experience using Photoshop. Since the first time that I saw Photoshop used by Jesse Greenwald in the journalism room at El Dorado High School (he was demonstrating the rotate, wind, rotate, distort, indexed color, color palette assignment, method for creating digital flames on text) I’ve been building a repertoire with that software application.

Learning Photoshop was a passion, because even without anything that I really needed to make, I wanted to create things just to use this awesome tool. I wanted to master it, have the ability to create anything digital I wanted. And for the most part, I’ve succeeded. But now that my favorite platform doesn’t have a Photoshop equivalent, I’ve always missed it. There’s the GIMP, a competing free application that I could learn, but I just didn’t want to. Why? I don’t have a passion for image manipulation tools anymore. When I want to use Photoshop, I really just want to generate the output as fast as possible so that I can get back to hacking. I’m not an art guy (not really anyway). I just want to get things done.

So when I heard that someone had released a patch to the GIMP to make it a lot more like Photoshop, I had to check it out. And I’m very pleased.

To give it a quick spin, I created these three hackergotchis of myself. Why three? I happened to have three pictures handy and I just wanted to play with GimpShop and see if I liked it. So far, I really like it. The menu reorganization/renaming in combination with a keyboard shortcut remapping went a long way to make me feel at home. There were still some differences that I didn’t like (No locking the aspect ratio during a scale transformation? What gives?), but it was usable. That’s the first time that’s ever happened with me and the GIMP.

Anyway, anyone is welcome to use these hackergotchis for whatever… preferably things hackergotchi like… like blog aggregation. In fact, I’ve created a symlink at http://www.tbradshaw.net/images/hackergotchi_tbradshaw.png that I’ll keep pointing to one of my hackergotchi’s and maintain reasonably. Feel free to just link to that and then wait with dizzying anticipation for when I change that link to another likeness of my face. (And I promise that it will always point to a reasonable image, probably always a 90 pixel by 90 pixel image of my face. I won’t stealth goatse.cx anyone.)

Last night some gals were playing Quarters on the bar. During conversation I ended up bragging a little bit about being really good at quarters back in the day. I shared a few war stories from partying back at Elgn Davidson’s and playing quarters on that tiny (but perfect) table and putting all challengers down, one after another.

Pat Milligan (of Copus fame. ) mentioned a video he had seen online about a guy that was playing quarters and making some shot that was difficult. I was kind of unimpressed at the time, because what’s one lucky shot?

Well I have seen the light. THIS VIDEO is amazing. The variety of shots and difficulty are superb, and even the camera work and editing is great. We have a phrase around here for the every day done to the extreme with extreme quality. It’s called “Bunker league”.

Well this video is definitely quarters, Bunker league.

Recently my success with my three plants has hit a huge decline, hinged on one very incorrect assessment by me. I thought that plants “do just fine” when outdoors. I mean, they are plants right? They are supposed to be outdoors.

Turns out that potted plants are often a lot like domesticated animals. They make great pets, but you can’t just turn them out into the wild and expect them to survive. Right now my three plants are pretty much on the last throws of survival, because I tossed them to the wolves for a little bit too long.

The plan was pretty simple at first. I was going to be gone for a while, and I had been forgetting to water the plants. So, I figure I’d do the best alternative. I’d put them outside where they can get natural rain water and lots and lots of sun.

Did I mention lots and lots of sun? Yeah. They’re scorched. All wilty and looking quite sad. I want to nurse them back to health. Partly because I appreciate the gifts (the two big ones are from my Mom, the other is from my Dad), and partly because I’m kind of curious if they are just dead or actually resilient enough to come back to life with better care.

However, I have a little bit of a conundrum. I mean, they are ugly now. They used to hang nicely it two alcoves we have by the stairs, but if I were to put them there now it would just be like a morbid and pathetic display of malfeasance on my part. I might put them in my room and see if I can get them back to life that way, but I’d have to do some cleaning to make room.

I’m just not sure what to do at this point, but I suppose it’s not that big of deal either way.

Today began a rather interesting stretch of reading about workspaces and productivity. It was all kicked off from Jesse Greenwald’s blog where he was lamenting our poorly designed office spaces here in Nichols and contrasting it with the amazing work of Roy Leone.

He was the architect that recently designed Fog Creek software’s new offices. Jesse called it awesome [emphasis his], and I don’t even know if that completely sums it up. I mean this place is fantastic, just… yiyeah.

But that wasn’t where my little tangent ended. I couldn’t help but think about those elements of architecture that really contribute to a better human experience and–as a result–higher productivity. I browsed more of Roy Leone’s work and decided that I like all of it, albeit his work environments quite a but more than his living spaces.

The rationale for the Fog Creek offices were incredibly solid as well and let me to follow a link to an article by Philip Greenspun titled Managing Software Engineers which I thought had a lot of really interesting insights. Specifically I felt like it really hit the nail on the head for a lot of things I recognize at my office.

In the end, there were two things that were kind of fun. For a moment I mused with Tyson about painting our office really wild colors as inspired by the Fog Creek offices. (Two walls blue, two walls lime green?) After that neat but unattainable idea was gone the second neat thing came up. I actually felt more motivated. Yeah, weird. Just reading about happier work environments and management strategies encouraged me to work more. How’s that for bizarre. I ended up putting in an extra hour at the office, and then came home looking forward to doing stuff… starting with this blog.

I slept through my ad hoc alarm clock–my mobile phone alarm–completely this morning, not waking up until nearly lunch time. I sent an email into Sterling to let him know that I had messed up and started getting cleaned up and considering my lunch options.

The lunch options were running neck and neck with an almost perfect toss up between “green olives rolled up in the heel from JD’s not-too-moldy bread” and yet another “entire box of cheapo stuffing mix”. Then, strangly I was reminded of a sermon that I had the pleasure of listening to at Central Christian Church, the great church I used to attend in Wichita, KS.

It was during a series of lectures on personal finance that Brother Joe was delivering. He was taking the hard line about finance, teaching a very strong message rooted deeply in Biblical teachings. Apparently it’s pretty controversial to preach about finance because it often upsets congregation members who are sensitive about money issues. Brother Joe didn’t care, he was sure that it Right thing to do was to talk about how Christ and preachings should be taken literally in all facets of life… and not excluding finance.

While I don’t remember all of the sermon–it certainly didn’t seem relevent to me at the time as a freshman in junior college (although a more Godly person would no doubt find the relevence)–I did have one portion of it come to mind. He strongly suggested that no matter how deep the debt, high the bills, or murky the waters, to first give to God, then keep a bit for yourself, and then start sorting out debts.

While the most important portion of that: give the first part to God, isn’t something that I practice, I remember his rationale very well for all of it. You give the first part to God, because that’s what He’s said to do and He will bless the rest of your money more than any mortal dealings can (part of that faith in an omnipotent God thing). You keep a part for yourself, because it combats the helplessness and or depression that people can face when trapped in debt with seemingly no way out. And then you do your best to settle your debts because it’s the right thing to do.

Well, I don’t have a church that I believe in at all, so tithing isn’t even ssomething I would consider (I’m also not particularly faith oriented, for better or for worse). And I don’t think that I’m really in so much debt that there is no way out. However, no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater and waste the wisdom from the entire lesson.

The point–I guess–is that after remembering this sermon and thinking on it for a couple minutes, I came to work and ordered myself some Jimmy John’s. I got a beach club and a cookie. The lettuce, sprouts, and guacamole mark the first vegetables I’ve had the great pleasure of eating in about two weeks. Sure beats the pickle sandwich I had yesterday! (Wait… do hamburger dill slices count as a vegetable? Surely not… at least not a healthy one.)

There are some obvious qualms about my “convienent” interpretation of the sermon. Of course I happened to go to action on the most self-beneficial part of his sermon, (”keep some for yourself”) rather than the strongest part of his sermon (”tithe”). But regardless of the religious origins or my haphazard interpretation, I thought it was good advice… and I took it.

I think that I’m going to continue this as part of my process. When I bleed for bling at the plasma place, the first chunk of the money goes towards buying myself a healthy meal. (Especially since I’m sacrificing health for the money anyway.) The rest will immediately go towards those I owe money. I don’t think anyone that I owe money will hold it against me that I want to eat decent now and then.

Oh yeah, and the cookie was probably over the top. But it was sooo good. I still shared a bit of it with Tyson, so I’m not a complete glutton.

Since I’m broke, I haven’t been grocery shopping in any fashion for quite some time. Of course, that’s not all that unusual, since I’ve gone for months without going to the grocery store. Except this time I’m not eating out instead.

As a result, I’ve been going through the food reserves with a feverishness that I haven’t had in along time. I’m always looking for that super-easy to make tastes-fine meal that will satisfy my immediate craving. Of course, as the amount of food dwindles, the amount of labor that I’m willing to put in for a meal increases. Microwave burritos have been the primary food source for quite some time now, as they only required a plate, 2 minutes, and a couple slices of cheese to compete. Alas, they have all been consumed.

Next, those foods in the box start looking a lot better. I really loathe to wait for water to boil, and then babysit food cooking for 10 or 15 minutes that I can really pictures myself doing better things… but I’m starting to get desperate, so it doesn’t seem like too much to ask now days.

This is when it starts to hit me, I’ve got a lot of good food that’s been in my cabinets for a long time. More importantly, for too long. I’ve found that most of my “food in a box” that I’ve purchased or even been gifted by my Mom have expired! My pretty much full food cabinet is nothing but a lie, as I’ve found that probably 60% of everything in there is expired.

I even just had a can of vegetables only to look at the date on the can and see that it was in it’s final month of “best before” time. That’s right, I’ve had a store of canned food long enough that it’s going bad. Yeah! Canned food! I thought that stuff was supposed to last through the apocalypse or something.

Anyway, I’m starting to really get a grasp on the old adage “use it or lose it”. I’ve been saving a lot of food for “a rainy day” only to find out when that rainy day came it was already bad. This reinforces my feeling that grocery shopping is a pain, and I’m kind of bummed out that I’ve squandered so much of the food in my cabinets, albeit unknowingly. I even took a moment to think of the kids in Somalia that have nothing to eat as I threw away box after box of good food. Of course, I then remember that part of the reason I didn’t cook those boxes were they required milk which I didn’t have at the time… and those Somalian kids don’t have any milk either. Guilt vanquished.

Someday I’m going to have to figure out an intelligent way to shop, cook, and feed myself that doesn’t involve eating out 80% of my meals or going hungry. Seriously.

I am surprisingly beat up today after frisbee yesterday evening. I fell asleep right away and slept amazingly well, especially since recently I haven’t been. After a long night’s sleep (almost seven hours) I woke up surprisingly sore.

Most of the muscle soreness as gone away, but a couple niggling injuries remain. It appears that my ancient running shoes just aren’t cutting it anymore for the amount of sprinting around that was necessary during an entire evening of ultimate, and my shin splints have returned. I never really had shin splints too bad, but they were pretty annoying towards the end of my diving career at El Dorado High School where running barefoot in practice and bouncing around on a spring board were taking their toll. For whatever reason my right shin has returned with a little bit of that feeling I remember so well from diving practice. No big deal, of course, but kind of surprising.

I’m also sporting a really hot looking fat lip. During our ‘for fun’ game after our close–but not close enough–tournament game, I was in the process of catching a very forcefully thrown two finger down the sideline when a defender played some great catch-up and intercepted. Only they didn’t really get a hand on it so much as just knock it about 3 inches farther up. Right into my face, heh heh.

It hurt pretty bad at the moment, but was definitely easy to just shake off and keep playing. Well this morning I get up and my fat lip has turned a really attractive bruised purple color and is probably 150% it’s normal size. It’s not bad enough that I talk funny, but it gets in my way a lot.

None of these injuries really matter, and I have no doubt that they will be gone in very short order. But it’s just kind of funny for me, alpha-geek computer nerd, to be all beat up from playing sports.

I kind of like it, heh heh.

Today has started to be the best day that I’ve had at work in quite some time, and it’s been a long time since I’ve had a good day, so that’s a big deal.

Since I first started working in the Computer Science Department some two and a half years ago, the biggest in-your-face problem that has faced our department has been the painfully inadequate physical network. This relatively disorganized mess has plagued us with a completely untroubleshootable nature that made even simple problems into bigger problems that were difficult or even impossible to solve. Nothing has prevented the improvement of our computer systems here in Nichols Hall more than our physical network.

Ever since I began here, I have been strongly advocating that our building needed some big TLC on the fundamental levels. A new (or boldly renovated) physical network, reorganized address space, and rethought namespace were all things that our department desperately needed to move forward. After all, these are the very foundations of a capable and responsive computing experience. You wouldn’t want to build a skyscraper without a foundation, would you?

Well, of course you wouldn’t… but we have. And it’s been a constant source of frustration for me, just because I’m the type of guy that has a somewhat anal dedication to doing things the Right way. (Note the capital ‘R’ in ‘right’… I’m not playing around here. ) So the idea of having a sloppy foundation for everything we do has always just ‘bugged me’. Unfortunately it’s also completely stopped me in my tracks as I try to solve difficult problems. There is just no way to systematically troubleshoot a problem with hundreds of variables that are already challenging to isolate when the “base set” of variables are inconsistent and unisolatable.

I just left a meeting with myself, Sterling, Earl, and a representative from Telecom where we laid the ground work to begin a physical rewiring project to bring our building out of twenty-years-ago land and into 2005. To say that I’m happy would be an understatement. I’ve been pushing for this move since my first day on the job, talking to professors and administrators, communicating with coworkers, attempted many fact finding missions, and anything else that I could think of that could fix this huge and fundamental problem. At first there was a huge “institutional” block, where it just wasn’t unanimous that something needed to be done. But after two years of findings and carefully selected words, I think that we are finally all on the same page… well, at least enough on the same page that we can move forward.

Our meeting with telecom was great and layed a general groundwork for the type of project that we’re looking at. Next up, our first deliverables will be a diagram of the building with our needs outlined on a work order so that we can move forward with a quote from Telecom at what we are looking at.

I’m estatic. Almost two years ago I finaggled a copy of the building plans–with Earl’s help–and scanned them in preparation for this moment. Now that we are ready to actually get a bid, I’ve joyously volunteered to take the maps and do an initial survey of the building to insure that we have a grip on the current status of our physical network topology. Then we’ll go over it again in meetings to rework our current status into a forward looking plan to revamp our physical network.

It’s more bureaucracy than I’d normally like, but this little bit of hope is incredibly rewarding. The last several days have been very exciting on this “action item”, and so I hope this great progress can continue forward.

Yay.