The Cats Nuts

This past week, I was trying to get a piece of software running on my computer and I was visiting some less than savory sites in order to get some help. Some time, while plowing through the depths of the Internet, I must have stumbled across some virus like content. For the remainder of the week, I struggled with my laptop, trying to keep it connected and trying to stop it from locking up. Cleaned up my registry, uninstalled as many programs as I could, really just did a whole house, top-to-bottom cleaning. It didn’t work. At the end of it all, even with as much scanning as I could do and as much patching up as I could muster, the laptop was still giving me issues. So, I did what any other self-respecting self-proclaimed nerd would do, I installed the RC Windows 7 on my laptop.

As of last night, it was working just fine, but as I am typing this, waiting for Windows to start, I am quickly coming to the realization that all might not be well, as this is the second time that my computer has hung with a dark screen while booting. Hmmm… I was just going to write a post about how nicely it’s been working and how Windows immediately recognized all the components of my Gateway p-7805u, but no….now I have to go and see if I can’t get it working correctly. Oh jeez…what have I done.

Melissa and I arrived back in South Florida after a grueling 10 hour traveling ordeal which left us exhausted for pretty much the remainder of Sunday and all through Monday. So exhausted that I once again botched getting up and missed my flight to Greenville. Because I have status on Delta, it’s really not that big of a deal and it actually worked out fairly well. I got in last night around 10pm and got to spend the day with Melissa who took a vacation day.

I have to say…Vegas is a ton of fun. The last two times I went out there was back in College when I was on the wrestling team and frankly, it sucked. I was cutting weight, under age and overall it just wasn’t a very fun trip. Granted, we did enjoy ourselves, but nothing compared to this last go around.

I don’t want to go into gory detail about the trip, but I’ll run down a few of the things that, we really enjoyed. Ceaser’s Palace has been redone fairly recently, and it’s much nicer than I remembered. We saw Cirque’s erotica show, which was pretty interesting, though I am left wondering if we woudn’t have enjoyed “O” a bit more than the one we saw. We spend a good amount of time on the craps table. If you don’t know how to play, learn before you go to Vegas. It’s the most fun game out there. Machine Guns… yep, fired off my fair share at a shooting range. It was a hell of a lot of fun. There were some other cool things like the Playboy Club and ghostbar, but they weren’t really the stuff that sticks out to me. It was a hell of a good time and I’ll definitly go back for another long weekend.

Speaking of long weekends, in two weeks or so, I will be heading out to Denver for a work trip and am very much looking forward to seeing Brad while I’m out there. The Great American Beer Festival is also going on around that same time, but seeing as how it’s only a few weeks away, I don’t see myself being able to get tickets for the event. Either way, it’ll be nice to be able to go and hang out with Brad, watch some Football and relax instead of just sit in my room playing video games.

Speaking of that…. this evening is looking like it’s going to be a bad night for gaming as we’re going to be working on another client’s work tonight starting around 9pm. Not exactly something that I find very fun, working that late, but it’s good money so I’ll put in the hours for the client who happens to be a pretty important client to my employers. Anyway, I am going to go and crank out some more defects and see what I can get done for the rest of the day.

Another Thursday, another flight. Looking like this Thursday is going to be a little different than my typical one. Around 4:00pm, I’ll be hopping in a car and driving down to Atlanta. Not going to be worrying about the delays out of the GSP airport or hopping a flight down to Florida. The only thing that I have to worry about is finding Melissa’s gate, and meeting up with her.

We’re heading to Vegas this evening and I’m damn excited. We’ve got lots of stuff planned for the weekend and it’s going to be nice to get away. We’ve got tickets to go and see Cirque, so that’s fairly high on my list of things to do as I’ve never seen them before. I think my excitement surrounding going to the Machine Gun shooting range has already been documented, but nevertheless, I’m still damn excited.

Work has been going pretty well recently and I certainly can’t complain. I got myself a nice little $10/hr raise, so that will be nice when that slightly higher income starts coming in. It’s been interesting running my own small business, but I think that I need to spend some time working on my finances a little bit. I’ve been lax in sending in my monthly taxes. Every says that the IRS is leniant the first year, but I’m going to get on that soon. It’s been difficult to set aside the time and get organized, but now that Melissa and I are all set in the new house, I should be able to carve out some time to do that.

Right now, Melissa is at home where the AT&T U-Verse guys are installing our new fiber based internet and TV. We’re pretty excited about it, but I’m skeptical about how well it’s going to work. We still have Comcast and frankly, we’re not really all that impressed with the performance of the Comcast service, so hopefully U-Verse will work out a little bit better.

All I have to do is make it through this week and this weekend, I’ll be in Vegas with the guys from work and various other folks, most importantly, Melissa. We’re going to be going to some cool shit, probably a Cirque show, a Machine Gun Shooting Range, indoor skydiving, etc. I’m really looking forward to getting away and having a fun filled weekend. Melissa and I have been charging forward with the house stuff trying to get things squared away before her grandmother comes to town in two-three weeks. This past weekend, I spent two hours mopping the floor…or actually scrubbing it as the case may be.  It looks much much better than it did, but I know that after two weeks of being away (when Melissa’s Grandmother is coming), it’s going to need another hearty mopping.

I was pretty excited about the coming weeks, as I was supposed to be going out to Denver for a software release. As it turns out, I may not get to go at all, or if I do get to go, it’ll only be for the first week of the release. One of the key reasons that I was so excited about going out there was to attend the Great American Beer Festival, which falls right when I would have been going.  As of currently, it’s not looking good. Oh well.

I’m going to bring my camera along to Vegas, so hopefully I’ll have some photos to post in the coming weeks.

Just yesterday, I was talking to a guy that I used to work with, and he was asking me how I went about starting up my business and how I dealt with the stress of being unemployed when I was laid off by my last company. I explained to him that after everything that I’d been through in my life, I’ve learned that things will work out. Maybe not always in an obvious way, but if you’re open to opportunities that present themselves, good things will come.

As you may recall, a few months ago, I started working for this small BI company as a freelance consultant. Well, yesterday, things took off and we’ve been granted (at least probably) granted an extension for the year. What this means for me is that I will a) be employed for the next year, b) making gobs of money, c) be running a team doing development, as the project will be growing in size d) making more gobs of money.

This road that I’m on in my professional career seems to be going to a good spot, so for the time being, I’m enjoying just riding the wave, and with any luck, I’ll achieve my 30 year goal.

Going along the same vein of thought, things are looking good in my personal life. Melissa and I are living in a great house, we’re steadily marching towards getting married and we’ve got some fun stuff planned in the next few months. This weekend, we’re planning on going to the Keys on Sunday to do some fishing and snorkling. We’ve got a trip to Vegas planned in a week or two. It’s all good stuff, and with all the turmoil that moving has caused, it’ll be a nice time.

Being that it’s Thursday, I’m looking forward to making my way to the airport and home shortly after that. Can’t wait.

I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that my little company that I formed is going to probably stay viable for the next year at least. The bad news is that I’ll probably be stuck flying to Greenville, SC for the next year at least.

This morning, our project sponsor is going to meet up with one of the owners of the company that’s contracting me, and they are working on getting up to a year extension. I don’t know how long I’ll actually be tasked on the project, but I figure at least the next six months could be here. We have a project starting up (always “probably”) in Melbourne, FL, which, happens to be around 2 hours from my house. I’d like to be put on that project, as the idea of driving a quick 2 hours to get to work makes me a little giddy inside compared to the fun 6-7 hour airport debacle that I typically endure.

Things at the house are finally coming together and we’re really almost done getting everything squared away. The last remaining item that needs to be addressed is the multimedia in the living room. I’ve held off on doing anything about it as of yet, as we don’t have an appropriate media cabinet/hutch. For the past two weekends, Melissa and I have gone out and searched for something that would meet out needs but not obliterate our budget. We’ve found a few things that were on the upper end of the scale, so we’re still searching to find the perfect piece. I have a feeling that this weekend will be when we find what we’re looking for. I’m pretty excited about setting up all the media, as we have pre-wired surround sound, multi-room sound and even speaker hookups outside. I’ve actually got to look into getting some speakers for outside, as the only ones that I have aren’t really designed to work through hurricanes and the moisture of Florida.

Other than that, we’ve made good progress getting the office squared away by getting two L-shaped desks from the illustrious Office Depot. They aren’t the most amazing things ever, but for $120 a piece, you can’t really complain about an L-Shaped glass-topped desk. They look pretty good in there, so that’s what matters. We won’t have them forever, but they’ll serve the need while we’re kicking around in this house.

Work has been slow this week, so I’ve been able to sit here and write up this post, but while slow, I still have to get some stuff done.

This weekend, instead of flying home to South Florida, I’m flying to Orlando to meet Melissa. She has a conference up there, so I figured that instead of hanging out by myself at the house, we’d take a trip up to Orlando together.

One evening we’ll head over to the Magic Kingdom for their “Extra Magic Hours” or something like that. I am looking forward to it. It’s always nice to get away from the grind, especially since the past month has been focused around getting our house all set up, which, by the way, is coming along nicely. We’ve got out bedroom, both bathrooms, the kitchen and the living room done. Having all those rooms totally set up makes the house feel much more homey than it has, so it’s an enjoyable place to be, even if we do have a 3ft. tall stack of boxes that still need to be unpacked.

I am going to take my terrible feeling self over to my dashboard page and see if I can get some work done.

For the past 6-7 years, my brother, Scott, has worked at a retail bike shop. During that time, I’ve gone down the path towards my consulting career, seemingly miles away from anything that he’s been doing. To all outsiders, we have totally different careers and that’s just the way things are.

The other day, I got an email that Scott forwarded onto me. In the email was a job posting looking for a Java programmer. While at first blush, I tried to think of a few of the Java folks that I have worked with in the past and found a few names and forwarded them the email. I didn’t really give it much thought past that.

A few hours later, Scott called me up and we started into our typical ramblings about the daily trials of life. Eventually we started talking about the job posting that he forwarded to me. I got to thinking about some of the experiences that I’ve had with open source software and how that could be used as an open-source solution for his company. The gears started turning and in the end, I was sending out an email to his boss, asking him for more details regarding what his company needed to accomplish.

One of the issues that I’ve had with my job is that I don’t see the results of my work. We’ll come in, put in a dashboard and that’ll be that. Nothing more and I’ll never hear about it. I’ve thought a lot in the past about gathering up the skill set necessary to put in small scale open source BI implementations for small businesses. Over time, this didn’t really happen, but the idea has always been in my mind. I brought up the idea of creating a application suit using open source software to the guy that I am working for and he lit up. After talking about it for awhile we came to the conclusion that if we were able to put in some significant effort into a project such as this one, we could build a custom application that could be put into other similar businesses in a modular form. The software would be free to the customer, offering an outstanding value proposition, and we’d have a product that we could push to all levels of client.

I proposed this option to Scott’s boss and he seemed to be interested, so next week we’re going to be on a conference call to talk about what our business can offer theirs. This is the kind of engagement that is a, I hate to be cliche, win-win, where we can justifiably offer a solution to them at a lower cost, actually probably taking a loss as a business, but develop strong intellectual capital. As you might be able to tell, I’m pretty excited about this and not to even mention the oportunity to head up to Boston to work with my brother on a project.

I am going to be taking this on as my own little baby as we move forward, trying to push sales and push us into this potentially lucrative market, so I’m sure I’ll have plenty more to say about it as time goes on.

It’s been about 6-8 weeks since I proposed to Melissa and frankly…the wedding planning hasn’t been going so well. We recently moved into our new house, so pretty much until we’re all settled in, we agreed to put the wedding planning on hold. Well, that doesn’t stop everyone from ASKING about it. The big question that usually comes is “When’s the date”, as if it really matters to most people.

The next question that we usually get surrounds the “How big?” And frankly, that’s a question that Melissa and I have yet to reach a decision about. Everyone from my mother to Melissa’s Grandmother has been pestering us to figure out what we’re going to do.

The one thing that Melissa and I said about our wedding was that we were going to do it how we wanted it and we weren’t going to led the agenda of anyone else…and we mean ANYONE else effect what we choose to do, who we invited, where it was held, the color scheme, type of flowers or the flavor of the cake. There are too many stories that go around about allowing other people’s influence come into your wedding and the amount of stress that comes from trying to please everyone. Melissa and I lead very stressful lives as it stands. She’s the director of marketing at a small technology company, and I’ve just recently started my own small company, so to invite another stressful element into our lives wasn’t an option.

One of the key points of contention that we’re already running into from both sides of the family is the “Who’s going to be invited”. Both Melissa and I have members of our families that we’re not particularly fond of and frankly would rather not see at the Wedding. We also have those family members who we’re indifferent to, and that being said, if we’re indifferent to them being there, then why bother with the expense and stress of coordinating yet another group of people into the mix?

After expressing these views to our respective family members we’ve gotten a mixed bag of

“It’s your day, do what you want…”

to “I am going to cry if your Aunt and Uncle aren’t invited”…

and pretty much anything between. At this point, we have no idea what we’re going to do for a wedding, or at least we’re no closer to deciding them we were a week after the engagement, but the one thing that we’re sure of is that we’re going to be doing it the way that we want it…not the way that someone else thinks we should be doing it.

Enough said.

You know, the more and more I sit behind my computer during the day, the better I feel. Why is that? Because every time I get up and go to the “other” form of media in my home, the television, I just get disgusted. I will be flipping through the channels and see these news organization, blabbing on about something that no rational person could believe, or better yet, no rational person would waste their time listening to, let alone talking about, then it hits me.

The ol’ profit motive. We’ve moved so far away from journalistic integrity in order to bolster the pockets of the news organizations, so now instead of “how factual can we get” we’ve moved into a “how sensational can we get”. It’s just disgusting. Hence why I try to get my news and information from community news aggregators like Digg.com or Redit.com

Jon Stewart says it best: