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July 3, 2009 - New Job
I started my new job last Monday. This was a shortened week because of the July 4th holiday. It was an interesting week that mostly involved my reading documentation about many software projects, sitting in on meetings, and meeting the various people that I will be working with.
It's a little weird being in a new place. At Oxy, everyone knew me... and they'd known me since I was 25 years old and a little less professional. I get a whole new start, here. This is nice.
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Entered: 7/3/2009 5:58:00 PM
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Modified: 7/3/2009 5:59:00 PM
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May 22, 2009 - Sleep Study Pt;.2
They connected me to a CPAP machine. The purpose of this machine is to blow air into your face so that it is easier to breath. To breath in, specifically. I seem to have a problem where I tend to hold my breath while I'm sleeping, and the air blowing in my face exaggerated my problem. I woke up probably 50 times because I was unable to breath. It was terrifying. It was one of the worst nights that I've had in ages. Apparently, sleeping with the machine is pleasant for most people, and a godsend for people with "normal" types of apnea. However, I hated it.
When I got home this morning, I crashed and didn't get up until around 11:00am. I've spent the day, ever since, on constant phone calls -- most related to my job search.
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Entered: 5/22/2009 2:11:00 PM
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Modified: 5/22/2009 2:13:00 PM
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May 21, 2009 - General Update
General update. I've spent the last week or so talking to recruiters, working on the new Helen's Heart website, reading blogs and commenting on pointless internet discussions. Notably on http://www.internetevolution.com , which speaks specifically on topics in internet business.
Sunday, we got new fish for the aquarium. When I moved our old fish (when we got new floors a month ago), they all spontaneously died. I'm not sure why, but I was disappointed. Our 10 goldfish were all in the 6" range. Our new fish are not goldfish. Shrimp, plecos, mollies, a rainbow shark, a loach, and a red male betta.
Last night, I made cookies with Savannah. Normally, I make cookies with Emily, because she really enjoys baking and cooking. Savannah has more rarely shown an interest in such things. Since Savannah asked, I made it a night to bake with Savannah. Emily was crushed; I guess she felt kinda rejected. I felt horrible, because... well I don't do things with the kids so that they'll be unhappy. I apologized and included her in the rest of the endeavor. We all happily made cookies and ate very few of them.
Of course... cookies are made with a cup of butter and 1.5 cups of sugar. The acid was horrible and kept me writhing in discomfort at 1:30am. Since I've started to use cholesterol medication, I can't take antacid for a four-hour block of my evening. At 1:30am, I took my zantac and had to wait 30 minutes for it to kick in.
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Entered: 5/21/2009 11:24:00 AM
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Modified: 5/21/2009 11:24:00 AM
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May 21, 2009 - Technical Interview
This morning, I had a technical interview with a consulting company
(Carlisle & Gallagher Consulting Group). It went very well. Although I'm a strong technical person, I've started to fear technical interviews. It appears that there is a huge margin for opinion and methodologies. I was shocked to have a person once indicate that I had weak SQL skills (primarily because I didn't do a lot of server-side maintenance, which seems somewhat irrelevent). Among most technical interviewers, most say that it's a strength for me, and I consider myself to be strong with it. My skepticism and light useage of deep abstraction methodologies -- particularly abstract classes, complicated class heirarchies, and many-tier (4+) development strategies -- has earned me some unfair commentary, too, in my opinion. I understand how to make things complicated... I do it if I have to. I just prefer my data to be structured in a pretty simple way.
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Entered: 5/21/2009 11:27:00 AM
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Modified: 5/21/2009 11:34:00 AM
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May 15, 2009 - Baby Girl
Ang and I went to the doctor yesterday to get ultrasound pictures of our baby. This was "the exciting one" where you get to see if it is a boy or a girl. Ang and Savannah have been wanting another girl, but Emily has been wanting a baby boy. I didn't really care which one it was. The extended family seemed largely convinced that it would be a boy -- Ang has jokingly blamed a lot of her complications (nausea, baby moving) on "the boy."
However, the ultrasound has demonstrated that it will be a baby girl. Her name will be (tentatively) Jessie Clay Jacobsen.
(btw, this is the first time I've used my "blog with a gallery" tool. It is super-easy to upload multiple pictures and they show up just like you see to the right. It includes tools for re-arranging the pictures and picking which is "the big one." I coded this several months ago, but hadn't integrated it into my blog until recently.)
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Entered: 5/15/2009 8:33:00 AM
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Modified: 5/15/2009 8:40:00 AM
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May 8, 2009 - DLink DSM-520
I got another DLink DSM-520, which I bought from eBay. This is a set-top box that accessing video files from my media server through our wireless network.
This is my second one, and I hope to get another one. My DVD collection (roughly 2000 discs) seemed a lot less practical after I got married. My anal-retentive disc habits were fine when I was single, but expecting my wife and kids to put DVDs back in cases and shelves in alphabetically order turned out to be unrealistic.
Now, I have 4 Terabytes of disk space on my media server, and I have thousands of TV shows and movies ready to stream wirelessly throughout the house. It is more convenient in every discernable way -- except that I have to encode movies. With 4 DVD-Rom drives and a quad-core processor, it turns out not to take too long.
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Entered: 5/8/2009 4:24:00 PM
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Modified: 5/8/2009 4:38:00 PM
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May 8, 2009 - Sleep Study
Last night I participated in a sleep study. I hadn't been sleeping very well for the past couple years, and my wife complains that I snore. She also says that I sometimes gasp for breath, and that she thought I had sleep apnea.
Well, doctors haven't been a big priority for me, but since I have spare time (being unemployed and all), I decided that I should take care of it while it didn't conflict with a job.
It was surprisingly easy. I showed up at 9:30pm at the medical center and went to bed in some rooms that were set up like a motel. I was supposed to get to sleep at 10:30pm (my normal bedtime), but I don't think I actually got to sleep until after midnight. Fortunately, I anticipated this and brought my laptop and some TV shows that I hadn't gotten around to watching, yet.
The nurse wired me up with a couple dozen electrodes and plugged me into a computer. Then I went to sleep. Actually, I was a bit uncomfortable and when the nurse "got me up" I was already awake... and I didn't feel like I'd slept at all. It was one of the worst night's rest I've had recently.
However, in spite of my perception that I didn't sleep, the nurse assured me that I had. I was afraid that I had wasted the entire sleep study by not sleeping. When I thought about it, I realized that I hadn't quite counted to a thousand (I count, slowly, when I want to get to sleep... it's boring enough to knock me out), and that would only have taken an hour, whereas I had been lying down for 6.
The different electrodes left sticky glue or some kind of gritty paste on various parts of my head, face, and body. They washed out easily enough. One electrode left a red mark under my left eye.
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Entered: 5/8/2009 4:37:00 PM
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Modified: 5/8/2009 4:39:00 PM
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May 6, 2009 - Test Video
This is a test video blog. I've uploaded a short animation that I made last year with a Greek-style temple and some trees. The animation kinda sucks, because I didn't get around to fixing the trees (which float) and fixing the speed, and fixing... well, lots of stuff. I wanted to 3D model the temple for another project, but thought that I should put together a brief animation to show it off (most people can't view model files). After a few hours, I was a little frustrated with the amount of time I was wasting and decided that the animation was good enough to show the temple.
But this is, at least, was a good video for me to test uploading (an AVI file) and automatically converting it to FLV and displaying it in a custom FLV player that I wrote.
You'll probably notice that there are issues with my FLV player, but I'm working them out. It looks like most of the ActionScript 3.0 features related to video are meant to support the Flash Media Server product -- which I'm not using. But we'll see what I'm able to do with this.
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Entered: 5/6/2009 9:19:00 AM
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Modified: 5/8/2009 10:30:00 AM
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May 4, 2009 - Server Network Adapter
I was re-reading some of my logs and noticed a log entry I made about my primary internet server using a USB 10/100 Ethernet adapter. It made me realize that I hadn't updated my blog to mention that it was a temporary thing. I long-ago replaced it with a dual gigabit PCI-X NIC. Which I found in its original packaging in a garbage can filled with old server pieces at Oxy. It works perfectly. I actually found a couple of them along with some DVD drives and other components. I didn't need the old SCSI adapters, zip and bernoulli drives or the stacks of manuals. And, no, I didn't dig through banana peels and coffee grounds. All of this surplus was discarded separately from normal garbage.
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Entered: 5/4/2009 2:15:00 PM
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Modified: 5/4/2009 2:22:00 PM
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May 3, 2009 - Power Supply
A long-standing problem with my main computer is that it won't always boot properly. When I shut down, it often takes some coaxing to get it started back up again. Sometimes something as inoccuous as a restart will send it in a repeating cycle. The physical symptoms included a soft click/whirring noise that repeated itself over and over again, occassionally blinking lights (my case has several LEDs), and eventual self-power-off.Now... the problems started after a storm a few months ago, and I figured that the motherboard was fried. I'm not sure why I got that idea -- I guess because the computer started sometimes and not other times. It never crashed after it got started. Also, it did "power on" but had weird behaviors. In my experience, a bad power supply is the cause of "sudden problems" in a stable system 6 times out of 10. Another 3 times out of 10, it's a dying hard drive. 1 time out of 10, it's a dying CPU. I don't think I've ever actually had a motherboard go bad (although I've gotten bad motherboards out-of-the-box). In any case, I noticed that the fewer things I had connected (i.e. USB devices), the more likely the machine was to boot up. Although USB devices don't draw much power, they do draw some power, and the power drain was the only thing that I could think of whereby a USB device might affect boot-up. So I switched out the power supply, and bingo: The system came right up. Next time I have computer problems, I think I'll just play the odds and assume that it's a bad power supply, regardless of the symptoms.
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Entered: 5/3/2009 8:32:51 AM
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Modified: 5/3/2009 8:32:51 AM
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May 1, 2009 - Angie's Netbook
 Angie and I went to Fry's in search of a D-Link DSM-520 (Media Center Receiver) for her bedroom. This clever device allows us to watch movies -- which are stored on our computer -- on a TV using a remote control. I apparently got the very last one in any local Fry's a few weeks ago. They no longer carry the product line. (I'm bidding on three on eBay. I hope to get them all). While we were there, though, we looked around at the tiny laptops. These are generally called "netbooks" and have an 8 - 10 inch screen. They're not much bigger or heavier than a paperback book. Angie got a 10" version with 160GB hard drive, 1GB memory and 1.8Ghz Atom CPU. It's powerful enough to run Windows XP with ease, and we got the version with a "big battery" for 7 hours of battery life. It's a really cool little computer. It wasn't expensive, either, at $349.
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Entered: 5/3/2009 8:48:35 AM
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Modified: 5/3/2009 8:49:11 AM
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Books - Recently Read
Isaac Asimov
The Robot Series
John Hemry
(as Jack Campbell)
The Lost Fleet Series
Terry Brooks
The Shannara Series
Stephen R. Donaldson
The Chronices of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever
Walter Isaacson
Einstein: His Life and Universe
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| My Myers-Briggs Type: INTP |
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Introverted 56%
Intuitive 33%
Thinking 22%
Perceiving 56%
INTP types are quiet, thoughtful, analytical individuals who enjoy spending long periods of time on their own, working through problems and forming solutions. They are curious about systems and how things work. INTPs tend to be less at ease in social situations although they enjoy the company of those who share their interests.
www.humanmetrics.com |
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