From the Department of the Registrar at SCSU
August 26, 2008

"When I looked at your transcript it does have your degree recorded – 8-14-08. You received a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Management. Diplomas are mailed out about 8 weeks after graduation however if you ordered your transcript the degree is listed on the transcript."

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!

My Last Day at St. Cloud State!
August 14, 2008

Hooray, its my last day. There's a delicious exam to send me off, but an easy one at that. Almost there...

Holy Crap! Three More Days!
August 12, 2008

There's only three more days left, presumably, in my entire college career. I'm so excited that its almost palpable. Not quite yet, though, as the gods of St. Cloud State - including Sir Harry Potter the III Esquire More Honorific Surnames - probably still have more tricks up their sleeves to try to keep me there. I've only got one paper, one more exam (which should be a cake-walk) and another class of rigorous and educational walking. They'll figure something out.

Actual free time awaits me patiently, as do my many now-dormant projects. I swear, if ListForge wasn't enough awesome for you - just wait until you see what totally interesting app I have coming down the pike next. ;p IN THREE DAYS!

Weekend LAN Party
June 25, 2008

So, I totally have an excuse for not updating anytime recently - this past weekend I was host to an awesome LAN party! Unlike most of our usual ones, which are usually limited to around 4 people, this one had 9 total participants which finally made team games like Counter-Strike a viable option.

Much fun was had playing Counter-Strike, as Mike A. from work definitely helped our team pwn everyone else. ;p We tried playing some UT, but it truly has not aged well. I had to drop to software mode, and lag was a continuous issue. Also, it didn't help that the speed had gotten reduced down to Halo'tastic on a game meant to be a twitch shooter. We got in a few good rounds of Quake 3 which was awesome, because it happens to be amongst my favorite games. We finished the night off with some Co-Op Serious Sam and I beat out the little pyramid area for the fifty ninth time.

I was surprised at how well everything went off having 9 people on the LAN. There weren't *too* many technical issues, Draz' box hadn't been configured to play games (no video drivers, lol) and Tom's box managed to corrupt its version of DX. I also had to buy a Cat-5 coupler, because Micro Center lacked bulk cable necessary to run from my main switch to the other room where people were. Alas.

So, all in all - it ended up being a great party and an awesome way to kick-off my new house. Thanks to all who attended, and may Tiegs' version later in July be made of equal parts win and win.

INTERNET! MWAHAHAHAHAAH!
June 17, 2008

Oh my god, I finally have Internet. Citescape was scheduled to come out on Tuesday, but it was raining and I never heard back after the cancellation. Alas, I gave in and on Friday decided to place a call to Charter. So, here I sit with an Internet connection that's 10~100 (20kbp/s was not unheard of) times as fast as what I was getting out at the farm. Yum yum. It is so nice to finally be surfing the Internets,that I don't know what to do with myself. Google reader, I'll come read some of your excess of 3billion unread items I have!

We Close on Our House Today!
June 06, 2008

Hooray, today we close on our house. Muy excitingo!

Stargazing, Lulz
June 01, 2008

Awesome night was awesome. Most of the group came up from their various locations to congregate at my place last night for some star gazing and general hanging outs. T'was definitely good fun, and a nice way to say goodbye to our current home. We got to see the ISS, the space shuttle and a number of other goodies - but best of all, Babbles.

To all who came and partook in our entertaining social event - thank you. Everyone else, you will be forced to come to my welcoming LAN party @ the new home. No, really. James will show up at your doorstep and proceed to vocalize Cat on a Keyboard In Space until you come.

Hisashiburi Desu
May 20, 2008

Man, its been a long time since I've posted. Apologies - this happens almost every Summer. I've passed all my classes and have entered into hardcore packing mode for the moment to hit our June 6th closing date. I've also been working on a C# implementation of my old System Status script in order to get a cleaner implementation. Working on my nice fast home machine is so much nicer than the one at work which grants me a coffee break everytime I hit "ctrl-shift-b".

Oh, and of course there's been too much GTAIV for this blog's health.

Summertime Coding: .NET or Ruby on Rails?
May 09, 2008

Now that the semester's over, I've got a decision ahead of me. I've two paths to go with my free time coding, Ruby on Rails and continuing with learning awesome new stuff that's incredibly useful and cool - or .NET and strengthening my professional coding to excel more at my current place of employment. Oh, what's a boy to do? You may have noticed that my Caturday page is down. I'm split in between redoing it in .NET or making it into a cool RESTful application through Ruby on Rails (lawl, how does .NET know REST? It doesn't.). I've now got two viable dev environments, so that's no longer limiting me... it's just a choice between personal growth and professional growth... oi.

I sat down yesterday to do some work on it in .NET, and was reminded of how much work it is to get an object saved into the database compared to Ruby on Rails. However, when I go back to work I'm impressed with how neat it is when all the groundwork is finally laid and everything works. Humungous upfront fixed cost for some neatness in the end (.NET) Vs. tiny upfront fixed cost for some neatness now (RoR).

I'm still not sure what I'll end up doing... the great Summer question.

Group Projects Are Fun
May 08, 2008

Group projects are so much fun. There always seems to be at least one group every semester where there's at least one person who doesn't pull their weight. Our MGMT 453 class has a paper worth around 50% of our grade due on Friday and two members still haven't contributed their final versions. Oi.

It's a good thing that I don't play GTAIV or anything, or I might get some terrible ideas about becoming Russian and eating hot dogs (Draz, who bakes their hot dogs? Really.) to regain my health. Oh well, this semester will soon be done with and I won't have to worry about this kind of pewp anymore (I'm assuming that Summer courses won't have this stuff built in). Hooray!

Finals, Developers and Houses - Oh My!
May 05, 2008

The past few weeks have been some of the busiest in my life - barring wedding time, I think that they have been the busiest times in my life. Finals are compounding and there's tons of group work to be done - on top of that I've started at a new job recently, and then ended up getting promoted over to the software development department! Hooray hooray! What else is new? Well, Emily and I are finally getting a house so I might be in one place for a little bit. We actually just got our offer accepted on a house in St. Cloud so we'll now be going through inspection processes and all sorts of other fun. Hooray, hooray. I just didn't want my blog to get too much dust in the corners. Later days!

Busy Weekend Was Busy
April 07, 2008

Wow, this was a busy weekend. I had a lot of fun, but I'm incredibly glad that it's over. What did I do? Let's see...

• Saturday I got up @ 0530 in order to get to Sartell by 0700. I ended up spending all day at the Twin Cities Code Camp learning all sorts of .NETie things. I actually got a lot out of the talk on Things Every .NET Developer should know, like turning on treating All Warnings as Errors in order to get more design advice out of the IDE. Good stuff. Sadly, I missed out on any prizes (Mike F. ended up getting a VB2008 book. Woohoo! </sarcasm>
• Saturday night I ended up spending working on some back-end stuff for this blog (images are now cachable by your browser) and playing some of the World of Warcrafts.
• Sunday was spent at work refactoring and extending some code to do things it wasn't designed for. I also got a chance to add in unit tests and even some front end UI tests through the exceedingly cool WatiN C# Unit Testing framework.
• Sunday night has ended up being spent on school work designing a training presentation for Internation Business Etiquette (oh lordy this thing's going to bomb).

Busy weekend is busy. How busy was your weekend?

The MiniView Micro KVM
March 06, 2008

I finally broke down yesterday and purchased a KVM switch. For the longest time I've been sliding in between my shiny new Macbook and my Game'rific PC that I was finally fed up with it. Enter the IOGear GCS632U MiniView Micro USB Plus KVM Switch. Quite a mouthful, but an acceptable product which after much searching and cajoling has done what I needed.

Why so much cajoling? Well, it's because I'm using a shiny new aluminum Apple keyboard (There would be a link here, but Apple fails at having a linkable storefront). This keyboard, seems to draw too much juice from the USB lines and is thus incompatible with the KVM. Thanks to some helpful chaps on the Apple forums, however, I found out a way to make it work.

Apparently, to get the GSC632U to work with the new Apple keyboards you must:

1. Plug the Apple Keyboard into the Mouse Port on the KVM
2. Plug your Mouse into the Apple Keyboard
3. Plug a PC Compatible USB keyboard into the real Keyboard Port on the KVM
4. Use the command keys on the PC Keyboard to operate the KVM

It's hardly the most optimum situation, but it works I suppose. Now I have my Macbook finally outputting to my delicious large BenQ monitor. It is truly awesome.

My First Week at W3i
February 23, 2008

I know, I haven't updated in awhile. This week has been so amazingly busy that it's not even funny. However, it's been a fantastic week and I'm absolutely thrilled with my new job. I work with highly intelligent people who care deeply about what they do, and it's fricking awesome. For the first time in my life I had a relevant conversation about modern web programming technologies, discussed the virtues of virtual machines and learned about some awesome new ASP techniques in one day.

All told, I'm incredibly excited and looking forward to working at W3i. Hooray!

Starting at a New Job
February 19, 2008

Hooray, tomorrow I start working for W3i. I get to work with the illustrious Mr. David and am certainly looking forward to a change in atmosphere. I'm also very excited to get to work full time on web developments, instead of dividing myself between the thirteen distinct job titles that I held at Geronimo. Hopefully once I get started there I'll have many more .NET tidbits to share as well as far more interesting tales to share.

As an aside, why doesn't the IRS use logic in their PDF forms? I can't believe I had to manually subtract lines on my W4...

T Minus Eight Days 'Till Total .NET
February 11, 2008

T minus eight days until I begin work for w3i and switch all of my development energies to .NET. I'm very anxious and looking forward to it. It's also going to mean some changes around the blog. Since my development work over there will be done using Microsoft's tools and ASP.NET, there's going to be a definite change in the content here. Rather than focusing on my usual Ruby and Ruby on Rails I'm going to have to shift my focus to look more at the Microsoft side of things. My recent tutorial series start on using MVC is just a taste of things to come. So, enjoy the new taste!

Using MVC with ASP.NET
February 05, 2008

Some of you may have noticed that I didn't make any updates to listforge over the weekend. Alas, I was busy with bigger things. As part of a recent opportunity, I've begun honing my skills with ASP.NET and am in the process or rewriting my Caturday page using its new MVC framework (Really, it took them this long to get one out there). All of us cool kids who use Ruby on Rails have been using MVC so long that we've tired of it and are moving on to REST, but MS as usual is lumbering along behind us. I must say that I'm thankful, though. The concept of MVC is a much needed design pattern for web applications and an incredible difference over Code Behind.

The process itself is actually going quite well and I'm learning a lot on the way. For instance, if you pass variables in to the controller statement it seems to eat the Request.Files children. You have to actually use the MvcToolkit (totally different from the MVC extension) and use .UpdateForm (not .UpdateFrom like the MSDN blogs say) to populate entry data.

One other item of note is that unit testing out of the box doesn't work if you're using a local database file. There doesn't appear to be a way to set "development", "testing" or "production" databases within the projects and unfortunately the testing project that gets created fails to recognize the database specified by the main application. I pulled my hair for quite some time, thinking that I destroyed some crucial application bit, before realizing that the testing just plain didn't work. After firing up the web server, I realized that everything was just fine.

I'm using ASP.NET 3.5 so I also get the beauty that is LINQ. Really, it is .NET's redeeming feature. The ability to query any (of the widely supported) enumerable type(s) using a SQL-like language is phenomenal. It even brings with it ORM style object addition and data-store commission allowing things like "LinqContext.Items.Add()" for anything ranging from XML files to SQL Databases to you're usual arrays. Delicious.

Interested in trying some MVC development in ASP.NET? You can download the extension itself from Microsoft's Official ASP Site and the Toolkit Extras or MvcToolkit from Microsoft's Official ASP Site. If you're looking for help, Scott Gu's blog has an excellent series of articles on the matter (though in typical MS fashion, no decent way to find them). Obviously you'll need a copy of Visual Studio Web Developer (or VS2008 Pro in my case) in order to get going with this.

Slippery Slippery
January 31, 2008

So, tonight marked my first night in the ditch. There was a patch of glare ice that in the span of 2 hours sucked in two cars after me for great justice. Luckily, I seem to know a bunch of people and a handful of friends had ended up pulling off to give me a hand - one of whom had a great big truck and tow cables. Thankfully, I was able to get pulled out of the ditch without too much issue. The first car to follow the patch of ice was gotten out with some pushing - but the second car was in a bit deeper and ended up in bad shape. She ended up landing on the newspaper delivery pole that I had earlier demolished, and it made quite a loud scraping sound when her car was tower out.

All told, all drivers were OK which was good. It did take Sherburne County Patrol at least half an hour to respond though, which is crazy considering that I pass a cop at least once every day on my commute to work.

Update: 2008-01-30

The direct damage to the car, so far, has only cost me about $20. However, it appears that the coolant pump ended up leaking which is quite a hefty $200 repair. Oi. I don't know whether that was a result of the ditch or if it was already there though. I still haven't taken the car in about the scratches.

All Quiet, But Stuff's Coming
January 25, 2008

It's been quiet around here for a little bit with good reason. I've been keeping the wraps on it, but I registered the domain last night and I'm finishing up the polish on the user interface. Sometime next week I'm going to be putting up my third public web application entitled "Listforge". I created it, like most good software, to scratch my own itch and indeed it has scratched it well. I needed something to keep track of things I wanted, to sort these things and present them to me in a meaningful manner. From this idea, I bore my lovely new idea that Andy played with last night.

I am currently working on socializing the software, letting friends view each other's lists and to see their desired products. I'm hoping that this will be a neat way for you to share your interests with your friends, and to allow you to learn about new things you didn't realize you were out there.

Anyway, I look forward to everyone hopping on and trying it once I get everything nailed down. Talk to everyone later!

More Running
January 05, 2008

I've been down with a cold most of today, but I've got a job to do! Andy ran for an indeterminate amount of time and an indeterminate distance - and I've got to outdo him! Oh no, I will not be content with my single mile ran. This evening I've continued the gains and ran 1.4 miles in just under 15 minutes at 5.6 miles per hour. Andy says he ran for twenty minutes, but alas - he walked most of that. Boo him! Get on that thing and run it!

Oh, and what's this? A crappy song dedicated to Babbles and a cover of one of my favorite Matt Nathanson songs have shown up on my caturday server. My, who knew that Garage Band could be so much fun?

Running Into the New Year
January 04, 2008

Not so much part of any New Year's resolution, but more that I'm finally getting a chance to dig out from underneath all of the school from last semester. I'm finally able to get back into my exercise routine, but I decided to go ahead and fully add running into the set. Last night I ran my first mile in over six years. Go me!

On that note - Andy's mentioned that he's going to start running and possibly doing some more exercise related things to post on his new blog. Hopefully we'll be able to goad each-other on a little bit, and I'll get to do more than just store my stats in a cute little spreadsheet!

Merry Christmas!
December 24, 2007

Graduation So Close...
December 19, 2007

One of my real life buddies e-mailed me today telling me that Summer classes were posted. Alas, registration has not yet begun - but something utterly awesome happened while I was there. I happened to flip back to Spring 2008 semester to check on my courses and loe! One that I needed was there and fit within my schedule. I've got five classes lined up for next semester, but if I play everything right I can definitely be done half-way through Summer! Fantastic!

Busy... Busy...
December 06, 2007

Well, this has certainly been a busy couple weeks. I've done a bit of contract work, shoveled out our gigantic driveway and classes are winding down for the semester. I've managed to snag a 92% on my first final so I'm off to a good start so far. Here's to continuing that trend! Don't even mention the fact that I've got to get busy with Christmas shopping... oi.

St. Cloud State University; Oh teh Course Offerings
November 29, 2007

This semester's registration was a little different than most. Rather than waiting until the week before class to register (and face whatever stupid problem SCSU invented this time over breaks rather than during finals), I decided to get a jump start and register close to when my window opened up. Four days after window opening, I hopped onto the SCSU wob-site in an attempt to locate classes for my second to last semester and loe - there were none. "Hwat?", says you, "but you should have a much sooner window than everyone else! You've been going there since time began!" - Why yes young grasshopper, but SCSU lacks business sense.

With further frustration I began going through the entire course catalog attempting to locate professor's so that I could petition for overrides into their classes. My dismay grew with every "ding" from FireFox notifying me that there were no courses. I finally tracked it down, and out of the sixteen management electives - only seven were being offered this semester. That's right, only 43% of the courses were actually being offered. One of the four management core classes was even being offered only once during the daytime. Something had to be wrong, I thought to myself - but alas, I was wrong in thinking that they were wrong.

I met with the chairperson this morning and found the terrible truth - SCSU actually only runs half of its management electives every semester. Wonderously fantabulous! Despite this, I've managed to get my needed four classes this semester but with the absolute most terrible schedule ever imagined - a night class, an 8A and a noon class all fall on the same day. Oi.

So, if I'm a little grumpy during the Spring - you'll know why. With all luck , diligence and SCSU fighting I'll be able to finish this Summer though.

Update - Whole New Levels of Professionalism

It appears that the issues I was having with the SCSU registration web-site earlier this week were just a precursor. Tonight they broke the authentication portion of the site and nobody (myself and two other people, at least) seems to be able to login. Bravo boys, this is your outward facing PR representation that collects thousands of dollars from people - and you can't handle something so simple as a login page. Oi.

Weekend Update: The Diablo II Edition
November 25, 2007

Mike ended up having to work yesterday so there was no Dungeons and Dragons this weekend - instead I was apparently supposed to go up to Miniature Tonka Ville and hang out with James and Andy. Alas, I slept late and totally didn't realize our plans - but all was not lost! For you see, we are connected by a series of interconnecting tubes through which data and kittens flow!

When we made the giant Draz head a few weekends back, James introduced me to Skype. It looked like an interesting program so I decided to give it a shot to establish some voice chats with James. Skype lets you essentially use VOIP for Internet to Internet calls for free which seemed like quite an offer. With the recent discovery that my 360 headset worked with my PC, I was quite excited to give voice chats a go.

Anyway; A few hours later and James and I were off playing through Diablo II (circa 2000 baby!) complete with voice chat. Good fun was had rescuing [C|K]ane from the evil clutches of Diablo's minions. Somewhere around 2100 we decided to call the quits so that I could get other work around the house done, but all told we probably spent at least three hours with some delicious click-festive action. Om noms!

So this weekend has been happily split amongst Mario Galaxy, DDO (download the trial client already James!) and Diablo II. What have you guys been playing this weekend?

Wii picture referenced because Diablo II on the Wii would rock my socks until they became locks.

What's In Your Queue?
November 12, 2007

Sorry guys, I'm just finding it incredibly hard to find time to write lately. This morning my unread count in Google Reader is up around 4,000. That's a lot of stuff. Even before that there's the group projects for class, all the papers, exams, the new Genshiken series and oh the new monitor that's set to arrive today. So much to do... so little time. I haven't even been able to upload the pictures from our last Dungeons and Dragons session including the giant Draz head. Oi.

Originally this was an excuse post, but my browsing of Dtoid got me thinking about how many damned video games I have queued up to play over the coming month or so. With so many great games coming out (and that have come out) in recent times I thought a list would be in order!

This week I ask, what's in your game queue? For me the rather long list includes...

• Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
• Halo 3
• Half-Life 2: Episode 2
• Persona 3
• Beautiful Katamari
• Assassin's Creed
• Zach and Wiki
• Mass Effect
• Super Mario Galaxy
• Hellgate London
• Conan
• Eternal Sonata
• Contra 4

So, what are you jonesing to play over the coming months of delicious almost obese portions of gaming delight?

Incoming Toy!
November 06, 2007

After a long week or so of debating with myself, I've finally decided to buy myself a nice new BenQ FP222WH widescreen monitor. What finally kicked me in the nuts and made me do it? Well, part of what was holding me back is my current dual monitor setup. With another monitor added to the party, that means that I would have to get rid of one of my existing LCDs and nobody I know has a need for one. Then I was talking with my Dad when I happened to mention that I was looking to let one go. Surprisingly, he was more than happy to take it from me. Couple that with my still unspent birthday money (really, besides these sorts of things the only 'fun' things I buy are video games and God I have so many queued up).

My humble Newegg has kindly informed me that my new treasure will be arriving on Thursday, so if I disappear for the next few days you can begin praying that my Xbox doesn't get Red Ringed and my computer doesn't melt into a ball of silicon and toxic chemicals.

Picture courtesy of Newegg. Of course.

When Do You Let Go of Your Dreaming?
October 25, 2007

As I was watching Moyashimon last night I realized something; I'm 24 and watching a show about a guy who can see germs. When I was a wee little lad, I always thought sadly of the days that I would give up my Stormtroopers and watching GI-Joe as somewhere in my early teens but that time never really came. Sure, I stopped playing with action figures and truly fantasizing the way that I used to as a kid, but I realized last night that I've never really let go of the part of me that fantasizes and dreams. I still watch TV shows starring giant robots and magical creatures, I still play video games and become totally engrossed in epic completely-impossible stories, I still love miniatures of sci-fi soldiers and read books with mostly pictures. Heck, I even still have the same unhealthy obsession with rescuing Princess Zelda that I've had since the 80's.

My friends and I still get together every weekend or so to play Dungeons and Dragons together and we give it as much gusto as I'd like to admit here. I almost considered bowing out of this last campaign because everything in my life is just so busy right now - but I didn't. I chose not to because I realized that this might be among the last chances in my life to do such a thing. What are the odds of finding a group of people like Draz, Andy, James and Mike so close to each other again? What are the odds of finding others like us, who haven't stopped dreaming and still have the vivid imaginations that we had as kids imagining that we're romping through a dungeon questing for cake?

I guess that I just hope I don't stop dreaming anytime soon.

Dungeons and Dragons This Weekend
October 19, 2007

Just to preemptively start this thread up, since I know that the Still Alive thread would otherwise be hijacked... this weekend it would appear that Dungeons and Dragons will be held down here in St. Cloud on Saturday. I wonder if Mike has weighed in on his work schedule yet... will Babbles be fed cake? Or will Cole get to look on in horror as the Gnome on stilts falls over again?

Birfday Fun Wrapup
October 16, 2007

So I've finally got a few minutes here this morning while praying that the dog doesn't wake up and beg me to walk him. This weekend ended up being quite enjoyable. We had pizza and such at the office on Friday where a half-order of Jalepenos turned into a double-order - which guaranteed me far more than my fair share of tasty pizza. Saturday was good fun with my father making tasty ribs for lunch and Emily taking me out to Sakura for delicious sushi. Andy took me out to The Original Pancake House on Sunday before our Dungeons and Dragons session (which was very good btw Andy) where they brought out a tasty desert soufle instead of singing and marching half-assed around our table. Quite nice.

As you can see by my gamer profile there on the side (which I hacked together using some CSS and a sexy cronjob) - I've also got some new games to play as a result of not dying for 24 years. Halo 3 is actually ending up being a much more entertaining romp than I was expecting, even causing me to eschew and wait a bit on Portal et al. My parents also bought me a nice new LED flashlight which is enchanted with relatively infinite charges of Blinding Lumen Emission.

All in all, quite a lovely birthday. Thanks everyone!

Birthday This Weekend
October 12, 2007

While I'm quite certain that I wasn't adopted, this is the only cat which adequately represents birthdays. One might even call him "birthday cat" instead of "adoption cat". Anyway, I'm fairly certain that I turn 24 this year and I'm starting to see how everything starts rolling up like a huge Katamari - which I will surely be playing with in the coming weeks, since Beautiful Katamari comes out on the 15th.

What fun have I had this year? Well, I started what was a fairly successful site about cats, I finally got back into gaming, celebrated our 1 year anniversary with my lovely wife, I started actually doing well in my major, I moved twice, I started playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends, watched an anime that none of my friends have seen beyond the intro (Hachimitsu to Kuroba) and drank a whole lot of coffee. On the whole, a nice little slice of life. In the coming year I should finally graduate from college which will be such a relief that it is expressible in quantities of kittens in a single bowl with a radius of exactly 121 centimeters and measuring 300 centimeters deep.

What am I doing this weekend in its honor, you may ask? I have no idea. Frankly, this week has seen two tests two group meetings and a shitton of work at real-work. I haven't the foggiest clue.

Holy Busy Batman!
October 09, 2007

These last few days have been incredibly impossibly busy for me. In between the new 360, school and this last weekend's D&D session which got me home around 01:30A on a Sunday - I'm totally beat. Hopefully I'll make some new postings this evening, but even that's suspect since I've disassembled my office and am using my poor neglected laptop to type this up. Oi.

Oh, I did get the 360 to talk to Windows Media Player too. 'Tis quite nice to finally have decent music access in the living room.

Sick on A Caturday, Happy Birthday Mike!
September 15, 2007

So, I'm sick today. It kind of sucks, but shit happens. I managed to get sick at James' during last weekend's D&D session. A shame, in its own right, but James, Andy, Draz and even Ryoseth (who caught it by empathy, since he wasn't there) managed to get sick. Ouch. I was down on Monday but got better over the week. Little did I know that it would kick my pants last night. My throat's in terrible shape and it sucks.

Today I was supposed to go to Plymouth to celebrate Mike A's birthday with lunch at Red Robin, but this has obviously prevented that. Sucks. Oh well. We'll get together next weekend for some sort of tastiness before D&D. Anyway, Happy Birthday Mike A! May you continue to increase your laser discharging for many years to come.

Lunch With David Yields a Link Crawler
August 31, 2007

I had tasty lunch with David at the China Restaurant yesterday. It was good to see an old friend that I met on the Internet ages ago. Hopefully sometime soon I'll get to see his babby.

Anyway, he mentioned that he was in need of a link crawler while at lunch yesterday. As we all know, I have trouble resisting psuedo-challenges like that... and oh look. What's this? Could it be? A garbage file? Put there by none other than Elingson's elite sysadmin... oh, what's this? Is this the secret bank account that the money was stashed in? Oh, I think it is. Man. You know, I kind of feel like God...

Oh, wait... sorry. Really and truly, it would appear as though rather than my usual night of BioShock and/or Metroid Prime: 3 I tore myself away to write some code. Well David, here's your link crawler! It's not heavily tested or terribly robust, but it runs against a handful of test sites and I think it does exactly what you described.

Update - 2007/10/02

I've published a bazaar repository for this project. You can find information and an updated version of this file at this posting.

Married for One Year!
August 24, 2007

So, this coming Sunday is Emily and I's first anniversary of being married. We'll be going up to Duluth to enjoy ourselves and celebrate our year together.

Here's to another wonderful year. I love you Emily.

D&D Weekend: Part Deux!
August 20, 2007

We ended up holding this weekend's Dungeons and Dragons session at my place this weekend - and it was definitely an utter blast. Andy, Draz, and James showed up somewhere around 03:30P to indulge in tasty grilled chicken goodness and begin setting up. We managed to cram everyone around my kitchen table and Babbles even stayed away!

After it started raining I ran around shutting windows and noticed someone outside... loe! It was Cole! Mike ended up having to work later, so he sent Cole along ahead in order to discover that my doorbell didn't work. Oh wells, he was soaked but quickly dried off. We gots to the gaming and ended up seeing Rip again stalking us first in a trash can and then in a stilted-Sneaky-King costume that created for some fun antics from Andy.

Around 07:00P Mike showed up and we began wanting for food. Emily happened to be in St. Cloud and stopped at the C of the Oborn's and picked up some tasty sausages which I grilled once she was home. All this done on the last batch of charcoal! Thank goodness I didn't run out...

We meandered about a bit doing this and that (discussing jeweled rats) before being summoned to the palace to meet with the king's chancellor. There was talk of our heroic deeds in stopping Gnomish expedition day until that palace's defensive crystal failed with many flailing rats having thrust their anti-magic crystal tails into the powering crystal. Some giant owl-battling later (and Mike saving my character's abysmally unlucky self from a grappling owl) and a giant Gnomish Airavan came plowing into the top level of the tower! Emblazened alongside it was none-other-than the insignia of Professor Burnsides, our gnomish bard's uncle who led us to the Laboratory fight in the first place!

Well, Leo was looking for some payback but was able to deliver. Gnomes came pouring out wearing explosive barrels ready to attack. Taruenn and I struggled out from under the Airavan and found that the gnomes were threatening our poor bard. After a little deliberation, Leo took out the gnomes and we all jumped to our impending death hoping that Mike's featherfall would save us. Luckily for us, it did. (Oh sure, Owyn had fancy magical doo-dads on him Mr. Fancy pants McFancyton)

We collected ourselves on the surface only to find a giant case fall near us. A familiar case it was. One that Taurenn recognized as having given him an eery glow and caused hair loss. The draconium box! Now outfitted with a timer we raced to disarm what was presumed to be a bomb.

11:52 left and we did it! The timer turned off and we started dusting ourselves off wondering where we'd go next. Suddenly there was a giant explosion and Draz informed us that we were all dead and saw a cat on a keyboard floating in space. Apperently, we had simply disabled the timer display... but no the bomb. Oops!

Anyway, great fun was had by all. I'm definitely looking forward to our next session. Yae for geeky fun!

D&D Weekend!
August 06, 2007

So, yesterday was another session of our (now semi)regular Dungeons and Dragons meeting. This weekend we delivered a chest full of irradiated Draconium to a Gnomish lab, watched it get carted off by kobolds and then spent the rest of the evening trying to figure out a way out (gnomes make good fore-weights). Oh, Andy's character may have also been inadvertently elected mayor of a small town which eventually burned itself to the ground. Oops!

Anyway, much fun was had and we are all already planning the next meeting. Hopefully this next Sunday we will get to meet again and discover what ever happened to Uncle Burnsides (and Lio needs his payment!). It will also be doubly interesting to see how Taurenn deals with the Gnome who turned him in to the city guard for smuggling a barrel of highly-explosive Gnomish gunpowder into the town.

This Weekend's LAN Party and a Grill
July 16, 2007

This weekend's LAN party turned out quite well. I got up early to make sure that the cooler was filled with salted ice-water (incidentally there was still ice in it 24h later) I went down to St. Cloud to meet up with Andy and pickup our requisite foodstuffs. We made a quick pit-stop over at the Target to pickup ourselves a nice little charcoal grill so that we could have tasty grilled hamburgers. Indeed, the grill output quite tasty hamburgers at the hands of Mr. Andy. James showed up around 03:30P and setup began.

The requisite file sharing (I buy sausage) commenced and much anime and flash animations flowed over my network. We then quickly began sharing our latest network findings, Vista tweaks and other goodies. Then, it became time for our stomachs to begin grumbling as we were all quite hungry.

We exited my dark and imposing office to assemble my newest possession and then proceeded to build fire. It took several tries before we determined the correct amount of lighter fluid but we eventually got it and flames erupted nicely. Burgers and brats were grilled and tastiness was had by all.

After filling our bellies with tasty fire-cooked meat we proceeded to get to the gaming. We started off with a few rounds of Halo 2 where Andy turned off all weapons but the pistol (some of you may have heard of this common arrangement for Quake3 tournaments) and I was quickly bored. Halo's movements are entirely too unresponsive for me, having grown up on ID Software's twitchy shooters I'm used to being able to flip around and back in a nanosecond - so my constant need to watch my back always ended up netting me a pistol in the face.

The fun didn't start until we setup a nice Warthog fun-time. Overshields, max health and a whole lot'a Warthog carnage commenced. We had great fun over the course of three maps, but then we were pooped out.

We then moved on to NeverWinter Nights which was met with much sadness. You see, our favorite LAN game of old has become too long in the tooth to work anymore. We had immense issues getting the networking to work and I had a weird issue where my character could jump all the way across the map in a split second. We gave up, defeated.

We played through a fair amount of Quake 2 before finally settling on our game of choice for the night... We settled on one of the best games evar. For all of the thousands of dollars of super-up-to-date computing monstrosities we ended up playing an old classic from circa 1993. What was it? None other than Doom.

We fought our way through the UAC's Mars research facility and into the very jaws of hell before becoming fatigued. We finished up our final file transfers (I buy sausage) and then called it a night.

Great fun was had by all. Thank you Andy and James for coming down for such a good time.

Weekend LAN'ing
July 13, 2007

This weekend will be a very special and fun-filled weekend indeed. Why is that? Saturday marks the first LAN party to be held in our new place! James is coming down from ze Maple Grove area and Andy's hauling his compie out to my place to put some nice testing into the house's wiring systems. Let's hope everything goes as planned!

We're planning on playing some Halo 2, Neverwinter Nights, Co-Op Doom or Quake, Cossacks and possibly rocking it with a little Command and Conquer 3. I'll be making up some tasty hamburgers and much fun will be had.

Draz, sorry. Much like Guantanamo on the Bush News Network, Apple won't be showing you this in its ads. You see, John Hodgman's alter-ego is really Hulk Hogan. Hogan smash. Hogan SMAAAAASH frail little Mac boy. Then Hogan drink beer and smaaaash more. Then Hogan get sleepy. Then Hogan think you girl. Hogan tell you sweater look nice. Hogan offer buy you soda. Bring you cup bring you ice. Then hogan smaaAAaash. Then Hogan go to Korea and play Starcraft while jamming on his air guitar of coolness+1.

My Top Ten Favorite Computer Games
July 12, 2007

Roger Johansson over at 456 Berea Street recently put up a list of his top ten favorite computer games. Since this is a subject very near and dear to my heart, I decided that I would participate as well only to realize just how difficult it is to whittle down to your favorite ten video games. I've cheated a bit, and counted sequels and originals as one entry for the sheer fact that sequels are so frequently a continuation of the original game. Without further ado, here it be!

• Diablo I & II
• Doom 1
• Super Metroid (only here because of emulation!)
• Half-Life 1 & 2 & Episode 1

• Commander Keen
• Quake 1 & 2
• Cossacks 1 (Cossacks 2 was a buggy piece of crap)
• Homeworld
• Dawn of War + Its Expansions
• Warcraft II

This was quite a difficult list to make. Honorable mentions include the Command & Conquer series, Oblivion, Quake 3, Quake 4, Doom 3, Counter-Strike, Rage of Mages, Super Cat Petter 2000, Warcraft I, Deus Ex, Big Red Racing, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem and Defender for ye olde Apple IIe. Many fond memories are brought forth by all of these games and I'm very excited to be playing a few of them this weekend with James and Andy!

So guys, what's your top ten list look like? Remember, these are computer games not console games. I fudged with emulation because Super Metroid happens to be my second favorite game of all time. Andy and Draz - you guys have a blag, so put it up there and I'll give you guys a linkback to your wobsite!

Update

Draz responded to the call for great video games! He's posted his own top ten computer games over at Baddisk. Go read it now! Oregon Trail definitely deserves mention. "You have killed 1,000,000lbs of food but can only carry 5lbs.".

2nd Update

Andy responded to the call for great video games! Alas, he was not blessed with one of these twiddly complicated things that we know of as computers during his youth. Thus, he has posted his Top Ten Console Games. I am slightly perturbed by the fact that Andy owned a NES and a SNES but never any Zelda games.

Moving In...
July 02, 2007

Well, we moved in yesterday. I've got plenty to keep me busy over the next couple days, so don't expect any updates.

What you can expect though is better availability and speed with this site. Why's that? Jesse's boys from Citescape came down to hook up service this morning and loe, I has Internets. I even kicked in the tires with a little Quake4 run and the lag is definitely better than with Charter. Now, to really test it and download the latest Ubuntu release via BitTorrent.

Nothing New, Really...
June 19, 2007

The farm soon cometh. Emily and I are counting down the days until July 1st when we move, so my entire life is basically consumed by packing. When I'm not packing, I'm busy trying to figure out which box Babbles got packed in... the office is totally packed except for the networking core and of course my main rig. I've also got the living room and hallway areas packed up from all the nick-nacks. Next up are the non-essentials from the kitchen and bathroom. Joy for packing!

What's new? Well, David's wife should have popped out her baby by now. Hopefully Mr. All of Her Berlin will enjoy rousing rounds of Counter-Strike and Warioware with his daddy. I am estimating roughly six weeks before he has a Wii-mote strapped to his back and David's trying to get it to connect to the sensor bar.

I've been playing Halo 2 a lot, especially now that I found the graphics detail setting. I'm happy with my $50 purchase. Happy like a fox. Multiplayer's pretty fun, if you can find a game. I counted seven populated servers last night - two of which were password protected. Oi. Also, did you see? Geometry Wars has been released over Steam. Damn, I gotta get me some of that.

I also found a nifty way to make home-made salad dressing even easier... use a cocktail shaker! I like to use half olive oil, balsamic vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon each of salt, pepper, dill, garlic powder and lemon juice. White wine goes good too!

Until next time... KITTIES! Yes Draz, I will soon have something ready for you to assist me in tagging these super-mega-kawaii creatures.

Keeping Me Away...
June 13, 2007

Some extremely important personal matters have been keeping me away from this blog. Those of you closest to me know what I'm talking about. Anyway, things are looking up in that regard so I should be able to start posting again soon.

A Long Weekend
June 04, 2007

So, this was a very long weekend indeed. Friday was spent packing and cleaning but was otherwise totally uneventful. Only a brief lull before the weekend actually began.

Saturday though! O glorious thou art! E. and I made our way to the great grove of Maples (apparently folks around there consider "Large Sprawling Suburban Housing Complexes" to be Maples. Go figure) in order to attend Andy's honorific graduation party. Much fun was had getting to hang out with Andy and friends.

Even Mike A. showed up to the party bearing a green laser pointer with all the safeties removed. It was great delight to draw black dots on James and then hit him up with the tingley (apparently it felt like an IV insertion) green concentrated photon emitter. Draz was there to make fun of people and receive comments on his shiny head of course. Sadly, we left before we got to see James partake in tippie-cup.

Oh yes, there were also tasty margaritas. Rather than the traditional Tequila, Cointreau and Lime Juice Mix - Andy's mom used Lime-aid (I think it was), beer and Tequila. It was an interesting mildly carbonated, though far less alcoholic than I would have liked, tasty bit 'o goodness. Then there was of course the taco bar. Mmm. Tasty tacos. Oh, this was after E. and I ate at Famous Dave's for 1st dinner. Tasty chopped BBQ pork was had by us.

Sunday I slept until around noon and then E. and I went out shopping for some pots and some sort of Clint Eastwood collection. Alas, St. Cloud is devoid of any sort of real media outlet and the Clint Eastwood collection quest was met with failure. Oh well, perhaps E. will find that link helpful. There was also a special about pirates on the History channel. Sadly, I didn't get to see much of it before I was instructed that I had to shower.

So um... ya. I need a nap.

Trent Reznor, You 'Da Man
May 24, 2007

So, it appears as though Trent Reznor is none too happy with his label. It's nice to hear a big artist who's angry with the way Big Media is today. Of course, Trent's always been keen to catch on to the ebbing of the market. Remember when he did the Quake sound-track? That was good stuff.

I had a chance to talk with the life-partner of someone high-up in the BMG foodchain over the last weekend. They really do believe that copyright violation is theft. However, it's only theft if its their content. It's ok if its happy birthday or copyrighted church propaganda.

So, when was the last time that you bought anything from the *IAAs of the world? I'm at three years now. Thankfully my media interests provide me with a wealth of other sources for media that don't involve those lumbering beasts.

I'm Alive!
May 15, 2007

I am alive, don't worry. I've just been super busy with tidying up post-school affairs and mapping out the Summer. I hope to get back to work on Caturday on Rails soon and get something workable running.

I also ran across a decent WPM measure. Rather than random garbage, it actually uses real text. I scored a 131 wpm @ 553 cpm. What are your guys' scores?

Congratulations Andy!
May 10, 2007

Congratulations to Andy on finishing yet another semester as SCSU. What's so special about this semester? It's his last! Congratulations my dear sir!

Enjoy the life of a Public Relations / Marketing dude! Also, enjoy your ability to generate your own public relations by this lovely photo.

Picture Very Related - No more ramen for Andy!

Almost Done!
May 10, 2007

I'm almost done with the semester. It's so close that I can taste it... I've already gotten a 96% in my BCIS class, a solid B in my FIRE class, probably close to an 85% in my MKTG and probably over 90% in my MGMT.

There will be a bigger post about my MKTG class once the semester's finally over. I can't wait!

Oh, there are some new cats.

Picture Unrelated

Andy, Eat the Cat Already
April 13, 2007

Thank you for the source picture Draz. Much appreciated. Andy, we only do this because we love you.

Anyway. Breakfast time. Watashi wa Babbles wo tabete imasu.

Long Time No Post
March 13, 2007

So, it's time to make another one of these postings. It's been awhile since I've posted regularly, and I apologize. Our server went down at work at the beginning of February and I've been running around like a chicken without a head. Every waking moment (except in school of course!) has been spent getting everything together and cleaned up. We've got a box at a backup location right now serving up requests until I can track down another Colo host.

My BCIS class can be characterized quite simply as Asok sitting in a room filled with PHBs lead by one Extreme PHB who thinks, and continually reassures us, that "connecting to a database is hard". He accepts the book's over-simplified definitions of things and completely ignores trivialities like IEEE specs and official RFCs. This is why I can never work in a large corporation. Seriously, I despise going to this class. It has become the bane of my existence, but I will someday overcome it.

Thursday I get my MGMT test back, so it will be a very interesting day. This is one class where I have /absolutely/ no idea how I'm doing - since everything is subjective and this will be our first graded assignment. Let's hope I did well, eh?

In food-land, I discovered that splitting a chicken in half, jamming it down onto a cookie sheet (With sides Son Choy! With sides! I can hear Andy now...) and spreading it Paprika+Salt+Pepper+Cayenne Pepper+Garlic makes it far more tasty and crispy. Just an FYI.

Dijital Majik, Seriously Guys.
March 02, 2007

This afternoon the PSU fan in one of our non-critical server fans began to fail - making the telltale whirring and buzzing of a fan whose on its last legs. We meandered down to good old MinCo and waited awhile for a salesman to get to us to ring us out, and I mean awhile. After a good 25 minutes of watching them waltz by we gave up and headed towards Best Buy. Here we were faced with a $50 no-name brand and thought, "What the hell... we're right next to Dijital Majik, let's give 'em another try". Man. I wish we hadn't.

We walked in to find at least five guys sitting behind the counter salivating for a sale. One walks out and asks if he can help us find anything. "An ATX power supply", I say. "What size?", says he. "Uh... ATX.". We walk over to where they have the power supplies and loe, there is one choice. 450Watts of COMPLETELY no-name brand power. I had never seen the brand in my life. I ask if they have anything less and he tries to hand me a PSU for a mini-ATX. I laugh, one of the guys behind the counter says "No, you don't want that one". I ask him if there's a smaller one... "Oh no, you see... power supplies are all a bit different. Just because it says its 450W doesn't mean it is, it is definitely less. This aint no Cooler Master or Antec.". "Well, I only need a 300W - it can't vary by 150W."... either way, they only had one brand so we went ahead and bought it.

Here's where the fun comes in. The rest was typical computer store salesman bullshit. I popped open the package and began installing the PSU only to notice one glaring problem. The warranty seal on the PSU was broken. Now, anybody whose anybody knows - YOU DON'T OPEN A POWER SUPPLY. So I have our Office Manager contact them about a return and the salesman tries to offer an explanation... "Oh, it was probably part of our Quality Assurance Testing.". ... ... ... WHOAH there. One need not /open/ a box that says "DON'T OPEN ME UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES" to make sure that it works and then try to sell it to a customer. No. You apply power and test leads for voltage. FOLLOWED BY NOT SELLING THAT ONE AS NEW.

Keep in mind, these are the same guys who a little over a year ago told me "Oh no, they stopped making wired NICs a long time ago. It's all wireless now.". What's sad is that when they first opened they had very knowledgeable and savvy employees - it's just all gone way downhill.

Happy Birthday Emily!
March 01, 2007

Today is Emily's birthday. Everyone wish her a happy birthday! Sadly, there will be no kittens popping out of cakes. There will however, be a Babbles sitting in the sink - that is, until we turn on the water and scream "HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMILY!" and witness the cat tearing across the apartment towards her!

The Blizzard Fizzles!
March 01, 2007

It appears as though the "massive" storm that was to bring us 12 to 20 inches of snow has fizzled into nothing more than a little bit of haze. It figures, I get excited for my first really big snow storm - and then there's nothing. I don't even think we accumulated an extra inch overnight. Bah.

The Blizzard Attacks!
February 28, 2007

So, we're supposed to be getting a massive blizzard here in Minnesota over the next 24 hours. They're forecasting between 12 and 20 inches - and I'm excited. I've never seen that much snow before. There's even the threat of work being canceled - gasp.

Of course, school won't be canceled. SCSU doesn't cancel for anything. Of course, the administration building will be closed and no professors will show up - but school will still be in session and we'll have to come to see the posting on the door.

Warioparty Tonight!
February 23, 2007

So, Andy's hosting a Warioparty tonight! Sadly, David's already canceled - so it looks like it'll just be Me, Andy and his Room-mates. Oh well. It will still be fun. Our traditional weekend dinner will be followed up by a necessary Cub run. What fun is a get together without Pocky? We will then probably retire to Andy's peaceful living room for some joyous Warioware entertainment. First Floor Ap't == Ability to Jump Around Alot. I can't wait to try the jumping game while actually being able to jump.

Let's just hope that I don't suck at it as much this time around. :)

Happy Birthday Andy!
February 21, 2007

This day many many years ago in a galaxy far far away, Andy was born. The world was better. But then one fateful day, it was foggy and on November 21st 2000, he saw these two guys. They started making trouble in his neighborhood. He got in one little fight and his Mom got scared, you're moving with James and Mike in St. Cloud. Well he whistled for a cab and when it came near, the license plate said Deutche and there was lefse i nthe mirror. If anything he could, "this cab was rare" - but he thought "No sir. Erase this from my memory. Bring me home to St. Cloud!". He pulled up to the apartment about seven or eight and he yelled to the cabbie, "Thank you for the ride. Here is your money.". He looked at his apartment he was finally there, to sit in his living room playing Halo with Chris.

Happy President's Day!
February 19, 2007

Happy President's Day everyone! I'm celebrating by studying for my FIRE exam this afternoon. Oh joy of joys!

ING Updates
February 17, 2007

So, I've been with ING almost two months now and I wanted to give an update. They're simply phenomenal. For the last five years I've /wasted/ so much money by leaving it in a traditional bank that it's amazing. The 4.5%APR beats the pants off of any brick'n'mortar that will give me an ambiguous 0.04% something rate. On $3,000 (which is what I had in there at one time) in Wells Fargo I'm lucky to earn more than 51c in a month with their second-to-best plan. Of course, I can lose that in a heart-beat if I (for instance) have to draw tuition money and go below $2,000 in that account in order to incur.... CHARGES-ARGES-ARGES-arges.

ING's transfers are painless and usually take less than one week to complete. Then, the money's happily sitting in its new home actually accruing interest to combat inflation. So, joyous day - ING has gotten me happily saving!

No Updates?
February 09, 2007

No updates happened this week. Sorry. Our collocated server developed some massive routing issues that have kept me on my toes running all week long. Arf.

You Know You're a Programmer When...
January 24, 2007

So, I woke up this morning from a dream about writing some code.