Thanksgiving Break

Now that I'm feeling well enough and Thanksgiving break is over, let me try to recap:

Wednesday (11-22-06)
We ordered a ton of Chinese food at work for lunch and I of course ate too much. I left work a little early at about 3PM so I could get a head start on my drive to my parent's house in Derby (map).

My brother already had plans for us to go to Old Town in Wichita for a pub crawl with proceeds going to some charity for Lou Gehrig's Disease. The idea was to go to each bar and get a new playing card. The top 3 best Poker hands won some prize. We went to several bars: The Pump House (map), Heroes (map), Loft 150 (map), Kelly's Irish Pub (map), Club Indigo (map), and that's all I can remember (seems like there may have been one more). Ryan had a full house but everyone was cheating and the winning hand was 5 aces so he didn't win anything.

All went normal except for when we got back to Clint's. Let's just say Riz somehow got left behind in Old Town and fights and cops ensued.

Thursday (11-23-06)
Thanksgiving Day! It was a pretty laid back day. Even though we already had a ton of mashed potatoes, I decided that we needed cheesy potatoes so I whipped up a batch of those. We just played it low key with the immediate family + Grandpa Peters having Thanksgiving dinner at my parent's house. The food was really good and Grandpa stuck around and we played a few games of Pitch.

Friday (11-24-06)
Dad, Megan, Ryan, and I went and saw Borat. Wow! The movie was really funny. However, I could have definitely done without all of the male nudity. I think Dad, Ryan, and Megan would agree.

We watched KU beat Ball State on the parents' HD LCD. It was a pretty low-scoring-boring game and I was worried how we would face #1 Florida the next night. Oh well, at least we won.

Later that night, Ryan and I went over to Vinnie's girlfriend, Amy's place. Just hung out and played Battle of the Sexes. I can't remember who won but I know that I embarrassed myself by knowing one too many answers to female related trivial.

Saturday (11-25-06)
Rotating my tires on the P-Finder was way overdue, so Dad and I took care of this early Saturday morning. We also washed it along with Mom's car.

I took my brother and Grant to A J Sports Grill (map) to watch the highly anticipated KU vs. #1 Florida game. There was a ton of people there: Matt, Buddy, Don, Hannah, Hollie, Jordan, Romer, Jones, Marsh, Tina, Kelly and her friends, etc. (I'm sure I'm missing some people). This was a much more exciting game and went into OT where we won the game!!!!

After the game we ended up going to Mulligan's (map) and then to the Finn's for after hours.

Sunday (11-26-06)
I woke up early with my throat hurting like crazy. I thought it was because I was yelling so much when watching the game.

Grandma and Grandpa Kraus came over for brunch at 11:00AM. It was really good but I was interrupted by a customer who's production system was down. This took some time and I had to facilitate this for a couple hours of the early afternoon.

I left at around 2PM and picked up Grant to head back to Overland Park.

...Towards the end of the night, throat still hurting.

Monday (11-27-06)
Woke up absolutely miserable: throat hurting, cough, achy, argh! I went to work for about an hour and then had to leave. Spent the rest of the day resting and trying to get better.

Today (11-28-06)
Still trying to get better. Hopefully I'll be able to go to work tomorrow.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Wish List

My mom asked me to put together a wish list for Christmas for her so here I go:

• USB Flash Drive
• at least 1GB
• preferably a little loop on the end so it can be used with a lanyard or key chain
• the end also needs to be protected by retraction or a tight cap
• good deal on 2GB Kingston: http://slickdeals.net/?permadeal=8394#direct_deal_8394
• Muffin tin (shut up)
• A couple pots (I only have one)
• Plates (I only have a few)
• Nice potato peeler
• Calendar ideas:
• Family Guy
• Simpsons
• Shiba Inu (http://www.dogdecor.com/shiba-inu-calendar.html)
• Angels & Demons (Book)
• The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (book)
• Over the ear headphones
• the better brands seems to be Sennheiser, JVC, and Logitech
• This is an example of Sennheiser. Although these are more than $100 cheaper than anywhere else, they're still a little pricey. This is just an example of the style I want
• Family Guy - Season/Volume 4 on DVD
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy box set (widescreen and has to be the extended editions)
• Shiba Inu stuff from http://www.dogstuff.com/advanced_search_result.html?keyword=shiba+inu&search_in_description=1
• photo frame
• security sign
• bumper sticker
• The pet hair Dyson (purple DC17) - http://www.amazon.com/Dyson-103-DC17-Animal/dp/B000I5REVA/sr=8-1/qid=1164038187/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-3640928-5483803?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden - hey, at least I tried :)

If I can think of anything else, I'll add it.

Finally Outta Beta!

I'm finally at the point with this website where it's stable enough for others to look at it. The site evolved from a bunch of random stuff I've been doing over the years. I've compiled everything together into what I like to call a "hybrid blog". It is also a really good arena for me to work on my memory skills which are definitely nothing to brag about.

A few highlights about the site:

• Run a real time report about my movies.
• Look at my picture gallery.
• View my blog entries in the center column.
• Click links within the blog entries to have the Google Map in the right sidebar update to reflect the clicked location.
• Search for your own locations on the search bar below the map and take advantage of the results (switch between map, hybrid, and satellite, get directions from that location, etc.)
• Use the search box in the right side column to search my blog, the web, videos, news, and all blogs. The results will be dynamically displayed in the middle column without page reload via AJAX. Change between the tabs to get your search results in the different domains.
• A list of different RSS feeds that I am tracking.
• Add comments about each individual blog entry.

What I have yet to do:

• Fix the style of the search results to better match the rest of the site.
• Integrate my Google Calendar as a page on the site.
• Add links to the RSS feeds for the blog and picture gallery piece.
• Add links in the right side bar for the different labels (you can currently see the labels at the bottom of the blog entries).
• Add a subtitle for the site.
• Finally finish uploading and sorting all of the pictures from European trip.

I've been posting for a couple of months, but the main page will only show the latest 10 posts. You can look at the older ones by accessing the archives in the right sidebar.

Best SI Cover Ever

Parental Visit

My parents and brother drove up from Derby (map) on Saturday and got here at about noon. Then, my sister, Megan, came up from Lawrence. Friday was her 19th birthday and Saturday night was a thing with Megan's sorority for Fathers where they were going to Dave & Buster's (map). So, that's basically why everyone came up to my apartment.

When Megan came up, we all (Myself, Mom, Dad, Ryan, Dennis, Megan P., and Megan M.) decided to go to the Elephant Bar for lunch. It was pretty good, and I had what I usually get, The Smokehouse:

I usually have to squish the chicken breast, ham, bacon, onion ring sandwich to even fit it in my mouth.

Then, my mom and the Megan's went shopping at Oak Park Mall (map). My dad, Dennis, Ryan, and I watched Click while they were gone. I wasn't really expecting that much, so it wasn't that bad. I'll probably never watch it again, but it was worth watching the first time.

Later that night, Megan and dad went to Dave & Buster's while Megan, my mom, and I watched KU beat the shit out of Northern Arizona. I'm so excited about this season. Rush and Wright are freaking amazing and the freshman Collins and Arthur have been real impressive. We basically chilled for the rest of the night.

In the morning, we went and ate breakfast at First Watch (map). Megan and I have been trying to go for the last two years in both KC and Lawrence but the wait is always so long that we end up going to Micky D's or IHOP or something. Anyways, I had The Works Omelette and breakfast was pretty good. Afterwards we went and picked up my brother and Dennis' and went back to my apartment and mom cut my hair. They left shortly after.

All in all, it was good to see the whole family and we had a good time.

Mo 'Puters, Mo Problems

What they say is true, "mo 'puters, mo problems". Ever since I got my laptop, I have had nothing but problems. At least the problems were not with the laptop itself though.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the wireless Internet connection wasn't working for shit. So, yesterday, I decided to cough up the 50 buck and by a new router. I got the linksys WRT54G:

It plugged in and worked pretty quickly. The wireless connection to my laptop was fast and constant. Now, the next thing I wanted to do was enable file and print sharing so that I could easily pull files off of my desktop and use the printer that is hooked to my desktop from my laptop. This ended up being much more of headache than anticipated.

The idea of setting up file and print sharing is really easy. You basically run the Windows network wizard and specify the same workgroup for all computers involved. I did this about eight times and still nothing would work. After many hours of banging my head and trying to figure out what the problem was, I found that my netBIOS service was not running. netBIOS is required in the LAN for file and print sharing. There was something corrupted with it and when I ran "nbtstat -n", it indicated that it could not be loaded. Usually, you would see a NetBIOS Local Name Table. Anyways, I tried everything, I even reinstalled the TCP/IP protocol that Windows ships with (this is not straightforward). Finally, the resolution was to uninstall and reinstall my network card. This fixed it! There must have been something corrupted in the registry that was preventing the netBOIS from loading.

Then, my next problem was with using passive FTP through my linksys router to my desktop. I need this working because this is how I publish my blog from Blogger to my web server. The only thing that changed was the wireless router, and Linksys support couldn't tell me what was wrong or how to fix it. The way passive FTP works is that it sends, as part of the response, an IP address and a port. The IP address is the internal IP to my network and thus is not available outside my network. So, there is a special setting on my FileZilla FTP Server where you can tell it the IP address of the router, which is available to the Internet. You also have to forward port 21 and a user defined range of ports for the passive part of FTP via the router. I had all of this setup perfectly and it was working with my old router. After trying everything in the book, I disabled the special setting on my FTP server that replaces the IP address with the actual IP of my router. I couldn't believe this, but it actually fixed it! The only thing that I can figure is that the new router is smarter than the old one and knows to swap internal IP addresses with the router IP address for outgoing requests and this was screwing things up somehow. Argh!

All I did was get a new dang router. I better not have any more computer problems for a while. I've met my quota for at least the next year.

New Bundle of Joy Has Arrived: My Laptop

Yay! I got my laptop today and started playing with it a little at work today. I almost wished I didn't get it today because I had class tonight and didn't get to play near as much as I wanted to. Regardless, I ended up messing with it from the time I got home until the absolute last minute before I had to go to class. Similarly, I worked on it when I got home from class until I went to bed at about 1AM.

The thing that really pissed my off was the wireless connection. I have a really old linksys b wireless router and the connection on my laptop kept disconnecting. Roque gave it to me before he left back to Uruguay. Who knows how old it is or what it's been through. Anyways, when I connected to the neighbor's wireless, unbeknownst to them, I had no problem whatsoever and the connection was constant. Guess all those times that Megan complained about the wireless connection on her PC not working too well were actually valid. Looks like I have to buy a new wireless router :(

In other news, this made us really laugh at work today:

Study: Dolphins Not So Intelligent On Land

BIRT Updates

I finished a new BIRT report that displays information about my DVD collection. I basically cleaned up the formatting to make it look nicer and added some new graphs. There are three pie charts accompanied with data that show how I have ranked my DVDs, what decades they're from, and the different MPAA ratings in my collection. The second page is a list of all of the my DVDs including the year it was released, the MPAA rating, the runtime (in minutes), the date I added the movie to my database, and my personal ranking of the movie.

All of the data is dynamically populated whenever the URL is ran. So, what you see, especially the graphs and total runtime, is calculated on the fly when you run the report. I need to add about 10 DVDs to my database so the data in the report will change when I get around to this.

You can export the data into a CSV file by clicking the following button in the toolbar and choosing the desired columns to export:

You can also convert the report to PDF by clicking the following button in the toolbar:

Also, I upgraded the BIRT Report Viewer to version 2.1.1 on my Tomcat 5.5 application server.

Free Weekend

Megan left yesterday to go to Wichita to help her parents move to their new house and get some work done on her car. So, it looks like Ember and I are on our own this weekend. I'll probably go downtown and got out with Romer and company tonight. Looks like Johnny is coming up tonight too.

I'm so excited! My laptop was finally elevated from the "boxing" stage and has been shipped. What the hell? What took it so long to get "boxed"??? The following are the different stages that it was in:

1. Order Processing: Monday, October 30, 2006
2. Pre-production: Monday, October 30, 2006
3. In Production: Monday, October 30, 2006
4. Kitting
5. Build
6. Testing
7. Boxing
8. Shipping Prep:Thursday, November 02, 2006
9. Ship Date:Thursday, November 02, 2006

It was in the damn Boxing stage for about 3 days. I would figure that building and testing would take the longest, but it seems that these stages were instantly completed when it went into production. Perhaps they already had a laptop prebuilt with the specs I choose. I think boxing is Dell's code for "we are waiting for your laptop to be sent from Malaysia and then we will ship it to you via FedEx when we get it".