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".

Happy Halloween!

New Laptop

I have been wanting a laptop for quite some time now. There is a really good deal with Dell now through their EPP (Employee Purchase Program) where you can get 30% off $1299 and higher in addition to a few other discounts. I built my laptop and finally pulled the trigger. Here are the specs for what I got:

• Inspiron E1505, Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7200 (4MB/2.00GHz/667MHz)
• 15.4 Inch UltraSharp TrueLife Wide-screen WSXGA+, for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• 2GB, DDR2, 533MHz 2 Dimm for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• 256MB ATI MOBILITY RADEON X1400 HyperMemory, for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• 80GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, English without Media, for Inspiron
• Backup media for XP Media Center,Inspiron
• Integrated 10/100 Network Cardand Modem, for Inspiron
• 8X DVD+/-RW Drive for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• Integrated High Definition Audio, Inspiron
• Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11a/g Mini Card (54Mbps) for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• 53 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery, for Inspiron 6400/E1505
• 2 Year Limited Warranty
• Warranty Support,1 Year Extended
• Dell Hardware Warranty PlusOnsite Service, Extended Year
• Type 3- Third Party At HomeService, 24x7 TechnicalSupport, 1 Year Extended
• Dell Hardware Warranty PlusOnsite Service, Initial Year
• Type 3- Third Party At HomeService, 24x7 TechnicalSupport, Initial Year
• Warranty Support,Initial Year
• Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Module (2.0 + EDR),for Inspiron
• Express Upgrade to Windows Vista Home Premium, Free plus S and H payable at redemption

It is going to take about eight days to build and the delivery arrival estimate is Friday, November 10, 2006 - Tuesday, November 14, 2006. I don't think I can wait that long!

Halloween at the Tilden's

Last night, we went to Steve and Donna Tilden's annual Halloween party in Gardner. Steve is one of the guys I work with. We had a good time and I took a few pictures.

Megan dressed up as a pregnant lady. This kinda freaked me out a little and reminded me a lot of Morgan when she was pregnant. I dressed up as the one-and-only Chuck Norris. Jason and Megan were the big bad wolf and little red riding hood, respectively. They one best costume.

Steve provided the keg 'o beer and various mixed drinks and shots while us guests brought food. Megan and I brought Taquitos, rice crispy treats, and Honey-BBQ Flavor Twists. There was a lot of other "creative" food though. There were sandwiches that looked like fingers, BBQ chicken wings with gauze on the end of them, bubbling rum drink, and a bunch of other "normal" food. By far, the most interesting was the kitty litter desert that Jason and Megan brought (see picture). This was a mixture of cake, tootsie rolls, and who knows what else to look like an actual cat box. It was even equipped with a genuine pooper scooper for serving. Disgusting, but good.

There was a scavenger hunt towards the beginning of the night where we split up into teams of two and went searching for things like candy, candle, garlic, battery, straw, etc. We somehow lost as the other team finished in 8 minutes. I think they cheated somehow. Anyways, the best part was how I got the straw. I notice a guy made out of straw sitting on someone's lit up porch. So, I slowly walked up and went to quickly rip some straw off this decoration and make my getaway. The problem was, for the life of me, I couldn't rip the straw off. So, I did what any man with a few beers in him and the desire to when a "hunt" would do, I bared down on this fake man with my teeth and tore off some straw. I then quickly retreated back down the street to the house with my soggy straw!

IE 7

I went ahead and downloaded and installed Internet Explorer 7 today. The interface seems slicker and there is a lot of add-ons to download and choose from. The best thing though is definitely the tabbed browsing. This is something that Firefox has always done and IE just started with this 7 release.

I always like to have a lot of heterogenous windows open and being able to group all of the IE windows into one is going to be nice so my Taskbar doesn't get too cluttered. So far, the most useful thing seems to be holding Ctrl and clicking a hyperlink. This opens a new tab within the same browser instead of opening a whole new browser or replacing the existing page with the link that was clicked.

All of the new stuff and label locations is going to take a while to get used, but I think it will be worth it. Hey, in the future I can probably look back on this and laugh because MSNBC-Google-McDonald's Internet Explorathon v37 will be the dominating browser :)

New Google Toy

Being that I still have this in Beta, not yet ready to be unleashed, I just added a Google search bar in the right column (I also made the Google map longer, because bigger is better, right?). This new search leverages the Google AJAX Search API. I'm still tweaking the CSS stuff so that it looks right in the site, but so far I'm really impressed.

After you commit the search, I have programmed it so there are five tabs displayed in the main column: This Blog, The Web, The News, Videos, and All Blogs. These correspond to the different domains that can apply to the search you made and can toggle between them. The neatest thing about this is the AJAX technology allows the results to just be "pushed" on top of the existing content in the main column seamlessly and without refreshing the page. The same goes for toggling between the different search domain tabs (This Blog, Videos, etc.).

Here's my current list for the main things I need to tweak/add before I'm taking this thing out of Beta:

• Fix the new search so that the results colors, styles, etc. look good with the site.
• Add feed links for both the blog piece and my photo gallery.
• Create a subtitle.
• Integrate my calendar into the site.
• Finish new BIRT report design for my movies.

Amusing Note

So, I got home from a very loooooooooooong day at work that involved working frantically on one hot issue all day, and Megan had left me a note because she had left to go to class:

Hey,
Got home later than I planned. Please take the dogs out. I didn't have time to. Hope you had a nice day at work. I didn't get fired. See you later.

Thought I'd share this cause it really cracked me up.

She was referring to the fact that she was maybe going to get fired due to showing up late / leaving early lately. Nevertheless, mentioning it so casually in a note made me bust up.

Long Week!

Ah, been so busy this week. On Sunday (10/15/06), I had to stay up pretty late working on my homework for EECS 767 - Information Retrieval that was due the next day. I didn't even get it all finished and had to work on it during my lunch at work and the whopping two hours I have between work and school on Mondays. I did finally get it done though.

At work this week, we hit the 200,000 case! They had a contest to see who could guess the closest time when we would hit the 200K threshold. Jason and I both forgot to put in our guesses. I was planning on submitting my guess right before the deadline, 9PM Central, but we ended up going to see The Departed at 8:35PM at AMC Studio 30 and I totally forgot about it. Trevor ended up winning but we don't know what the prize is yet. The next day, we were all treated to Chipotle.

Work has been super busy. I was put on two hot issues in one day in addition to delivering my part 1, 1 and 1/2 hour training on Performancesoft on Wednesday. Performancesoft is the new company we acquired a few months ago and I was put in charge of learning their product and training the rest of support on it. Quite a task, let me say. Part 2 is next Wednesday.

Now, I've got to work on a 30-45 presentation for my class. Two people are presenting per class and of course I was "randomly" choose to present on the first day we are starting. ARGH!

Funny random quote for the day:

The day's not quite gone, but the night's not quite here and somewhere, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love.

-Peter Griffin, Family Guy

Bulls vs. Supersonics at Allen Field House

Megan P., Megan M., Morgan, and I went to the Chicago Bulls vs. Seattle Supersonics game in Lawrence. Mind you, the game was at 1PM in the afternoon and Megan and Morgan and I didn't get back from Westport that morning until 3:30AM :(

It was really cool to see Kirk Hinrich and Nick Collison playing in Allen Fieldhouse again. They both started the game and every time they did anything of note, the crowd cheered like crazy. Likewise, every time they committed a foul, the crowd booed loudly.

Going into the game, they have a new addition to the front of Allen Fieldhouse, the Booth Family Hall of Athletics. This is really cool and contains all kinds of KU basketball information and memorabilia. They have a piece of the original court (see pic below) in addition to the original "Beware of the Phog" banner. There were too many people so we didn't really get to check everything out. I'm definitely going back sometime to look through everything.

The Bulls were the acting hometeam and had a rather lively mascot, "Benny the Bull". There are a few picture of him up on my site in addition to other pictures from the game. He was quite the dancer, although he probably couldn't keep up with me ;)

I also really liked seeing Ben Wallace. That guys is freakin huge but talented at the same time. I'd hate to catch an elbow from him when he's ripping a rebound off the glass.

Anyways, the Bulls lead most of the game by 10, but right towards the end of the game, the Supersonics caught up and but the game in overtime. The Bulls end up winning in overtime.

Although I definitely like college basketball over the NBA, it was a good game to watch and seeing all of that talent on one team was impressive. It was also good to see that Hinrich and Collison are making a difference at the professional level.

Friday the 13th

I'm not really that superstitious. I'm just really weird about numbers like walking an even number of steps, tapping each finger on my hand an even number of times, rubbing my tongue against each side of my month an even number of times, and setting the alarm clock such a way so that the number is even or falls on a quarter hour. I don't have OCD, promise. Anyways, I knew it was Friday the 13th when I walked into the apartment and immediately stepped in shit! Sugar had pooped on the landing at the bottom of the stairs and I stepped in it right as I walked in. With that said, nothing else has gone wrong today...yet.

Megan Got a Job!

Finally, after more than a week they told her they would get back to her, Megan found out she got the job at Missouri Department of Social Services this morning. She starts some time in the beginning of November. She is pretty excited and ready to move on from waitressing to a real full-time job with steady M-F hours. It will make taking weekend trips easier, but I'll miss the discount she gets at Old Chicago and having some evenings free :) I'm definitely happy for her though.

BTW, I hope they catch that Adam Gadahn guy and kill the shit out of him!