Okay, so apparently things didn’t go as smoothly as I had thought they would when converting from Serendipity to Wordpress. Many of my posts took advantage of the “extended” posting feature (which basically required a user to click “Read More” and see the rest of my entry). However, the converter that I used did not convert these “extended” entries, so many of my posts are without content. I apologize for this, and look to getting them back up soon!

Update (3/30/2008): I’ve restored all of my old extended entries, so they’re saved! Have fun reading!

So, I’ve obviously failed in terms of trying to make more posts as I had said I would. But, I’m so busy with everything right now that I don’t have much time to sit down and make lengthy (and frequent postings). Heck, even some of the regular events that I’ve been trying to start up at work (such as the Weekly Digest) has turned out to be not so weekly because I haven’t been able to schedule them. However, it’s about time that I give an update on my life situation and then a short tech talk on a really cool idea that has been around, but I haven’t started using until now.

Meetings

At CIS, my work load has finally diminished from what it had been the previous semester. Last semester (for roughly the entire duration of the semester) I had a schedule timeline that was roughly 8 rows long (ie: I had to split my time evenly across 8 different projects). This was inefficient, but I brought it on myself because I like to be involved in many different things. I was one who was responsible for the maintenance of a web service we use in-house that I was looking forward to rewriting using the .Net WCF model and was also involved in several different initiative programs to help improve the quality of work that we put out from Customer Applications. These initiatives put me in the meeting room with my managers quite often as we discussed the importance and various aspects of how Customer Applications does business. It got me really great exposure in terms of what we actually are supposed to be doing and gave me better insight on how to plan for change. But, the meetings ended up bogging me down so much that it felt that roughly 75-80% of my time was spent doing business-related work (which included customer interaction) and then 20-25% of my time was spent coding (again, it felt like this, but may not have been the literal case).

Now, mind you, I have a very strong passion to want to see Customer Applications succeed. Everyone was in acknowledgment that change was necessary and that we are behind in the times of development strategies. However, as the result of a project that failed miserably last semester, we have to be extra cautious and be that much more attentive to strategic planning to help ensure that we succeed. This I’m in complete agreement with: you cannot expect to change things overnight and have it work. Such a mindset will surely lead to dramatic failure, which is something we want to avoid. I did a lot of research on Gartner for the information that I’m looking for and found that typical business plans and timelines project that these changes take anywhere between 1 and 3 years to occur and bring chaos to the group. This makes sense, especially the chaos part because of the fact that there’s almost complete change occurring, and it’s very hard for everyone to deal with this.

Fortunately and unfortunately, I never have written a business plan for something like this. I was expecting to only take a couple of weeks to have it, but having to do research, analysis, and come up with a sound business plan is difficult when you have other customer projects going on at the same time, makes it extremely difficult. I had been working on the business plan for a few weeks (roughly until the beginning of February) when things changed.

We managed to convince a customer of ours that everything they wanted to get completed would not be so unless they upped their support contract time. We recommended throwing an additional 40 hours a week at their project, but they could only find the budget for an additional 20 hours a week. Because I was the technical and project leader for this customer, and the one with the most available time (because it was a lot of overhead), I had my time increased from 10 hours a week to 30 hours a week for this customer. This knocked off probably at least 4 rows on my schedule, putting me at 4 different projects to maintain.

Then, just last week, I managed to finish another customer project that had gone on longer than had been anticipated. Their project involved some upgrades that made the application more secure and robust as well as some aesthetic changes they had requested. However, they were an ad-hoc customer, and could only be worked on when I had applicable time, which had not been much at all last semester. This eliminated another row on my schedule, but was quickly replaced by another customer coming back and asking for contracted PHP support.

In short, what has happened is my schedule has become more blocky, meaning that it’s not spread so thin. I actually really enjoy this because then I can dedicate good chunks of time throughout the day and make progress on projects and other work as necessary. Unfortunately, most of my overhead time that was allowing me to develop the business plan to help revamp the way Customer Applications works is now on standby because I have to work on customer projects. Further, the managers that were helping me are also extremely busy managing their employees and working on other projects to help further this business plan. In short, this leaves Customer Applications in the state it is for however much longer. I only wish that our Associate Director would realize that we’ve maxed out our resources and that more positions should be opened within our group so that we could relieve the stress on everyone. But, because I’m not privileged to the information that goes on at the high-level, I don’t know whether he sees this and can’t hire new employees for other reasons, but the frustration of projects being shifted around and the realization that more projects are quickly on their way, but no relief, is starting to show among the developers.

Presentations

Well, I gave a couple of additional presentations recently at BarCamp Texas. I have to give kudos to Cody Bailey and the crew at the Creative Space, as well as everyone else that helped to put on this event, as it was truly an amazing informal conference that I will certainly be attending in the future. For those unfamiliar (and too lazy to check out the link), the gist of the event is technical enthusiasts, designers, and those whom are creative thinkers gather and create a schedule of talks/presentations they want to give by writing the name of the talk on a whiteboard. This is done on the day of the event, so it’s very impromptu (if the speaker hasn’t prepared for it ahead of time, which most seemed to). Then, the events begin and it’s kind of like any other conference, where there’s 30 minutes dedicated to a talk/presentation and then they move on. The idea is to network everyone together and get creative thinking and discussions going on whatever topic they feel like.

I ended up giving two talks. One was with Daniel Cousineau over PHP and MVC. This particular talk had a good turnout with many people posing different questions. Mind you, I won’t get mad at Daniel for practically dominating the talk, but I pretty much was in agreement with everything. I managed to throw in points that he missed out on, or was able to extend many of the sections he was talking about, but felt bad because we were unable to provide a code sample to our readers.

The second talk (which did not contain a slide set, as it was strictly a code sample and talk) was given by both myself and Ben Floyd. The talk was over LINQ, expanded as Language INtegrated Query. It’s a new feature in the .Net 3.5 Framework release that brings a psuedo-ORM (Object-Relational-Mapping) model to .Net applications. Further, it helps developers write strongly-typed and secure SQL queries in their code, so they get compile-time notifications of changes instead of runtime errors. However, it’s not just for data access, but also extends to XML and iterating over in-memory sets of data (anything that implements the IEnumerable interface). Short of having to convince developers to look at it, it’s a damn awesome technology and I give kudos to Microsoft for implementing it. I will attempt to post the code samples online, but it’s a bit difficult because the project was geared towards actually showing you how to convert old code to new code. Furthermore, most people won’t really be able to utilize the code samples because you have to have Visual Studio 2008 to open the solution. However, this presents an interesting idea…maybe a Camtasia video? Perhaps.

In any case, getting to finally present in front of two audiences and share the knowledge that I have (and put myself forward as an upcomping expert in these fields) was a thrilling experience. One of the goals I’ve set for myself is to be able to become one of those that gives frequent talks at conferences and user groups around the world. I want to be an author of a software development book that breaks new grounds and puts me in there with the high-rollers (really just the highly technically proficient individuals). This is one of the things I aspire to do, because I love to be in a position to share my knowledge with everyone. Mind you, it’s not my intent to push down onto everyone the idea that “I know much more than you.”. Rather, my determination is driven by the desire to see everyone succeed. I’ve seen so many software developers and so many applications that are pieces of shit because people don’t really know all there is to know about software development. However, with enough of a push and enough knowledge sharing, we may be able to start seeing the rapid increase in software quality quicker than we currently are seeing.

OpenID

Okay, because this post is so long already, I’ll try to keep this short. I didn’t just stumble onto this technology, as I had known about it for quite some time. However, I just never had the opportunity to look at it because I was so busy learning other things. However, now that I’ve had the chance to play with it, the technology and idea is quite thrilling, really.

In a nutshell, OpenID is all about decentralization of authentication (AuthN) and consolidation of identity. Woah, what? Lemme explain further. If you go to 5 completely non-interrelated web sites that are publicly available, how many usernames, passwords, and accounts do you have to manage? Usually the answer is 5 usernames, 5 passwords, 5 accounts. This starts to get really old as that number goes up. It becomes particularly hard when you register for a site you hardly visit, and then have to remember that god forsaken username/password combination for it. Another problem for this model is that sometimes your typical username is already taken at these websites. This is where we start to see derivatives such as ‘kittysmear1432′ or ‘dragonsblood87392′, as examples. So, when you usually expect to only have to remember passwords for sites, you now may have to remember “what’s that number I put at the end of my username”?

OpenID combats both of these problems. With OpenID, the decentralization of AuthN means that you can have an unlimited number of what we call identity providers on the internet. These providers don’t share information with one another (like some big centralized authentication system would) and are all really individuals. You can run your own identity provider if you’d like, but there are many others that have robust infrastructures that you should probably consider. In fact, you may be using services online that already are providers (such as LiveJournal, Wordpress, etc.). The idea is that you register for an account with only one provider (again, LiveJournal, Wordpress, SignOn, MyOpenID, etc.). When you register for an OpenID with them, this provider gives you, effectively, your identity for the internet. This is realized through a URI (URL, however you like to call it). A typical URI will look like “chris.myopenid.com”.

So, now that you have your identity established on the internet, how do you use it? It’s simple. You go to your favorite website. When you’re asked to login, you don’t do the typical type your username and password to get access. Instead, you give the web site that URI and nothing more, then click login. What happens is the website you are trying to login to takes the URI and sends you to the identity provider you got it from. The identity provider asks you to login and verify that you are who you purport to be. If you can provide your username and password in this one central location (where every OpenID web site sends you to), then you login to the web site without a problem.

Let me take this further from a technical point-of-view and actually present it on a very simplified level. Imagine you go to your local DMV office to get yourself a driver’s license, which is typically used to affirm your identity. The state in which you reside (which operates this DMV) is the Identity Provider. They provide you with a card (equivalent to the URI) that identifies who you are. Suppose for arguments sake, however, that the card contains no real identifying information (such as Date of Birth, etc.) Now, imagine you are trying to get into a location which requires you to have a valid ID (say a bar). The doorman would look at your driver’s license and would then call the DMV to ask if the person standing in front of him is who he claims he or she is. The doorman would hand the phone then to you which the DMV officer would ask you for a piece of information that was not on the card (say SSN # and Date of Birth, which we said was stripped from the card). Also assume that the doorman cannot hear the conversation you are having. You hand the phone back to the doorman, and the DMV proceeds to state that you are who you say you are. The doorman rights your card ID # (URI) down on a list for future reference. This is how OpenID works, in very simplistic terms.

Now, the other thing that OpenID helps combat is this whole username and identity issue. Because only one URI can ever identify one person, there’s no having to fight for usernames at multiple sites. Your OpenID URI will be guaranteed to be unique at different web sites, unless your identity has been compromised. Additionally, OpenID makes it possible for you to claim resources or pieces of information on the internet that are your own, and actually be able to prove that it is yours! You can now identify blogs, and other pages (perhaps even MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites in the future) as your own by adding your OpenID URI and identity provider address into the page itself. Now, these things are not visible to the naked eye, but are done through 2 lines of HTML which are rather simple. However, this is a topic of another conversation, but know that you can finally genuinely mark a blog as your own and be able to prove to others that it is, if requested. This enables aliasing of identities, so you can go back to having multiple names for yourself. The difference than how its done now, however, is that all aliases actually tie back to a parent name, as opposed to being completely anonymous aliases.

I’m out of time for today. Feel free to comment, but make sure you login with your OpenID account first!

Well, it’s been nearly a full 2 months since my last entry. Obviously, I’ve been a bit busy. I’m sure my friends would like to hear about what I’ve been up to, so here’s a couple of month’s worth of information in one post.

School

November and December were rough months in terms of school. Lots of things all around me started piling up at once. In particular, a project went horribly awry at work (Cleopatra, for those who are familiar with this project) requiring me to jump on board and spend a complete weekend from dawn to dusk working on unit tests. This was shortly after the whole Phoenix, AZ impromptu trip that I needed to make (read my last post to understand what’s been going on here). After this, the College of Architecture project really started ramping up and demanding a lot of my attention, which caused me to pull a lot of extra hours that I wasn’t planning on spending.

Past this, final school test preparations and studying was in order. Unfortunately, I didn’t spend nearly as much time as I would have liked this semester studying for my classes. My math class got the worst treatment of all, which essentially was me ignoring the homework most of the time and then cramming about a week before the test. This went well for the first test, as I made a 73, about 5 points above average on the exam. However, the second test didn’t go very well at all but was more because the professor was being _very_ in terms of how he wanted answers formatted. This caused me to get a 58 on my second exam, which really concerned me because I got my grade about a week before finals. The final exam went better than I thought it was supposed to go, but my final grade was not indicative of this. I received a D in the course, which means I have to take it over again.

However, the positive side was that I thought I was going to get a horrible grade in my ECEN325 course, and turned out with a much better grade than expected: a B. This is not bad considering I was sitting well below the standard deviation of students before the final. So, I don’t have to worry about retaking that course. The only thing I have to worry about is the 3 foot mount of paper that’s sitting on my office floor. This is no joke: I have a 3 foot stack of paper on the floor from this class _alone_. And Melissa says essays kill trees- classes in general kill them.

CIS

Most of the winter when work was in session I have been busy working on the College of Architecture web site. Many of you probably don’t notice a difference in it right now, but that’s because there isn’t any publically viewable differences. Instead, it’s all how it processes files on the backend and what new tools are now available from the backend. The problem with this was we didn’t write the backend system - it was a developer that was forced from his position unwillingly. So, rather than him leaving a nice plethora of documentation behind for his application, he left with telling me as much as he possibly could with the application and I was expected to learn how it operates and figure out any problems with it. When we tried to deploy it the first time, I ran into numerous unexpected errors and problems which forced us to abort the deployment. Instead, I spent a couple of 50 hour weeks trying to figure out what was necessary to be able to get the application ready for launch. Once that had been determined, I spent a lot of time both documenting the system and fixing what was missing or broken.

…and I’m still alive and kicking. I apologize for the lack of updates recently. I’ve been extremely busy with homework and school, work itself, and family matters. The most recent family matter involved a distant cousin-in-law of mine and my wife’s grandmother. Certain personal effects (mainly most of them) of my grandmother’s were being held ransom by Melissa’s cousin and had to be picked up for fear of being thrown out. Where were they? Phoenix, AZ. After a weekend of driving round-the-clock to and from Phoenix, I was extremely tired and to say the least, tired of driving. However, we managed to obtain Melissa’s grandmother’s personal effects and she was quite pleased.

In any case, I wanted to briefly mention that I hope to completely revamp my blog within the next couple of weeks. A new look is coming about (an original one, for once) as well as a port to Wordpress. I’ve barely been satisfied with Serendipity, so I hope Wordpress will make me much happier. Furthermore, by being able to design my own blog pages, I should be able to make it adapt better to my code entries. Nevertheless, expect an update from me again within the next couple of weeks.

The truth is, it has. (That and somehow the Staind song It’s Been a While just started playing…what a coincidence).

In any case, I figured I would give the world an update to let them know I’m alive and well. I’m busy, as usual, but I’m alive and kicking and screaming and everything else that I usually do best. I’m still a developer at CIS Customer Applications, working full time, still owning my own business, but I’m back in school attempting to take 7 hours of classes. Over the summer I changed majors from Electrical Engineering to Computer Engineering with a Computer Science emphasis. The reason I did it was because I was enjoying programming a whole lot more than I was building circuits. The change only increased my requirements from 54 credits to 71 credits till I graduate. I did the math, and it seems as though I’ll be able to graduate by December 2009 if I continue working at the pace that I have been (that is, 7 hours a semester with a minimester of courses between every semester).

The classes this semester are going well thus far, but it’s a lot of work and sucks up most of my time (when I’m not doing stuff for Cerberus, etc.). My first class is a math class (I thought I was supposed to be done with math, but changing from Electrical Engineering to Computer Engineering over the summer added one last math class). The course title is Discrete Mathematics, though it has hardly been anything but logic - which is a fairly simple concept. I feel like we’re taking baby steps in the class, with the exception that my professor likes to give us enough homework problems to take up 8-10 pages of notebook paper for each assignment.

The other class I’m taking is ELEN325, Electronics. It’s basically a course that extends two other basic courses that we had during our sophomore year, and is the last electrical engineering course I have to take. The only difference between how it is now versus how it was last semester when I first tried to take it is that my professor makes sense. He does a great job of thoroughly explaining everything without taking a real long time to do it. As a result, I totally understand the homework I’m working on, the pre-labs and laboratory exercises, etc. I hope to pull out of this semester with an A in both this class and MATH302 (Discrete).

As far as everything outside of school (the rest being my wonderful wife Melissa), she’s also stressing out about school (amongst other things). She’s gone back to taking a full-time load of classwork because she’s ready to get out of the community college system and into a university with a good music program (namely Sam Houston State University). As a result, the courses are piling homework on top of her, and it doesn’t help that she’s working 20+ hours a week at the HelpDesk AND the HelpDesk has been swamped by walk-up visitors, which have taken her away from doing homework at her desk. Coupled with the fact that the HelpDesk is having some rather nightmare-ish organizational issues with a merger that occurred recently, it’s been hell for her and I’ve had to console her a lot.

Because we’ve been so busy the past couple of weeks, we haven’t been able to spend much time with friends, let alone clean the house. I hope to get some time to at least do laundry, if not mow the lawn (because it hasn’t been mown in over 3 weeks!) this weekend. Wish me luck. Hopefully I’ll update soon, again…

Well, it’s been a really long time since I last updated my blog and let everyone know what’s been going on in my life. In essence, I’ve been busy as usual, but have made progress by leaps and bounds in most things I’m actually involved in, and also have a new addition to our (Melissa and my) family (more to come later).

So, a few weeks ago, Melissa and myself went to Denver, Colorado for a break from College Station and so that I could take some training in the infamous (and totally ripped off) programming language C# using the ASP.NET 2.0 framework. The reason I say it’s totally ripped off is that if you learn the language and learn Java (or vice-versa), you’ll notice that C# = Java. Barring that fact, I had a really cool instructor named Michael who kept me interested in learning the language and I did learn a lot. Essentially, I learned the syntax and how C# works and afterwards learned how to use Visual Studio 2005 along with parts of the Framework and how to create ASP.NET websites - simple ones at least. Besides the awesome (yet expensive learning) that it was, Melissa and I got to know her Aunt Kathy and Uncle Greg as well as do fun and cool things around Denver, a town that I haven’t been to in a long time.

While we were in Denver and staying at Aunt Kathy’s place, I fell in love with their large Lab and Golden Retriever dogs. It reminded me of how much I had always wanted a big dog, but never had one. They were extremely sweet animals and I told Nissa that we had to get a dog sometime in the future. I was thinking she was going to get one for me for my birthday, but as it turned out we went out and got a Collie puppy (also something I had always wanted). We had quite a bit of troubles trying to adopt it (read Nissa’s article), but we were happy when we finally got to adopt her. She’s truly very sweet and utterly cute and Melissa made me extremely happy that she did that for me (really for us). The collie is what Melissa had expressed that she really wanted, and when we went to the pound to look for a puppy, she saw the collie (we named her Sophie, eventually), she fell in love with her and it really seemed as though I wasn’t going to get out of the pound without her. I’m not upset by any means, though. Collies are sweet, wonderful, and really smart dogs - not to mention it’s the official mascot of A&M, but that’s not a selling point for me. I’ll have pictures of her soon to share with everyone.

Past that, it’s been crazy-busy at work because I’ve been involved with so many projects that have stringent deadlines and high requirements (isn’t that how it usually goes?). All of the projects are PHP, none of my time is actually budgeted to them (with the exception of one), and all of them have SQL Injection vulnerabilities! ‘Tis a shame that I don’t get paid more for security consulting and fixing these damn things. Same going for the documents I’ve been creating. I think I spent 2 days making a 40 page document for the proposed changes to one of the projects. I’ve essentially been doing the work of a Senior Software Applications Developer, but my title (and regrettably, my pay) is at the level of a Sr. IT Associate - someone that’s not really important. I’m not really upset, though, because I’m at least appreciated where I’m at. The managers (and associate director) understand that I provide valuable service to CIS, and that matters a lot to me. Of course, I’m still gonna demand a position upgrade at the time I was originally promised.

As of now, I’m in Chicago taking the advanced C# course right at this moment. The course has been even better than the intro course that I took. Our instructor Brad is very outgoing, humorous, and very intelligent. The course has definitely helped me to learn a lot about C# and I’m really looking forward to building websites with it. Another really cool thing is my business partner Tom came up yesterday and is staying until Friday. I don’t get to hang out during the day, but the evenings we actually get to hang out.

I feel really bad because I didn’t bring my wife along with me (because we didn’t have the money for it). From now on, though, I’ll definitely need to bring her along (assuming she can and assuming we can afford it). I love her dearly and I hate leaving her alone, and she likewise hates being left alone.

In any case, back to my course. I’ll update soon (hopefully).

Take this email conversation for an example:

Says she is having error messages when sending
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Christopher Weldon
Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2007 2:45 PM
To: <hidden>
Subject: Re: help
 
S wrote:
> > Chris --- K cannot send emails out of the network----S
> > 
 
S,
 
I verified that she could. I sent myself emails from all of her 
addresses and they came through just fine. Can you please provide me 
some specifics of what error messages she is getting?

The situation is that the customer was having problems sending emails outside of their domain via Outlook. I went on-site and proceeded to verify that every single one of them could send emails out (by sending to my domain). K’s was one that I double checked.

So, when I ask for “specifics” and get a reply that says nothing about what I requested, I just want to double my rate for support and call it the “dumbass upcharge”.

The third and wonderful “conclusion” to the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy was released last week, and I had the opportunity to take my wife to go see it two days after it came out. Suprisingly, the crowd at the movie theater was small, with the show being only 3/4 of the way filled. But, that’s to be suspected with the college crowd almost completely gone for summer.

The movie is slow to begin, but quickly ramps up once the underlying story is presented. Then, when you least expect it, it hits the ground running with a nice full-town battle ensuing between allies (?) and foes. ‘Tis unusual without the biggest character of the story, Jack Sparrow, present. Fret not, however, as his re-appearance is one of peculiarity, but undoubtedly reminds you of the Jack Sparrow you knew from the other two movies.

As many people have claimed, there seems to be more battles and more fighting in this movie than in the past two. This, I can agree with, but likewise disagree with. The difference between At World’s End and either of the other two movies is the complete interweaving of all characters that had been introduced up to the final movie. A lot of drama and arguing ensue, yet there’s always the ever-so-often hint of humor.

One of the more enjoyable aspects of this movie was the addition of more “traditional” things from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney. You hear more songs and see things that are oddly reminiscent of the ride, should you have had the wonderful opportunity of riding it before.

Overall, this nearly 3-hour long adventure is one well suited for any Pirate fan, and in my case, I can only hope the DVD is right around the corner.

4.5 / 5 Stars

Well, it has been quite a few days (maybe closer to 2 weeks) since I last updated. So, in an effort to get everyone up-to-speed, and to have a somewhat politically motivated post, I’m taking extra time out of my busy hectic life to give you, my audience, and update.

First and foremost, I’ve been busier than ever at work (CIS). I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it before, but I switched to Customer Applications from the Operations group. It meant a new title (yay for promotions), more money (always helpful), and likewise a plethora of new tasks and responsibilities. Then again, it doesn’t exactly help that the project that I’m working in is in serious distress. But luckily, I’m able to program quick enough to put me 12.5 hours ahead of schedule today. Go me. Hopefully we’ll be able to bring this project back on-track to the point that we’ll be able to actually deliver it on-time. For the most part, I’ve been able to program the past week or so, but before that I was doing a combination of consultations, analysis, and down-right project engineering for this customer because they needed everything including servers, SSL certificates, etc.

Second, Melissa and I are still moving things over from the apartment into our new house. We have most of everything (large things at least - we’re missing quite a few smaller items, and still my big fiberboard desk which will take a boheameth to transport over to the house). Most evenings are spent going to the apartment, gathering stuff, and moving it back to the house. The past couple of nights, though, we’ve had reprieve due to the bad weather and having to go to Houston for various things (such as Melissa’s recital, having a wonderful Italian dinner with her grandmother, etc.). This relaxation time has given my back a break, but sadly I’m still not getting much sleep at night. I’m anxious for the day when we finally pay-off the new mattress that we’re getting - it should cure all of our problems as far as sleeping is concerned.

As far as my business is concerned, I have a customer for my business who seems to think I can be at their beckoning call 24/7/365 for programming issues. I agree that for server issues they have to be resolved FAST (and for the most part I make certain they are taken care of at that speed), but programming issues take time to analyze, engineer, program, test, and deploy - not something that a large set of changes can be done in a short amount of time. Not to mention, the fact that this customer almost expects me to come to their office location at the drop of a dime is absurd - especially when the requests they have (which have to happen immediately) can be typed up and sent to me - that’s all that’s going to happen when I get them, type them up and put them in my bug software. Why waste my development time when you can type up the requests? These are the type of people that really push me to get out of this business.

Additionally, for anyone who is considering getting webhosting (and is not smart enough to go to www.cerberusonline.com and sign up for the best hosting in the world through that website!) should NEVER consider HostGator for a hosting provider. We have some reseller accounts through them and they have the WORST restriction, signup, and fee policies on the face of the planet. I won’t get into details, but trust me when I say do not trust them.

Well, my ride is almost here, so I’ll update this post about Vetos and Cheerios later. Give me a holler if you haven’t talked to me in a while. AIM: Nschinden15

Well, I know it’s been a while since I’ve last updated, so I just wanted to let everyone know I’m still alive and kicking. I suppose I’ll give a quick update as to my situation in life so nobody is left out of the loop.

On April 12, Melissa and I closed on our home! That’s right, we’re officially the owners of a new home! We’re so excited and up to this point we’ve already done a massive amount of things to it - mainly painting. The living room is nearly done, one of the bedrooms is completely done, the office is still undergoing paint, as is the master bedroom. Keep checking back for pictures.

Recently I also changed positions within CIS. I essentially got a much needed promotion and changed to a new group, Customer Applications. I’m no longer working on Keystone like I used to - and I’m fairly happy about that fact. I’m working with quite talented programmers and I’m getting the opportunity to use some of the programming styles I’ve not been able to do for CIS for a long time.

Anywho, I need to get back to work since this project I’m working on is EXTREMELY behind schedule. I’ll update again once we’re completely moved into our new home!