January 28th, 2010
Maybe I’ve talked about my current work laptop before, maybe not. I don’t think so.
I posted how much I was going miss my MacBook Pro way back then. Well, the laptop I’ve had for the past months has made me forget about my MacBook Pro. A day or two before Thanksgiving vacation, my Dell arrived. I immediately stripped off the Win7 it came pre-installed with, put Ubuntu64 on it with Win7 running withing a Virtual Box. Things have worked amazingly since then. I went from 10 minute database bootstraps on my old WinXP machine to 50 seconds bootstraps on my Ubuntu machine. The thing rocks! I love being able to go to the command line when I want to.
So why did it enable me to forget about my MacBook Pro. Well, it probably would’ve cost less to buy me a Mac. 8 gigabytes and a solid state hard drive have a way of causing deficiencies to disappear. I loved the thing over these past months. It will be another sad day come next Wednesday when I hand it over. :(
On this day…
- 2008: The Part Time Developer 3: Hibernation Mode — I got probably a good 3-5 hours in this weekend concentrating on working through another Hibernate tutorial, experimenting with the [...]
- 2005: Friday! — Not much going on today. Did some extreme grilling tonight for a pretty big meal by our standards. [...]
Tags: Tech Stuff, Work
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January 21st, 2010
I handed in my notice at work today. I’m headed to a digital media company doing web related work. It’s another exciting and scary situation I’m putting myself in. Looking forward to the challenge. Hopefully I’m up for it. (hansoninc.com)
I’m finishing up my first week of 2010 with Hopslam in the fridge. It’s been a wonderful week.
CodeMash was awesome. I’ve gotten a few new directions to explore in my side projects. I got a little taste of Ruby, which I need to continue. Plus I won a Scala book, and have started reading that. Not to mention that I talked to another person who said I need to learn Groovy and Grails. Looks like my year is going to be busy.
I don’t know if you noticed the new page I put up related to my Android apps. I created a Google Android app that displayed the CodeMash schedule. I really enjoyed creating the app and am trying to come up with a new idea for phone app development.
On this day…
Tags: Bell's Hopslam, codemash, Work
Posted in Beer, Tech Stuff, Work | No Comments »
January 11th, 2010
Only one more day of work before I head to CodeMash. I can’t wait. It was painful not being able to go last year. The problem always is trying to fit in all the great sessions that I want to go to. Plus, I plan to keep an eye on the Open Spaces topics for Android topics or other things that catch my eye. So session wise, it’s going to be tough.
This year they are even having a game room and a coding jam room. Add in that the evenings are usually filled with something (opening night panel, cocktail party) and I doubt I’ll make it to the water park area again. Just too much to do. This is such a great conference for the price. I hope I can continue to go every year.
On this day…
Tags: codemash
Posted in Programming, Tech Stuff | 2 Comments »
December 30th, 2009
Time to do some housekeeping and get some things out of the way I’ve been meaning to do.
Let’s look at the hobby related items first, since they’re the shortest. :)
1. Play 4 wargames. I’m counting this one successful enough. I believe earlier in the year, we completed a playing of A Victory Lost. I also got in 2 playings of A Victory Denied in the fall. Tabletop wise, that was probably pretty much it. But, I’ve been playing countless Risk and Axis & Allies clones online lately, so the sheer bulk of those should count. :) I didn’t get anything done solo, but I’m still counting this one a success. Let’s renew this for 2010.
2. BGG game collection updated. Fail. I’m finding my way to BoardGameGeek.com less and less. It’s still a great site that I use for reference, but I’m hanging out there next to never. Renew this just because I think it’s a nice way to keep track of things. I see things I have in it that I don’t notice when I look at my shelves.
3. BGG play list up to date. Fail. I probably didn’t play enough to care. It’s nice to have but this one will probably fall by the wayside. I probably care more about what wargames I’ve played than everything. I still need to write up my last AVD session. If I can remember much, other than the outcome.
On this day…
- 2005: Black Books — Black Books is a BBC series that I absolutely have fallen in love with. There’s a marathon of series [...]
Tags: goals, resolutions
Posted in Gaming | 2 Comments »
December 18th, 2009
How come I’m never approached to do one of these studies about drinking Bell’s beer? I love the part about how sticking to vodka over whiskey “would not improve your performance at work the next day.” Classic!
On this day…
- 2007: VB.net and my new saying — I’m thinking maybe I should give a look-see at VB.NET. I know the VB from the VB6 era but [...]
Tags: Beer
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December 13th, 2009
That’s right. Black Friday got me again. I’d gone nearly the whole day until I happened upon a blog that mentioned the MMP Black Friday sale around 10:30 pm. A sucker for MMP sales, I discovered that they were offering Valor of the Guards at a nice discount. Now yes, I know I haven’t played Advanced Squad Leader since my youngest was born, but I just love the system. I know I’ve forgotten more of the rules than I actually learned, but I just get all tingly thinking about the counters and kick-ass maps. I know that I’ve never clipped any of my ASL counters, but that didn’t stop me from buying A Bridge to Far 3 years ago and Pegasus Bridge the year before that (most likely from one of their Black Friday sales).
I want to relearn the system and get back into playing. I don’t know how active the community is anymore. I used to follow the ASL mailing list which was always quite active, but I haven’t checked on its existence in quite some time. I know this is a pipe dream for me to get back into the system, considering all my side projects I’ve been in and out of and those I haven’t even started. But nephew #4 has shown interest in it in the past and I have resolved to introduce him to the system.
Valor of the Guards really struck a cord for me because I was always interested in Red Barricades but it was out of print by the time I got into things. VotG has the same sort of rubble strewn map of Stalingrad, but there’s no giant multi hex factories with interior building hexes. 2 beautiful map sheets come in the box which make for a massive city battleground. 5(!) sheets of counters, special rules, campaign games, and a bunch of scenarios. Looks like some nice infantry only scenarios in there, so that may make getting some counters on the map a little more likely, if I can wade back into the rules.
To address a glut of unclipped ASL counters, a plethora of other unclipped wargames, and to prevent any further shoddy clipping on my part, I have ordered the C4 Counter Cutter. So, I may be able to do some accelerated clipping over my Christmas vacation.
Only 8 more days of work and I’m done for the year. I’m really getting stoked about that.
On this day…
- 2008: Stories of the Day — Proof that there’s still hit internet sites just waiting to be coded. Is it me or is the only way [...]
Tags: advanced squad leader, wargames
Posted in Gaming | 4 Comments »
December 8th, 2009
So it would seem that Shindo and I are the only ones who have noticed that floydwing.com is back. The move was successful, if slightly delayed because of my oversight. Stupid me didn’t realize that I needed to adjust the DNS servers for the site. I assumed that having the site moved from one host to another would have that stuff updated. Luckily, my new host has been very patient with and also a ton of help. Thanks Dave!
Having root access is pretty cool and makes it a whole lot easier than using file managers. Best of all, I can SSH in from the command line of my new work laptop.
I now have source control on more than just my local machine. I’ve uploaded one of the projects I’ve been toying around with. At some point I need to upload Pit. Unfortunately my early attempts to convert my Visual Studio C++ project into a usable Eclipse CDT or Mono project hasn’t found must success. I’ve been out of the C++ loop for a years, so I’m having a heck of time figuring out why these things are throwing strange errors. Somewhere along the way, either in a past VS upgrade or my own insanity, I ended up with includes that weren’t the same case as the actual files (VS must have allowed that) and a very inconsistent file naming convention. I’m a bit clueless how this came to be. I know my coding was somewhat abysmal back then (maybe now?) but some of these things I just couldn’t see me doing. VS seems to have been a bit too lax in what it allowed or how it upgraded.
So unless I can figure it out, I may be installing VS into my Win7 virtual machine. YUCK!
On this day…
- 2008: No mash or junk — In sad news, it doesn’t appear that I’m going to make it to CodeMash this year. This was a great [...]
- 2005: Tis the Season — Had one of them there doctor checkups today. The old blood pressure is continuing to be nicely controlled. [...]
Tags: Blog Status, pit
Posted in Blog Status, pit | No Comments »
November 24th, 2009
Or, it means that I’ve successfully migrated this blog and website away from tyranny. I now have shell access along with a whole bunch of other cool things. What does this mean for you? Probably not much. You probably won’t notice much of a difference. I’ll continue to deliver you the same boredom you’ve come to expect. See you in a few days.
On this day…
- 2008: Leaves of Wonder — So it would appear that those few Wolverine fans that frequent this blog from time to time were too embarrassed [...]
Tags: Blog Status
Posted in Blog Status | 1 Comment »
November 15th, 2009
In a Burger King bathroom just off exit 2 of the Ohio Turnpike, this event transpired while I was drying my hands:
A guy comes out of the poop stall with a big plastic pop cup from the joint. He skips washing his hands and proceeds to rinse the cup out at the sink and then fills it up with water. He puts the lid back on. He then picks up the straw from “between the wall and the faucet” where he had placed it. He begins sticking it into the cup when he realizes he’s got it the wrong way for some reason. He takes it out, turns it end over end and sticks it back in. He leaves.
I don’t know if the guy was planning on drinking it or had some other use for it, but the thought of drinking from a straw that was sitting on a Burger King sink is enough to make me gag.
On this day…
- 2008: Stupid blog — For some reason, this stupid blog is not honoring my paragraph breaks on the last couple of posts. I apologize [...]
- 2008: All good things must end — A few weeks ago, we took the field for our final game of the fall soccer season. On the line [...]
Tags: Deep Ramblings
Posted in Deep Ramblings | No Comments »
November 12th, 2009
I’m in the process of moving floydwing.com to a different hosting service. I’ll give a heads up a few days before the DNS stuff happens. In the meantime, if there’s anything you want saved on the forum, please copy it off. I don’t know whether I’ll go to the trouble of salvaging the existing content and even if I’ll have a forum at the new site, at least first on.
Keep an eye on the blog for future updates.
On this day…
Tags: Blog Status
Posted in Blog Status | 2 Comments »