Monday, December 22, 2008

Another Depressing Christmas

I never have liked Christmas.... Really what is the modern day meaning. I know what the true meaning is and nobody really celebrates that. So your next culmination may be fellowship. OK I could buy that for $200 Chuck. But really what does the modern day family see in Christmas. Is it the shopping, the tree, the lights...nope. It's the dream to buy something that may make someones life a little brighter by going in to debt so you can spend the next 12 months paying off the $37 scarf they needed for one time. You say why do I look at it this way. I think gifts should be made by hand. Christmas tree's should decorated by ornaments made by your family. Not some ornament you buy in the store so you have to store it up for another year to in the hope's it won't break while you shove it through a hole in to the attic that you can barely fit in.

I look back on the posts I made last year and even though the posts sound depressing, I still feel the same. I hate the holidays! I wish we could just go from October to January but then we wouldn't have a reason to make New Year's lies to ourselves about losing the 20 pounds you just put on in two months or paying off the thousands of dollars you spent trying to make you kids happy.

Kids are happy if you buy them something or nothing. I see it all the time. Buy a kid a twenty dollar toy and they'll play with the box it came in. So why do I think the holidays are depressing? Christmas never really had a meaning to me. Why rush around and be nice to someone once a year. Why not be nice to them all year long..... There's an idea. Now I'm starting to sound like George Carlin.

Anyway I don't like to see people exchanging gifts. It has a sense of boasting. What if the gift you got me cost more than the gift I got you. Then you pissed because you spent more than you had to. When I was younger I think I liked it a little more but I think people go way overboard. Come on does anyone celebrate Columbus Day? No, but damn sure like the day off from work right. So back on task as I ramble away. I have a lot to say in the winter so get use to it. Let's break this down element by element and undermine the value.

UPDATE: I started to add them all in here but I figured I could make multiple blog posts and keep this going for a few days.....so enjoy.

Sunday, June 8, 2008

First Walgreens Deal

OK so I'm not a virgin to the drug store deals but I later realized I screwed it up. After seeing my wife do the CVSing for a couple weeks and even helping her once or twice has got me on the let's stretch every penny we have kick. I don't go as extreme as my wife does on the deals but this is my first. Right now I'm trying to only stick to deals that we use but it doesn't hurt to have a small stock of products. Especially living in hurricane prone Florida. My granny always told me when I first moved to Florida that I should have a hurricane preparedness bin so this is my way of thanking Walgreens and CVS for helping me do that. So here's what I got in my deal.

4 x 12pk Dr. Pepper cans = $11 with $3 RR
- $2 Dr.Pepper.com coupons ($1 off 2 12pk)

2 x 7oz Gillette Series shave gel = $4
- $2 Walgreens June coupons

1 x 7oz Gillette Satin Care shave gel = $2
- $1 Walgreens June coupons
- $.55 P&G coupon 6/1 newspaper

1 x 24pk Walgreens Cold Multi-Symptom = $3.99
@ - $3.99 rebate at end of June

Total: $20.99
Coupons: $5.55
OOP(+ Tax): 16.46

Rewards: $3.00
Rebates: $3.99

Where did I screw up you ask? We'll I thought the $5 RR was for any sale over $20 but it was $20 in Gillette products. Since it is Saturday I need to look at next weeks ad. If they have the same sale next week I may return the shave gels and then make a sale for 10 cans to total $20 so I can get the $5 in rewards. I know will forfeit my .55 coupon but getting 10 cans of shave gel for almost a quarter of the normal price will be worth it. I need to find somebody who sale newspapers so I can get the left over ads from the papers they do not sale on Sunday. That would help a lot. I like the way Walgreens puts out a coupon book every month and you don't have to clip the coupon. It's also nice that one coupon applies for each item in the sale.

Monday, May 26, 2008

Procrastination - the story of my life

I must be the biggest procrastonator in the world. I hate to do homework. Yes I said homework. I am in college and have been off and on since 2002. I've taken my fair share of breaks over the years. I usually can only take about a year of it then I need a six month break. I still haven't seen the point of a degree. It seems to only be worth the paper it's printed on.

What I mean is who can really be a programmer on the leading edge of specific development languages by going to school. I have friends who have Bachelors in Computer Science and couldn't program "Hello world" but here I am with no college degree and have been programming professionally for about 2 years now. I say professionally for two years because I really hadn't proved myself till then. I had made some small things here and there but until I took on a couple projects that other more well known programmers had failed at is when I really proved myself to my peers. I also made a name for myself when I just took on a development team for an ASP.Net website and took off making leaps and bounds for customers.

So this brings me to where I am today ranting and raving about a stinkin' degree. I've been developing this website we'll call as "BIAS". At the beginning I stayed up many nights trying to finish the core to really prove what I could do to make it a product we wanted to stay with. Well I not only did that, I fed their thirst and they wanted more. Everybody within my team loved it. Now Friday I just finished up the administration section and then threw in a curve ball with a nice report that wasn't expected. I think I have a couple things in the admin section to go back and complete like the user's profile upload image page but that won't be used for awhile and was really just a way out there feature. I need to code the IFrame to make it work correctly.

Tuesday I begin working on the configuration section and that's where the controversy will start. What I haven't told you is there are two other programs, one legacy program with many years of following and a new high cost development team project that are basically trying to do the same things I am doing. The only key there is I can make changes in a day what takes them weeks after all the red tape. One thing I learned early on is make the change and ask for forgiveness later. It always works out in the end especially when the customer is happier.

So back to my weekend procrastination fest. Here I am on a earlllllyyyyy Monday morning doing homework again not getting anywhere. Sometimes I wonder if I have ADHD or am just lazy. I think I will take my Provigil tomorrow and see what happens. I always seem to be able to focus better when I take it. Anyway the class is Human Biology and what I think is useless unless you are going to become a doctor or chemist. Really what do I care about how the liver and kidneys filter blood except how it filters my beer out of my blood. So now I know how to get drunk and stay drunk longer by saturating the liver down.

On a good note I got a new cell phone on Friday after the first one died that I received Monday. Now for the story. Well the Friday before I broke my other cell phone, a Motorola L2, which was a piece of junk. After using it for over two years I had began to become fed up with it. So Saturday I order myself a refurbished AT&T Tilt from their premier website. Paid for the over night shipping so I would get it Monday. My wife was at home at the time so she opens the box and the back cover has a tab broken off. No biggy, I'll deal with it and call them this week to send me a new cover. Well Thursday afternoon I had to take my wife to the ER and while me and the kids were in the waiting room the damn screen goes white like all washed out. I tried a soft reset, a full hard reset to no luck. Well when we got home later that night I called up AT&T, same number on the box, so after being passed around about 4 times and working with 3 or 4 different sales people they go me a new phone sent out. Guy on the phone told me three to five days delivery. I'm like great. I got a nice three day weekend here to deal with a broken phone. Well Friday my new phone shows up out of the blue. It even looked different when I opened the box. Like all shiny and new.

I've been playing with my new phone this weekend customising it to my likings along with my wife liking the Palringo IM I installed on it. Now I've just got a few more items I would like for it then I think I will be happy.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Who needs a stairmaster when you have stairs

I lay here in the floor on Sunday night about ready to go to bed and begin my week of ass pounding on the keyboard until my fingers are sore.

The weekend was very eventful in my house. Friday my wife and I decided we needed to do some rearranging of the furniture in the house. We first started with our bedroom and the loft outside the door of our bedroom. Our plans are to make a small bedroom out of the loft for our daughter. This also included moving the computer closet from the upstairs closet down to the closet under the stairs. This took almost all of Saturday and I still haven't finished hooking up everything. Sometime this week I've got to call Cox to unlock the cable box for me to run a new cable line to the under stairs closet. This closet was were I planned to setup everything from the start but we initially had all the computer equipment upstairs on the loft so that's were I originally setup the shelving and wiring.

Anyway we got most of our bedroom cleaned up and a good part of the loft. Mostly what's left is putting clothes away in the closets and then we can begin setting the bed up for my daughter. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to go to Lowe's to get some coax cable and a waterproof exterior box for the new cable line. You may ask why I need a exterior box to run a cable line. The box is for me moving all my cable and telephone lines to so I don't have to call the cable company every time I want to do something with my cable.

The closet under the stairs is pretty much wired up other than me having problems with my server over heating because I have it vertical instead of horizontal. For some reason I am having problems with my new motherboards north bridge overheating. I emailed Gigabyte today but I won't here anything from them for a couple days to week if they even respond at all. I should get my DVD drive back from NewEgg this week that I had to RMA.

Off to dreamland I go......

Friday, February 29, 2008

Long awaited update

It's been a pretty long time since I've made any type of post to my blog and I hope to do it more often. I been trying to get my server at home straightened out. I originally planned to make it my full web server and get rid of the paid server I have now but my 512kb upload speed just wasn't enough to support the needed bandwidth. So in regards to my server I've been working on getting my pictures online with another host. I finally decided on using Flickr for my pictures because of the price and the unlimited storage. I currently have about 18 gigs of pics on my server to share.

Another piece of software in question was my current blog. I found that I liked Wordpress alot better but they didn't offer domain mapping for free. The only way I could get it to work the way I wanted was on my home server and again it couldn't handle the load even with IIS compression turned on. A day or two later I found that Blogger offered free domain mapping so I decided to stay with Blogger. You can now find my blog at http://blog.thedelongfamily.com

A third piece I've been working on is integrating my domain with Google Apps. I've gotten the email, docs, and calendar setup. The Google Apps is pretty cool but I'm not too sure how or if my family is even going to use it.

Right now I have a lot going through my head with work and at home. I'd like to write a really good photo website similar to 4images using Asp.Net and MSSQL Server 2005.

Anyway off to working on my server and network some more.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

A New Year

I guess it's been a few weeks of me posting to my blog and it's time I get back into it. The post will be a followup from the last post.

First the setting: It's a cold winter night here in Florida and I am sitting in a chair on my back patio with a small fire going in my fire pit wishing I had some firewood. Luckily had one starter log and branches.

Now the rest:
The past few weeks have been very hectic at work and at home. First at work I have been slammed with new projects and along with fellow teammate taking their own time off to spend with family. As for my family it has been busy with go go go....shopping, fellowship, and anything else my mother-in-law or wife can find for me to do.

We ended up doing Christmas at our house Christmas eve and then Christmas morning. Christmas Eve we opened all the presents that we from our family and then Christmas morning the kids opened all the presents from Santa. Yes my kids still believe in Santa. The site on both my kids faces this year was what made it the best Christmas of all.

After opening presents Christmas morning we all bathed and hurried over to my mother-in-laws to open presents there along with eat breakfast. Of course my mother-in-law did no have all the ingredients necessary for breakfast so she was waiting on us to bring the shredded cheese. We did find out that my mother-in-law's sausage biscuits were much better without cheese and everybody agreed. My family showed up late as usual plus we had to stop at Walgreen's to get a gift for dirty Santa going on later that night. Everybody opened presents at my mother-in-laws to include my wife's brother's family. Everyone got nice gifts just maybe something they may not need or want.

After my mother-in-laws we headed across town to my brother-in-law's wife's families house for more fellowship. This is where the game dirty Santa commenced to be played on a group of 17 people. The rules were that no one could spend over eight dollars on a gift. Each person drew a number and the when it was your turn you had the choice of stealing a gift that was already opened or opening one from the pile. At the end whoever had number one got to decide if they wanted to swap gifts with someone or keep the gift they ended up with. Of course my daughter had not slept most of the day so she was being a pill to deal with until she finally fell asleep in my arms in the recliner. I think everybody was happy when she finally went to sleep. We also ate dunch (lunch and dinner) there and played my son's new monopoly game that uses cards instead of money.

Well I've almost made it through Christmas week when the baby sitter calls Thursday morning while I'm at work to say my daughter is running a fever. The is the first pickle my wife and I have been in since my wife went back to work. I decided to take off of work and take my daughter to the doctor as I wanted my wife to feel I was supporting her going back to work. We went to the doctor and my daughter has a virus which there's nothing they can do except make sure she gets enough fluid and sleep then take Motrin for the fever. My daughter is already a daddy's girl but Thursday she was all curled up in my arms most of the day. I did finally get her to lay down for a little while and I was able to log into work and get a few things done before she woke up again. Friday was pretty much more of Thursday, I ended up staying home with my daughter again so she didn't spread her virus to anyone else. I gave her some more Motrin after eating something for breakfast and her fever went away. She of course went back to being a kid except you could tell she was tired. We played and cleaned house till about 12 when she finally laid down and I had a meeting starting at 12. My wife brought me something for lunch about 12:30 from Burger King. My meeting dragged on till about 2:30 and my daughter ended up waking up soon after that.

This past weekend was more of go go go stuff and then we both went back to work Monday. Monday wasn't too hectic at work but for some reason I didn't get much done. Later that after noon I started feeling bad but I stuck it out as I wanted to go out and do something with my wife for New Year's Eve. We took my daughter over to the mother-in-laws and headed out to Destin to eat at Outback. We ended up getting a table in the bar section as soon as we got there and everything was cooked good. The forgot to cook my green beans for my meal and you could tell the manager and waiter were panicing. I had no problem as I've worked in the restaurant business before and I understand mistakes happen. On the way home we stopped by Target for more shopping. We ended up with a lot of stuff for the amount we paid. Really lots of dollar items and 75% off Christmas stuff. We picked up my daughter about 10:30 and headed home to see the ball drop. We waited up till it was New Year's here in central time zone and then my wife went to bed. I stayed up for a little while fighting my cold and sleep until I feel a sleep on the couch watch Jeff Dunham. I love Achmed the dead terrorist.

Today has been a decent day. I stayed in bed till 12:30 until my wife woke me up to get out of bed. I headed downstairs to gargle with some Listerine and eat a orange. My daughter wasn't up long after I got up before she went down for a nap. My wife left to go shopping and I laid on the couch for a while until I finally got up to clean house a little before my wife got home. My daughter woke up about 20 minutes before my wife got home and I had taken a few pills so I was beginning to feel a little better. My wife later cooked us some chicken fettuccine alfredo for dinner. So now we've caught up with the past few weeks and here we are with me sitting on laying in the floor inside because it was too damn cold outside to finish typing this out there. I've got to get some firewood before I try that again.

Well looking ahead and talking about some of the stuff going on in my head I am looking to do something with my server. I've got 24 days left on my evaluation version of Windows Home Server and I don't really want to drop $160 for an operating system. I really like linuxmce but its still in its infancy and so I'm looking at maybe switching over to FreeNAS. I currently have a server setup as a web server or I could stay with my web host and continue to pay the 11.90 every three months for it.

I've got a feeling this year is going to be a good year for my family and me I hope anyway.