Bobbis.net

Fall classes start Monday. Where did the summer go?

What happened since the last post?

Not in any particular order.

• Got a deal on digital cable and cable Internet
• Bought a 3G iPhone and handed down my old iPhone to Gaila (she loves it)
• While purchasing my iPhone, bought a 1TB TimeCapsule. I now have reliable, secure wireless in the apartment. Really great for the iPhone Remote app.
• Setup my parent's iMac. I may have an iPod Touch coming my way.
• Took a class on Windows Vista
• Cleaned up a SQL injection attack on a departmental site
• Rearick family reunion. Too many relatives I didn't even know existed
• Someone was murdered at the Casey's just down the road from us
• Twitter goes over capacity while I try to look back to fill out this list
• Found the video of my co-workers doing a parody of "The Office"
• Did something to my back and saw a chiropractor for the first time
• Google Street View arrives in central Iowa
• Went to the Iowa State Fair. Butter Shawn Johnson anyone?

Gaila and I are still working on wedding plans. The tentative date is May 2, 2009. If anyone has any tips, please let us know. Since we got engaged Gaila's uncle got engaged and will be getting married in October, Meridith got engaged and will be getting married in November, and my brother got engaged and will be getting married in July '09. I think we may have started a trend.

This weekend Gaila and I will be heading down to Ottumwa for the annual tomato and salsa canning party. Next weekend (Labor Day) we'll be camping down in Sailorville with some new friends of ours.

How long until my next update?

Wow, this month has been pretty crazy. What has happened this whole month I haven't posted anything?

First week in June was settling down after the apartments flooded. The weekend after the flooding our landlord was ready to start painting most of the affected apartments. The day before I left for WWDC (Saturday), I helped paint several apartments and hallways. Then, the next day I flew out the San Francisco without really being able to stretch my legs, so the ended up being kind of sore. Pretty much all the tenants are back into their clean apartments now. By the way, Jim is an awesome landlord.

WWDC was lots of fun as always. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to talk about all the cool stuff I learned yet. However, some stuff I learned out there has already become public, such as SproutCore, a JavaScript framework for developing cross-browser, desktop-like web applications. They use it in the coming Mobile Me web applications. The band for the bash was very surprising. The Barenaked Ladies performed for us at the Yerba Buena Gardens. Friday of WWDC I went to Alcatraz with Rod and Shane who are from Iowa State. I took a whole bunch of pictures, mostly of Alcatraz.

The next week was pretty short. Dinner with my parents and Gaila's dad at my parent's place. Caught up on work that accumulated while I was gone. Wednesday morning I had my wisdom teeth removed.

I had all four of my teeth pulled. The top two were easily pulled. The bottom two were impacted, which required they do some cutting in my gums. The pain and the pain-killers as a result pretty much knocked me out through Monday. I was back to work the following Tuesday. I took the rest of that week taking things easy and catch up on more work I missed.

I managed to launch a site for a new major in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences - Global Resource Systems. My boss and I are preparing for a major overhaul to the Brenton Center infrastructure. We'll be rolling out a new Active Directory to replace the current Novell system we are currently running and consolidating file storage to a pair of 12 TB Aberdeen systems (includes the main backup plan for it). I am currently working on an online database for aquatic vegetation that is taking up most of my time right now. I also have plans to redo the scholarship system and implement a content policy for the college site.

This last weekend I saw Wall•E twice. Once with Gaila on Friday night, and once with Brett and a bunch of his friends on Saturday afternoon. Saturday evening was spent hanging out with Brett and his friends at his apartment for his birthday and to say goodbye to him as he is moving to a new job in Kansas. Unfortunately, Gaila worked pretty much all of Saturday.

Sunday, I helped my parents order a new computer (iMac 20") after their 8 year old iMac kicked the bucket. I even managed to get my dad an iPod Touch as a replacement for his PDA that died a few weeks ago. I managed to backup their data so it will be ready when the new machine arrives.

Gaila and I have a tentative date for the wedding on Saturday, May 2nd in Ames. We still need to reserve facilities and plan everything. Buying a house has been put on hold for a while, but it looks like the market keeps moving more to be a buyer's market. I hope I don't miss the opportunity to buy when the market is down. I also broke down and got my own cable internet and digital cable for a reasonable price when it was on sale in June.

For smaller stuff you can follow me on Twitter now.

Gaila and I got a few pictures from the flooding around our apartment today. It seems to have crested around 1pm so, I think we are in the clear. Our landlord has already contacted ServPro for the clean up and is expected to start as soon as the water goes down sometime tomorrow. We may be spending the night at my parent's.

So, I will be going to WWDC this year. Work will be sending me. I have my flight and hotel all squared away. I will be staying at the W San Francisco, only one block from the convention center. The W is a 4-Star hotel I got for $219/night with government discount. Yay for being a state employee. At least four other people from ISU will be going and most of them staying at the W. Colin will be splitting the room with me, unless for some strange reason he doesn't get the WWDC scholarship. I will also be going to a Giants game against Oakland that Friday night. I will be looking forward to perhaps hanging out with Mark who Colin and I met at WWDC 2006 and moved to the Bay Area from Canada just recently.

In other news, my iMac at work has crapped out. For the past couple weeks I have had a few kernel panics. Then, Monday morning the machine wouldn't respond when I woke it up. I did a reboot and it couldn't find the hard drive. Booting from the installer disk revealed that it couldn't find the drive either in System Profiler or Disk Utility. For the time being I am using my personal laptop at work to stuff done. Thankfully I have been keeping Time Machine backups, so I didn't loose anything important.

IgniteIT is coming up this Thursday night at 7pm in the ISU Research Park Rotunda. I suggest any geek/computer type person in Iowa (or anywhere for that matter) consider coming to the event. The event is free, and there will be food and lots of fun entertainment and networking opportunities. If you plan on going be sure to register.

It seems Colin will be giving a couple short, informal, presentations at the event about "Managing Information Overflow" and "Why Your User Interface Sucks". There will also be PowerPoint karaoke. IgniteIT is part of the Emerging Technologies Conference, which is also open to the public and will have some interesting, more formal, presentations.

It has been a while since we have been back from spring break. We took a few pictures for your enjoyment. Here is a quick run-down of what we did.

Monday

St. Patrick's Day. Gaila and I met up with Brett, Sheng, and Colin for lunch at Dublin Bay, and then prepared for the trip.

Tuesday

Drove down, more or less following a more or less planned trip following the Mississippi River in Missouri. We got a few pictures along some road-side parks, but it was really misty and the visibility wasn't the best.

Nearing St. Louis, it began to rain. By the time we got on the interstate leading into town it was coming down pretty hard. Having never been to St. Louis before, Gaila had my iPhone out directing me to the hotel. After arriving and checking in, we went to the House of Savoy, conveniently located in the hotel.

Wednesday

After sleeping in a good while on our overly soft bed, sheets, and pillows, we walked to downtown for breakfast at Teutenberg's then to along Market Street for a stop at Union Station. Gaila got some marbles and a book for her mom that would be given to her for her birthday before we get back, and I got my shot glass. I am getting a shot glass for every major city / place I go to. So far I have picked up San Francisco, Juárez, and St. Louis.

On our way back to the hotel, we stopped to pick up tickets to the Arch. For dinner we ate at Hannegans in Laclede's Landing. We then returned to the hotel to get the car and drive to a show at The Fabulous Fox Theater to see "The Wedding Singer" musical. We enjoyed the show, but we seemed to be more impressed with the theater itself. We noted they had tours and planned to bump our planned zoo trip to get a tour the next day.

Thursday

We slept in a little late, which prompted us to eat self-made sandwiches in the hotel room so we could make it to the tour of the Fox Theater. The theater tour was very nice. Unfortunately, we were not allowed backstage, take pictures of the stage, or get a performance of their big theater organ (Apparently the 2nd largest theater organ behind Radio City Music Hall). We were a few minutes late getting there, but managed to join the tour in progress with the organist at the lobby organ. The tour included stops through the Fox Club and the woman's and men's lounges. Gaila got plenty of pictures.

After the tour, we dropped the car back off at the hotel and headed for the arch via lunch at the nearby Cafe Mattino where Gaila ordered a intensely flavored mango-peach smoothie. When we arrived at the arch, we walked around the National Expansion Museum until it was time for our train to leave for the top of the arch. When we arrived for our appointment, it turned out they were running about 30 minutes behind schedule. To kill time, we spent a few minutes at the gift shop. The train to the top was fairly cramped. There were 8 cars, each seating 5 people snugly. After the arch, we returned to the hotel for a nap, because getting up before noon was way to early for us; plus, we were planning on staying out late.

Once we were well rested, we walked out to BB's Jazz Blues & Soup. We stayed for two sets of live music. The first set was just a guy and a guitar who was pretty good. The second set, things picked up quite a bit. The place filled up as the band was setting up. We ended up staying until around midnight enjoying the music, people watching, and a couple drinks.

Friday

We checkout out of the hotel and went for breakfast at Cafe Mattino before we headed towards Ottumwa. Once we got there we settled in and watched a couple Lipizzaner movies.

Saturday

Gaila went riding with Adrienne and Ashley in the morning while I helped their parents move some furniture to storage and move some other furniture from their old house to the farm we were staying at. By the time it was 4:00 pm or so, it was time to leave for Des Moines after a brief stop at Gaila's cousin's place.

In Des Moines we met with Bob and Marty (Gaila's aunt and uncle who live in Des Moines), Becca, and Gaila's mom for her birthday at Buzzard Billy's where we gave her the book we purchased for her at Union Station. After the good meal, we stopped by Bob and Marty's to see the progress of their kitchen, living room, and dining room remodel.

The way back to home was greeted with falling snow, grocery shopping, getting Gaila's mom's car out of the mud at the redemption center, and a trip to Cold Stone.

So, that was the recap of spring break. We're still waiting for spring to come to Iowa.

Gaila and I have decided to go to St. Louis for spring just because. We will be staying Tuesday through Friday, then heading back via Ottumwa for a day to visit with Gaila's family. The hotel we are staying at is the HoteLumiére. We got a pretty good rate for the 4-Star hotel at $120/night. If anyone has and good ideas for what to do down there, please let us know.

I am posting this from MarsEdit after enabling the XML-RPC plugin for Drupal. I am liking it a lot. Thanks for the tip Colin.

I couldn't get a better picture, my camera doesn't focus that well. I did not get it at K-Mart.

So, I have been working at my new job for a week now and I am already taking care of all the requests that come in for web work, dumped the freshman scholarship data for the selection committee, and attended a couple seminars. I am setting things up to create a streaming server, make the college web site more user friendly, re-do the scholarship system, implement a system for managing users and sites hosted, and started a project showcasing research done at the college. Lots of fun stuff.

The best part is that when I turn around I can see the campanile. I also like the maxed out iMac with an extra display with Adobe Creative Suite Web and being able to walk to campus-town for lunch (with the exception of the bitter cold).

We'll see how things go.

Wow, I guess I did pretty good. With the exception of the iMac, it was basically the whole keynote with the exception of Time Capsule and iPod Touch updates.

It is interesting to see the iPod touch upgrade costs $19.99 and is for sale in the iTunes store. Kind of seems like a dry-run for software installation before the release of the SDK.