Rick's World

Ok, so I am a developer / programmer / software engineer. Choose a name. It doesn't matter to me as long as the paycheck clears! Some people I know get very bent out of shape over titles.

I am a hardcore fan of C and it's related languages (C++, C#, Java, etc.). I am NOT a fan of the 'Basic' style languages (Visual Basic, Delphi. etc.) Why? I don't know. I guess because C style languages are clean and not too wordy, but at the same time are very readable (unless you are one of these programmers who likes to impress people by writing bizarre code - that's a story for another blog). Today I made my first real foray into programming in Visual Basic (shiver). The main reason I don't like Visual Basic is because it's too wordy and it is not a very well designed language. Things have been just tacked onto it for years. It's a mess. Unfortunately, since the project I work on at work is underfunded, I'm the only developer on the project. There is more work than people. Since I'm the only developer available, I had to make some changes to and old version of the web site that goes with the project. This web site was written in Visual Basic 6, a program that is SEVEN years old, and no longer even supported. The site is a confusing mixture of Visual Basic, ASP, and COM+ controls.

In my attempts to get this confusing and ancient mixture of code working on my machine, I managed to screw something up so badly that now I can't compile *ANY* programs in ANY language! Me and several other coworkers spent the afternoon trying to figure out the bizarre set of problems on my machine. So we ended up resorting to the classic Microsoft solutions of 'reboot' and 'reinstall'. Several reboots didn't help. I uninstalled ALL of the development tools and proceeded to start reinstalling everything in the HOPE that it fixes the problem. I will likely be working on this all day tomorrow as well. If the reinstall doesn't work, I'll likely have to send my laptop off to the IT department for a complete reinstall of Windows! Kiss the rest of my week goodbye.

Compound that with other delays and work and today truly sucked. I *HATE* when crap like this wastes time!

Darn it! I promised in my blog yesterday that I was back on my workout program and I was hellbent on doing everything - cardio and weight training every day. I tried, I really did! Unfortunately, thanks' to Miss Rita the Hurricane, the gym closed at 8pm instead of it's usual 10pm. I only had time for a 30 minute cardio session. :( Likely tomorrow, I won't be able to go either, since the gym will be closed due to the hurricane.

Oh well, I guess my next workout will have to be Thursday. I will stick to the nutrition program in the meantime though.

I have a confession to make. I have been doing very badly on my efforts to get myself in shape lately. I've become entirely too comfortable with the new 'slim Rick' and as such I've gotten lazy. I've been cheating on my nutrition program a lot. I refuse to call it a 'diet' because the word 'diet' implies something temporary you do to 'lose a few pounds'. This is not temporary. This is permanent. We are talking the rest of my life here. Keeping yourself in shape is an endless, continuous battle. You can't let up for a second! It must be a driving force in your life, 24 hours a day. One slip up and you can easily undo weeks of success. There are too many temptations that you are constantly exposed to over the course of the day to ever let your guard down. Now granted, it's not like I've cheated so bad I've blown up and gained 50 lbs or anthing like that. More like 5-10 pounds. Yeah, yeah, I know. Most of you out there are thinking, "5-10 pounds? So what? That's nothing!" On the contrary, for me, that is everything. At my lowest point, I was at 197 lbs, a 34-36 waist, and like 13% body fat. These days my weight averages 205-210 and 36 waist jeans are starting to get snug on me. Before I was going to the gym 4-5 times a day, with regular cardio and weight training. Now I'm going maybe 1-2 times a week with no weight training at all.

This is not acceptable.

Here is my promise: Effective immediately I am back hardcore on the "Rick Workout Program". No more cheating. No more skipping the gym. No more subs at Quiznos. No more Frostys at Wendy's. No more pretzels at Auntie Anne's. No more eating out several times a week. As of now, I'm back on the 4-5 days a week workout and cardio program. I will not miss a day. I am also hereby restricting myself to 1 eating out a week.

This is fair warning to my family and friends that often invite me out for dinner. I will be turning your invitations down. This is not because I dislike your company or I am trying to be antisocial, but because sacrifices must be made. It is nothing personal.

I hereby encourage everyone who knows me and reads this to get on my case and push me to not cheat and to yell at me when I do!

My friend, and 'guitar guru' Dave, made a good point in his blog today. He talks about how you need to be consistent in your pursuit of something. In his case it was karate, reading and the gym. In my case, it's mostly the guitar and the gym. I tried karate a few years ago, and found it interesting, but not interesting enough to devote the time to that it deserved. If you live in the South Florida area and want to take a fantastic free Karate course, drop me a line and I'll send you info on it.

What Dave would call his pursuit of consistency is what I would call time management. I'm a busy guy. Between work, working out, learning the guitar, cleaning the house, feeding the cat, running errands etc., it is difficult to find the time in the day to do all these things. The only way to do this is to plan out your time every day very precisely. Something I haven't been doing very well lately.

I've got the whole nutrition program pretty much down to a science and that has freed up a lot of time for me. I only cook my meals about once very 2 weeks! I make up a huge batch of food and portion it out into plastic containers and stick these in the fridge. Then, every morning I grab two of the containers (one for lunch, one for dinner) and take them to work. That takes care of most of my meals for the day. Add to that a bowl of oatmeal in the morning for breakfast, and several apples and banannas spread out over the day and my cooking is done. Not having to cook dinner every night not only saves me at least an hour a day, but I save power and water by not having to run the dishwasher every day. While my weekly eating is very good, my weekend eating isn't as good. I eat out just about every meal on the weekends and that's bad for my waistline. Got to get that back on track.

I used to be very strict about going to the gym every day. I've been very bad about that lately. I usually go in the evenings and the gym normally eats up a couple hours in the evening (what with driving time, working out, cardio etc.) and I hate to lose what little free time I have in the evenings to this. I need to get this back on track. They are building a new gym about 1/2 mile from my office. When that opens, that will save me a lot of time, but that's still months away. In the meantime, I need to get myself back into the habit.

As for the guitar, I've been trying to devote 30 minutes a day to it. It's been a rough effort lately due to all the boring practice, but I am making progress and that is encouraging me to continue. I know I have a LONG way to go. I won't be an expert player for a long time. I don't always get that 30 minutes in. Sometimes it's 20 minutes, sometimes its nothing. Yet another habit I need to improve.

And finally, the biggest time waster of all time - my computer(s). I swear, if I sit down in front of that damn thing in the evening, it sucks me in and the entire evening dissapears. I have to learn to turn the damn thing off and not use it so much in the evenings. I'll suddenly discover a lot more time to do things if I do that.

Ok, so I've been trying to learn to play the electric guitar over the last few months, as I'm sure you know from my previous blogs. My friend Dave has been a big help in answering all my questions and being my 'goto guru' for things. I thought I'd give a little update on how things are going.

I'm still in the early stages of things. I'm still learning where the notes are on the fretboard and getting used to all the finger movements. This means that a lot of what I do these days is simple practicing. Lots of things like scales, finger stretching exercises, experimenting with alternate picking, things like that. I'm not really playing a whole lot of songs yet. I've been trying to learn a fairly simple 2 string song and making good progress. My ability to move from one string to another has become much better. When I first started, I was always 'misfiring' and managing to hit two strings at once. Now I can hit the strings pretty cleanly without hitting any other strings. I still have some trouble with the pinky finger in stretching it out to hit the fourth fret, but it's getting better. I still need a lot of practice, but things are slowly improving. All this practicing is very dull and frustrating, and at times I have to force myself to do it. I have been doing it as often as I can. I think the more I do it, the more I progress, the more I will want to do it. It's just hard to get past this opening stage.

I did spend 30 minutes last night doing finger stretching exercises. For the first time in a while, I was actually enjoying the practicing! That 30 minutes flew by! Fingers 1, 2, and 3, are fretting pretty good, but the pinky finger (finger 4) is still kind of off. I have to work some more on the stretch on that one. I did notice significant improvement over my previous attempts at this. My fingers were hitting the right spots a lot faster and with less discomfort. I'm quite pleased by what I saw last night. I did notice that my picking hand had a habit of drifting down towards the end of the guitar as I was practicing. I suspect this happens when I switch strings. I seem to be 'finding' the right string to switch to pretty well now, but I am still drifting a bit on hand placement. Gotta work on that.

One of my readers (wow, I have readers?) asked if it was possible to block IP addresses. Yes, Christine, I ended up blocking this person's IP address in Mexico and my hits dropped from their 2000/day back to the normal 200/day. Looks like that one guy/girl was the source of much of my porn referer spam. The porn referer spam seems to have largely dried up. I only get a few of them lately. Looks like I fixed the blog weirdness. Thanks for reminding me to update the story, Christine!

I've been trying out the new Firefox 1.5 beta 1 on my Mac for the last couple of days. I have to say, I like it. It works well. They even seem to have fixed the shutdown problem I was having on the Mac! (Basically, the old version of Firefox would NEVER shut down. It would stay stuck in memory forever).

Kudos to Mozilla for coming out with another great product! You gotta love open source software!

Today is the 4 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. They say that you never forget where you were when you found out about some major event in the world. This is true for me for when the Challenger exploded and it is also true of the 9/11 events. I wanted to share a few memories of that day.

I remember driving to work that day, listening to the news on the radio. I usually listen to the news in the morning because I can't stand most morning radio (Howard Stern, Paul & Ron). It's just a couple of idiots blabbing about nothing for several hours. I'd rather listen to the news. Anyway, I was nearing my office (running a bit late for work.) I was maybe 5 minutes from the office when I heard a news report that a plane had hit one of the two World Trade Center Towers. My first thought was probably the same thought as everyone else when they heard this. I thought, "Oh, it's just some little one seater plane that went off course and crashed. Knocked out a few windows. No big deal. As I continued to drive, they said that it appeared to be a full size passenger jet. As soon as I heard this, I thought "Uh, oh. That's a big plane. This is bad." I was only listening to the radio here. I had not seen any footage of it yet. Right as I'm pulling into the parking lot of the office, I am listening to someone on the radio being interviewed about what he saw of the plane hitting the tower. In the middle of the interview, the second plane hits, right as the person being interviewed is watching. They guy on the radio says something like 'Oh my God, another plane just hit the other tower!" As soon as I heard this, I thought, "OK, two planes hitting two towers within a few minutes of each other. This is not an accident."

I walked into the office, excited and said to one of my coworkers as I walked in, "Did you hear the news?" He said "Yeah, a plane hit the World Trade Center." I answered back, "No, a second plane hit the other tower!" He had a look of shock on his face. We all went off to another room to watch the news.

At the time, I worked for a company that did software for daytrading. As such, we had a large group of daytraders (around 50 or so of them) in another room using our software to daytrade the stock markets. The stock market normally opens at 930am. It was a few minutes after 9am at the time we walked into their room. In the trading room, they had several TVs mounted on the wall, normally so the traders could watch CNBC as they traded. Normally, if you walk into the trading room this close to the opening of trading, the traders are intently staring at their screens, planning their trades for the day and even entering a few starting trades. They are very focused and will bite your head off if you even whisper in the room. Not today. Today, not one of these guys was even at their screen. They were all gathered around the TV watching in shock as CNN carried the footage of the burning World Trade Centers. This was my first view of it. Everyone was talking about it, and watching the screen. They all seemed to have forgotten completely about trading. The stock market trading ended up getting cancelled that day anyway. Noone was working in the entire office. We were all glued to the TV. Normally, the boss would be upset by this. This time noone cared. I remember standing there looking at the two burning towers on TV and saying to a friend next to me "Can those towers survive that much damage?" My friend assured me that the buildings were build well and would survive. I thought that the floors above the burning hole would collapse. I never expected the whole building to collapse. A short time later, they both did. As the towers collapsed, I sat there watching them fall and I was thinking, "My God, I'm watching 5000 people die."

Later, another plane hit the Pentagon and another one crashed in the woods in Pennsylvania. Supposedly this one that crashed in the woods was meant to hit the White House, but the passengers found out what was going on in New York and stopped the hijackers. Good for them. By the time the fourth plane had hit, my boss, a very excitable woman, was now running around in near hysterics over what was happening. It was damn near impossible to concentrate that day with all these events on your mind. I don't think anyone got any work done. When I look back on this day, I think it is the day where my future at this trading company started to end. 9/11 caused the stock market to close for 2 weeks (I think it was). When it finally did reopen, the stock market started a nosedive that sent the economy and the stock market into a plunge that lasted several years. As the stock market plunged, we lost more and more daytraders, and so we lost more and more money. Eventually the company went out of business and I had to find other work. At the time, the economy was very bad and finding work for a programmer was damn near impossible. I was laid off from the company but after 3 months of unemployment I ended up taking a pay cut to go back to the same company to do some other non-trading related work. I ended up staying in that miserable place, making lousy pay for another 1 1/2 years before I finally found the job I'm at now and left there in December of 2004. I am MUCH happier at my new job (and making a good deal more money too).

Just got the Powermac back from the Apple Store and it seems to be working now. It also feels a lot faster now that it has twice the CPUs! :)

I also had a chance to play with the new iPod nano. It's pretty nice. The click wheel works well, it weighs practially nothing, and the color screen, while very small is quite readable. The only two things I noticed about it that were unusual, is that the headphone plug is on the bottom of it and the hold button on the top is reversed from the usual iPod hold button. On most iPods, if you slide the hold button to the left, it locks the keys on the iPod. On the iPod nano, you have to slide it to the right to lock it. It is also a bit unusual in that the dock plug on the bottom is not centered. It sits over to the left side of the bottom. I imagine this was done to make space for the headphone plug, but it gives ia an odd 'uneven' look when the dock cable is plugged in. I suspect that the headphone plug was moved to the bottom so that you could wear it hanging from your neck while working out (using the really cool combination neck lanyard and headphone accessory that they have coming out soon). They had a lot of them in stock at the store today, but they appeared to be selling like crazy. They had already sold out of the black 4GB ones. Not surprising. I figured the black one would sell VERY well. One other thing I noticed about it, that is not apparent from the photos online is that the entire front of it is covered by a thin, clear layer of plastic. You essentially have the silver back, the white 'center' and then the clear top. I guess this clear top is to protect the screen. The feel of the iPod Nano kind of reminds me of those credit card calculators you see sometimes (but a bit thicker)

Nice little gizmo. Now if only they could make a 40GB version of that thing, I'd buy one in a heartbeat.

*sigh*

I just noticed today that my newly repaired dual processor PowerMac only has 1 processor in it! This means that they forgot to replace the second one. Essentially I only got back half the computer I was supposed to get. It took me a week to even notice this.

I'm off to the Apple Store tomorrow to get this problem fixed. Dammit, I love Apple products, but this is starting to piss me off!