Chomer Speaks

Well, I’ve sent a message to Val again about my missing DVD. She’s going to work on getting me a copy finally (I ordered it months ago). I don’t think that the problem is Val herself, most likely it is the people she hired to distribute her DVD.

I’m looking forward to getting it Val! Love your show!

Problems come in bunches:

• A bird is building a nest in a vent for my attic (the grate popped out). You can hear him in the ceiling of our bedroom. I’m trying to get a handyman to fix the problem.
• My neck and shoulders are really bothering me and doing something about it is really a hassle. And, of course, when you feel bad, things that are a hassle seem to be even more of a hassle than they really are!
• My external hard drive (1TB) for my MacBook is not powering up at all. This is really a drag (I’ve only had this thing a month or two).
• The project I’m on at work is just a mass of confusion and corporate politics. Man do I hate this thing!

Just doing a little venting…

I’m paying to have a link to my blog on USA Today’s web site. I was given different topics to select from. I had to pick one of the topics to list my blog under. I put it under Technology. I wish they had an Eclectic topic. That would be more relavent. I’m interested in technology so I write about it. But I’m interested in lots of things and I will write about those things too: health (I have health problems), interesting places or people, etc. Maybe some day there will be an Eclectic topic!

My sister told me of her frustration in finding certain information on the internet. She told me how much work she put in digging up the information and how it was too bad that someone didn’t provide a site under said information. “Why don’t we create the site?” I asked her.

We started brain-storming and came up with our idea. I signed up for an Amazon web service. I’m not telling you which one right now because at this point, I want to keep my sister’s and my ideas a secret!

Needless to say, the service going down like that did give me some pause. It also made me think about the design of my site. The whole site will not be on Amazon. The new site will be on my web host and use the Amazon web service in question.  What will happen on my new site if the web service has gone down? I need to take that into consideration.

What information do I cache? Can our users still get some things done on the site if the web service is down?

There was allot of snow that fell yesterday. And then it stopped. My wife and I were suprised when we woke up this morning and there was a huge amount of new snow on the ground… and it was still snowing!

I helped my wife dig the car out of the snow. Unlike most of our neighbors we don’t have a garage.

Suprisingly for me, the “L” was actually running more efficiently today that it has been running of late!

Let’s see, there’s the Six Sigma class coming up in February… my wife is taking two classes in occupational therapy the next two weekends, we just replaced our defective printer, I’ve been buying various books on software management and intros to statistics. I’m toggling back and forth between reading these books (due the subject matter you can only take so much of this stuff at one time)!

On the health / self discipline front my wife and I are doing alot better. No self-medicating by buying and eating junk food / soda. I’ve been walking the stairs (30 floors) almost every day at work. Slowly, some of the physical symtoms I experience in my body are waning/disapating.

Things are REAL SLOW at work right now but I expect that is going to change real soon. And I actually will be glad when that happens.

The tutorial I am making for importing video from a Canon HG10 video camera into Windows MovieMaker is taking longer than expected. But, I have been working on it and it is getting better and better. It will be nice to have a solid and complete tutorial up on chomer.com!

Well, today I have decided that the blog on my site would become my one and only active blog. So it is active: i.e.: there are links to it now! Although the formatting on it is not exactly as I would like, it is still pretty good.

In other news, Sunday is my birthday! Gonna be 45. Tonight I’m going out with some friends to celebrate at Pizzeria Uno. They have this pizza with spinach and broccolli that tastes awesome! That is what I’m am going for!

As usual I’m attempting to do too many things at one time. I signed up for a class on Six Sigma (starts on February 1st), I’ve been reading a book a co-worker has on Lean Six Sigma, I’ve gotten the course materials for the class mentioned and have started going over that material…

Last night I purchased two new books at the local Borders near work. One is on Agile software development and the other is on Lean Software Development (I’m reading the Lean Software Development book on the train to and from work).

Let’s see what else am I juggling at this time? Well, I’m working on getting the format of this Blog (CSS-wise) to be the same as chomer.com. In the evening at home last night I continued working on my web tutorial for getting video from a Canon HG10 video camera into Windows Movie Maker… including shooting some video for the tutorial. I imported some of the video into my PC (for loading into Moviemaker). I imported the rest of the video into my MacBook (iMovie is a much better tool the MovieMaker and I have the option to do so)!

I had my html on the Presentation section and my CSS almost perfect for my wordpress blog here. And then I pasted and saved the CSS code over the header code. No multiple undo here. Booo! Hissss! I’ve got some work ahead of me to undo my blunder.

I want everything to match. Slowly, it is coming along.