February 2004 Archives
February 22, 2004
So apparently, those annoying little creatures in the Quizno's commercials are spong monkeys.
Now I know what to call all my friends at Boeing. :D At least until April, I guess.
February 15, 2004
Table Saw: $99.
200 square feet of laminate floor padding: $40.
240 square feet of Cherry Ship Deck laminate flooring: $200.
Replacing some truly cheap, ugly carpet with something that looks like beautiful hardwood: Priceless.
I would like to thank my parents for the table saw, the Habitat for Humanity Restore for the cheap materials, and my wife for her patience. :)
February 14, 2004
Okay, so our Valentine's day wasn't exactly what most people would call ideal -- we cleaned, put in about 2/3 of the new floor in the guest room, made dinner, and are now browsing the 'net -- but I've had fun, and so has Jen, so I guess we're all right.
Incidentally, if you buy a bottle of Chambord, and use the included recipe to make raspberry martinis, note that the result is very very very very alcoholic -- roughly 3oz of pure alcohol in each one. I'm having trouble typing. :)
Anyway, the point of this post is that sometimes it still startles me how grateful I am to be who, where, and more importantly, with whom I am. I love you, baby.
As for gifts, I got a nice 3-speed hand mixer. It was very handy when whipping the cream for the chocolate expresso pots de créme. ;)
Hope everyone else had a good V-Day. ;)
February 2, 2004
I swear this weekend was no more than four hours long. We got up on Saturday, cleaned some of the house, went to the grocery, and went out with one of Jen's old classmates from Butler -- at a very cool bar downtown called Lounge (try the White Martini, seriously). Could become a regular hang-out spot for us. Sunday we got up and went to the dog park for a few hours with Megan, Nick, and Tupper, which was pretty fun. Came home, Jen did homework and I wrote some code, we watched the halftime show (what did I think? 1. Totally planned. 2. Meh.) and went to bed. And that was it. I mean, I missed a day in there or something! Sigh.
So the hilarious hiring hijinks are over, happily. We hired the guy I wanted to hire, he starts in two weeks, and we're all anticipating delivering all of our IT problems into his hands at about 9:15 that morning. ;) If he doesn't have a nervous breakdown by about 12, he should be okay.
On the other hand, we may be hiring for two more positions, one of which I would actually have to be involved with, so the whole mad process could be starting up again. On the positive side, hiring some more help would mean I had more time to spend on the uber-cool parts of my job.
I've been getting more interested in Wikis lately. I mean, I'd heard about them before, and had used the Portland Pattern Repository a fair bit, but hadn't had the chance to really investigate before. (For one thing, wikis seemed a bit unstructured for Boeing's environment. ;) At my current job, though, there are huge masses of domain knowledge just floating about, and a Wiki seems like a good way to start fixing that knowledge and making it accessible.
The only problem is that, of the relatively few Wikis designed to run in our (heavily Windows-centric) environment, none were really friendly or intuitive. So, like any good little software engineer, I'm writing my own. :) Oh, sure, I tell myself that it's a great opportunity to learn ASP.Net, practice some design patterns in VB.Net, and end up with a valuable tool for my work life, but the honest truth is that those are just icing on the cake. I like to code, and I don't have the patience to dig through someone else's code and fix what [I think] is wrong with it, so... :)
