There’s an interesting article at ABC News titled Vacation Deprivation about average vacation times in the US compared to the rest of the world. Here’s a nice quote:
If it feels like you’re stuck behind your desk on a sunny summer day while the rest of the world is on vacation, that’s because you are and it is.
I’m using all of my vacation days this summer to attend classes, so I can relate to this.
Maybe we’ll finally be able to eat a meal in peace. I swear some idiot calls trying to sell us something during lunch and dinner every day.
You can now sign up for the National “Do Not Call” List online. Here’s the address – http://www.donotcall.gov/.
Of course 90% of the time I’m on the Internet so I don’t know if anyone’s calling or not, but for the other 10% of the time, maybe the phone won’t ring quite as often.
Summer is flying by. June is almost over. That means I’ll be graduating in about 5 months. Woohoo!
It seems I’ve been to busy to update the site for a while. I’m working hard on a couple of programs right now. Hopefully by the time I graduate I’ll be able to start selling some of my software. We’ll see.
In other news, Apple announced some new computers yesterday. The PowerMac G5. These are a lot faster than the older PowerMacs, but unfortunately they’re still too expensive for regular people to afford.
I’m going to try to get some screenshots of my new programs here soon, and maybe a little info about my upcoming software business…
Paige and I have been married seven years today. It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long really. It kinda seems like we just met, but at the same time I feel like we’ve known each other forever.
Every once in a while, CNN posts an article that just cracks me up. Here’s a quote from their story Flushing Nemo:
“In truth, no one would ever find Nemo and the movie would be called ‘Grinding Nemo,”
That’s right kids, fish flushed down the toilet are ground into bits. Now, enjoy the movie.
After all this time, Metallica have finally released a new album. In case you haven’t been keeping up with Metallica lately, I’ll catch you up: Jason Newstead left the band, now Robert Trujillo (from Suicidal Tendancies, etc.) is playing bass, Kirk grew his hair back out, James went to rehab and he still can’t sing. Enough history, on to my thoughts.
The album was a great value – I got the CD and DVD for only $12.99 at Hastings. It also includes a code that you can use to access some exclusive Metallica stuff online.
Before the album came out I read several favorable reviews that said the songs were heavier and longer, much like on their earlier albums. That’s true, the songs are heavy and long, unfortunately that seems to translate into mostly sloppy and repetitive. Earlier albums had epic songs that filled 7 or 8 with an interesting story. These songs seem more like they were written by a five-year old. Listen to Frantic, tic, tic, tic, tic, tic, tock or Inspector, Rejector, Injector, Protector, Infector (Paige calls it protractor) if you don’t believe me.
I can usually get past bad lyrics and singing if there are enough good guitar solos (I listen to Dream Theater, after all). Unfortunately, the new Metallica album has no guitar solos. That’s right zero, none, not even a hint of a lead guitar part. This album is nothing but heavy, chunky rhythm guitar parts.
After all this you’re probably thinking I hate the album. Actually I listened to it all day in the car today and it’s starting to grow on me. I remember when the black album first came out I couldn’t stand it, and now I actually want to listen to it sometimes. Time will tell for St. Anger. It’ll never be as powerful as Master of Puppets or …And Justice for All, but it will probably always be better than 90% of the garbage that gets released every year.
Today at work I discovered that our site is blocked by the school district’s web filter. I guess it’s because I talk about games a lot. We’ve been going through the same 8e6 Technologies filter for months now, but we just recently started filtering gaming sites.
I guess I’m really wasting my time typing this, since the only people affected by it can’t read it anyway. I’ll get it worked out as soon as possible. In the mean time, people will just have to catch up on my words of wisdom from home…
When you work for a school district, summer is supposed to be a relaxing break. I guess that’s true if you’re a teacher (or a librarian), but it’s certainly not true if you’re a tech.
This summer we’re changing service providers and we’ll also be changing the IP address of every piece of equipment on the network. To make things even more interesting, Dale is retiring (again) so we’re also interviewing people for his position.
My summer class in Commerce starts in the morning at 9:00am. Thankfully, I’m only taking one class this summer (Advanced Database) so it should be pretty easy.
In my spare time I’ve written a web program to schedule teachers for our district technology fair on August 12, and I’m working on a program for our nurses to use to keep up with student immunization info (our CSCI 440 group project) and simple website for the CSCI 440 project.
My forum / message board program is also still floating around in limbo. It’s close enough to being finished now that I should probably go ahead and start using it, but I’m a perfectionist when it comes to things like this.
Finally, I’m also updating my Lua tutorials for the newly released Lua 5.0. The Linux downloads have already been updated. I guess I need to install this on my laptop so I can also update the Windows version. For now, if you’re here looking for Lua tutorials, download the Linux version.
That should update everyone on what I’ve been up to lately.