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Mon, 22 Dec 2003

I am Scooter.
scoot jpeg
You are a loyal, hardworking person, better known
as a doormat.

SPECIAL TALENTS: Going for stuff.

LEAST FAVORITE MOVIE: "Go For Broke!"

QUOTE: "15 seconds to showtime."

LAST BOOK READ: "300 New Ways to Get Your Uncle to Get You a Better Job "

NEVER LEAVES HOME WITHOUT: Coffee, clipboard, and Very Special Guest Stars.

What Muppet are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
posted at: 14:05 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Wed, 17 Dec 2003

I'm now an official CPAN author.
My very first published work.
posted at: 16:33 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Tue, 25 Nov 2003

Morons

So I called Dell today to try to find out how much a new battery costs. I hate calling places like that. The people I speak to are idiots. It took him forever just to find out which battery worked on my laptop. Once he did, he gave me a quote of $149. I asked him for the part number. He wouldn't give it to me!

He wanted to know why I wanted to know the part number. I told him that I wasn't prepared to spend that much today. He put me on hold. Next thing I know, he's quoting me $70 for the exact same battery! What a jerk.

I had fully intended to buy the battery from Dell, but now I think I'm going to have to find some place else that can sell me the same battery.


posted at: 12:57 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Mon, 24 Nov 2003

Annoying Dell.

The battery on my laptop died. Actually, it's almost dead. A fully charged battery now lasts for about 7 minutes before its gone. I called Dell support to find out if its still covered by the warranty. They told me that the warranty on batteries is only good for one year. At least I think that's what they told me. I think it's interesting that when you watch all of those dell commercials on tv, everybody speaks fluent English. In reality, that isn't the case.

Oh well, now I guess I know what I want Santa to bring me.


posted at: 23:50 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Sat, 01 Nov 2003

Whiteboard mania!

I have now installed a 4 foot by 8 foot whiteboard in my personal room. Total cost was less than thirteen dollars, thanks to Lowes. I bought a sheet of masonite for ten bucks and a little bit of hardware, and now I have a functional dry-erase board. Every programmer wishes that all walls where made of whiteboard. I'm just doing my little bit to help.


posted at: 21:43 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Fri, 31 Oct 2003

Trick or Treat

Natalie and Leanne went out trick or treating this evening. Natalie went as a big pumpkin. They were gone for about a half an hour before Natalie started getting out of control. Then they came back.

I also got my own treat today. I bought a new 21-inch monitor for home. My other monitor was a 19 inch monitor that fried itself. I've been using an old crappy monitor that I've had sitting around forever. After about 5 months, it was finally time to get something nice again.


posted at: 19:23 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

A mouse in the house

You'd think most cats would chase mice and occasionally eat them, wouldn't you?

Not our cat! He's an indoor cat with a habit of escaping. Well, this week he escaped out of the house, and then escaped back into the house carrying.. you guessed it.. a mouse!

Upon entering the house, what did he do? He let it go!! So we now have a tiny little mouse running around in the house somewhere. Personally, I'd rather keep the mouse and get rid of the cat.


posted at: 00:38 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Tue, 28 Oct 2003

Visible progress at last!

I finally have something to show for all of my work! OA6.org is now running completely under HTML::Mason! One new cool thing is a new home page with a tabbed-folder look. The images that form the corners of the rounded boxes are being generated dynamically, so I can change the shape and color of that box without having to build new images. I also added caching to the trading directory, which dramatically reduces the number of required database connections.

Now that step one is completed, I can move on to step 2.. that is actually developing new features for the site. The whole intent of moving to Mason and Class::DBI was that this would hopefully make it easier for me to work on the actual code for the site and not be bogged down by a cumbersome ad-hoc framework. We'll see how well that works.


posted at: 23:33 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Sat, 25 Oct 2003

Cleaning the code

I got a lot of work done with OA6.org today. I removed a lot of code that I'm not using any more. I also improved my use of Class::DBI by using a script written by Casey West which does a lot of cool auto-generation of Class::DBI definitions in a perl Module rather than requiring that Class::DBI::MySQL make a socket connection and describe the database every time it compiles. Much more efficient in a CGI environment.

Now that I have everything running in Mason, and I have everything running in Class::DBI, my next step is the step that I've been dreading.. It's time to come up with a new look and feel for the site. I have no idea what that is going to be yet, except that it has to encompass the change in theme for the site.


posted at: 17:24 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Wed, 15 Oct 2003

Busy weekend.

Saturday was spent cutting the grass, and working on wagion.org. Now there is some stuff up there about the October weekend. My next goal is to get the chairman to start taking advantage of the HTML::FromText stuff that I hacked in and let him do some work on the site on his own.

Natalie's cousin had her first birthday this weekend, so we went to Chuck-E-Cheese on Sunday. We spent several hours there. Then Leanne's parents watched Natalie while Leanne and I went to see a movie. We went to see "Cold Creek Manor". It was a stupid pointless movie. The plot was paper thin with no suspense. The acting wasn't even that good.

I took Monday off and spent that day cleaning out the shed. Now we have room for more junk.


posted at: 04:10 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Fri, 10 Oct 2003

Looking down a very long road.

The new project I have been anticipating looms on the horizon now. Its a precarious position to be in. The decisions made in the next few months could shape how the next 5 years will be. Rash decisions, jumping to code, forgetting decisions, and cutting corners are really big things on my mind right now.

One of the really true things that I've learned over and over in life is that you don't have to be in charge to be a leader. My goal over the next few months will be to balance the high-wire that is listening to other people, learning from what they have to say, and teach them what I have to offer all at the time.

In other news, I'm going to the Order of the Arrow N.L.A.T.S (National Lodge Adviser Training Seminar) this spring. Hopefully this will give me a leg-up into higher leadership positions in the lodge.

And in even other news, I now have a fully operating version of patchtrader.info working in a Mason Framework. Once I clean up my code a little bit, I plan on deploying it and then implementing some of the new features that I've been planning for a while now.


posted at: 22:55 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Thu, 09 Oct 2003

Random stuff.

I Attended the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers meeting last night. I had a good time and learned a bit about Perl. I also learned a bit about the Perl culture. Its interesting how much the people around me influence the way I think.

I'm continuing on in my endeavors to learn Mason. I've almost completed the book, and feel a bit more comfortable with its usage. I'm beginning to formulate some ideas for patchtrader.info. My hopes are that once I'm done reading about mason, I'll have enough ideas that I can develop the site much faster than I could before.

In other news, I'm thinking about trading my Blazer in for a new vehicle. I'm not sure when that will happen.


posted at: 02:59 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Mon, 06 Oct 2003

OA Weekend

I attended the Wagion Lodge #6 OA weekend this past Weekend. The weather could have been nicer. But at least some progress was made. My chairman was there and he did work hard to get some video put together that we will be able to convert into something useful for the web site.

I'm continuing my reading of the O'Reily "Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason" book. Its getting very hard to resist the temptation to put the book down and start playing with everything. I'm resisting the temptation because I really want to learn as much as I can before diving into my next project, which will be a revamp of patchtrader.info. I got burned the last time I tried to do stuff with it because I jumped into coding way too fast.

In other news, pairNIC development is starting to calm down. I still have a few pet projects (like SPF records in custom DNS) that I'm trying to get out the door. But things aren't crazy like they were. Our next big project, which isn't going to deal that much with pairNIC, is on the horizon though. We start planning meetings for that on Thursday. I'd expect that we'll be planning that system for at least a few months.


posted at: 23:33 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Sun, 28 Sep 2003

Steelers game

One of the Vendors I deal with at work gave me two tickets to the Steelers game that went on last Sunday. I took my Dad and we had a great time. We ate brunch at the Allegheny club prior to the game and we sat in really great seats. It was a good day. It almost made up for missing out on the Gateway Clipper cruise.
posted at: 18:00 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Sat, 27 Sep 2003

A great day for a boat ride.

The weather was really nice this afternoon. Somewhat un-expected for this late in the year. It was a really great day for a boat ride on the Gateway Clipper Fleet in Pittsburgh. pair Networks paid for a lunch cruise on the Clipper fleet for all of its employees.

Too bad I didn't get to actually go on the boat. After struggling for two hours to get Leanne ready to leave as she poked along slowly, we got there just as the boat was blowing the horn and they were un-tying the ropes. We were told that it was too late to board. So we got to stand there and watch as the boat left without us.

Its too bad. I really wanted to go. This makes three pair Events in a row that I haven't made it to. In June, I ended up in the hospital emergency room on the day of the event, and in July my mother died on the day that pair went to Kennywood. I think I'm just going to stop planning on attending these events. They are way too depressing.
posted at: 23:24 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Fri, 26 Sep 2003

pairNIC 2.6 is out.

This news is a few days late, but pairNIC version 2.6 is finally out! I've been working on it since January, and it feels good to be done with it. The external differences aren't all that much, but there was a lot of internal re-working required to make it do all that its doing internally now. The scalability factor has now been increased by an order of magnitude at least.

There might or might not be a version 2.8. There will be some more improvements to version 2.6 that won't be given a new version number, though. Version 3.0 will likely not be out until Spring 2005 at its earliest. My guess is that 3.0 will be the version to support resellers. But that is so far away, who knows what might happen in the mean-time.

All I know is that its nice to have a little more variety now. I've been spending the last few days closing out tiny requests that have been building up. Programming is more fun when you get to change gears often.
posted at: 20:56 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Thu, 25 Sep 2003

But I already said that!!!

I'm finding that a lot of the ideas that I'm expressing at work are being dismissed only to come up later in the mouths of other people. I think part of the problem I have is that I'm so concerned about learning as much as I can from the people around me, that I've implicitly come to put greater value on the opinions of my peers than on my own opinions. Consequently, I'm finding myself backing down way too quickly when I should be sticking to my guns.

I've had plenty of hard knocks in life that have taught me the dangers of being over-confident in myself. I believe it might be the case that I am over-compensating. Or perhaps self-confidence is something which should be variable depending on who you are dealing with.

I'm also coming to a revelation about programming methodologies. They don't work. The struggle for the ultimate, most efficient programming methodology is ultimately fruitless. There are far too many variables and not nearly enough constants. Once you lock yourself into one way of programming, you have doomed yourself into a downward spiral of bad programming. Things that effect this:

What is my conclusion? There is no black and white, even something that might otherwise be thought to be as cut and dry as programming. People leak into everything, and they bring those people things with them. The only truth is that if you thump your chest too hard and claim to be correct, you will ultimately prove to be wrong.

Oh.. and if you don't get this, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm wrong, it just might mean that you don't get it.
posted at: 12:43 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Tue, 23 Sep 2003

Natalie's birthday movie

So far, I've produced a video each year for my daughter's birtday containing clips and snapshots of her from the previous year. I'm not going to make it public, but if you email me, I can send you the private address where it can be downloaded.


posted at: 18:53 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Mon, 15 Sep 2003

Went to Pinburgh last weekend.

Every year, my boss runs an international pinball tournament known as "Pinburgh". I spent last weekend helping keep scores and doing whatever else needed to get done. I had a pretty good time. Pinball machines are really neat, but they are also really expensive and keeping them well maintained is also really expensive. My goal is to some day own my own ski-ball machine.


posted at: 19:37 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Tue, 26 Aug 2003

It arrived today!

My diploma finally arrived in the mail today! I have officially graduated from college with a Bachelor's degree! I only wish it could have happened one month sooner.


posted at: 17:44 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Thu, 21 Aug 2003

The final leg of the battle

I spoke with my professor today. She has turned my grade in to the school. Now I just need to say many many prayers that the registrars office doesn't come up with some reason why I can't graduate.

They did that to me a few years ago when I thought that I had everything done. It turns out that their system had given me double-credit for some classes and as a result, I had all the classes I needed, but I was a few credits short of the 120 credit graduation requirement.

This time, I think I may have had this application blessed by enough people, and I think I've done enough pagan sacrifices (no, not really) that the application should go through. Nevertheless, I'll be calling them a few times until I've got the diploma in my hand.


posted at: 22:23 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Wed, 20 Aug 2003

Adventures in UPJ world.

Its amazing. I still remember my freshman orientation. I was so excited to be going to that school. Everything was wonderfully organized. All the events were planned out in thorough detail. It was such a culture shock to be somewhere where all the things were not just thrown together at the last moment. I thought there could be nothing better.

That was a long time ago. Times have changed. I'm still waiting to hear about my degree. It turns out that my professor just disappeared for about a month during the time I was doing my directed study. She didn't even get back until after she was supposed to turn in my grade. As a result, I got an incomplete grade. She has all of my stuff now, and I'm hoping that she can get that grade changed by Thursday. If she does, I'll get my diploma mailed to me on Friday. If she doesn't, I don't know what will happen.

Note to self: if ever thinking about going back to Pitt for masters degree, bludgeon self with rock.


posted at: 15:25 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Mon, 18 Aug 2003

Had a good time at the OA Weekend

Last weekend was the fellowship weekend for Wagion Lodge 6. I had a good time up there. I spent a majority of Saturday working with my new chairman for the Web-tech committee. I think he will do a good job this year. We have a lot of plans. If we get most of them done, it will be a successful year.

Two weeks to go to finish pairNIC 2.6. Natalie's birthday party is coming up. Hopefully, I will get everything in to finish my degree this week. I'm really looking forward to being done with this month. I'm also really looking forward to taking a vacation very soon.


posted at: 19:49 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Thu, 14 Aug 2003

Got acpi fixed on my Dell Inspiron 8200

Finally, I got acpi to stop dumping all of those annoying warnings at me on my Inspiron 8200! Credit goes to Mark Santcroos. If you are in the same boat as I was, you will need to check out this page.

That was half the fix for me, but I couldn't get the dsdt to compile. I kept getting this instead:

dell.dsl   346:     Method (STRC, 2, NotSerialized)
Warning  2019 -                ^ Not all control paths return a value (STRC)

dell.dsl   391:                 If (STRC (\_OS, W98S))
Warning  2030 -                        ^ Called method may not always return a value

dell.dsl   396:                 If (STRC (\_OS, NT5S))
Warning  2030 -                        ^ Called method may not always return a value

dell.dsl   401:                 If (STRC (\_OS, WINM))
Warning  2030 -                        ^ Called method may not always return a value

dell.dsl   703:     Method (\_WAK, 1, NotSerialized)
Warning  2026 -                 ^ Reserved method must return a value (_WAK)

dell.dsl  2156:             Field (\_SB.PCI0.ISAB.FDIS, DWordAcc, NoLock, Preserve)
Error    1047 -                                      ^ Access width is greater than region size

dell.dsl  2159:                 F0DS,   1, 
Error    1051 -                    ^ Access width of Field Unit extends beyond region limit

dell.dsl  2160:                 F1DS,   1, 
Error    1051 -                    ^ Access width of Field Unit extends beyond region limit

dell.dsl  2161:                 F2DS,   1
Error    1051 -                    ^ Access width of Field Unit extends beyond region limit

The solution (written by Mark) was to apply this additional patch:

--- dell.dsl        Tue Aug  5 16:03:45 2003
+++ djwright.dsl        Tue Aug  5 16:09:26 2003
@@ -373,6 +373,8 @@
 
             Increment (Local0)
         }
+
+                Return (One)
     }
 
     Method (OSID, 0, NotSerialized)
@@ -732,6 +734,7 @@
         }
 
         Store (Local0, MIS2)
+                Return (Zero)
     }
 
     Method (NWAK, 0, NotSerialized)
@@ -2153,7 +2156,7 @@
                 U0BS,   32
             }
 
-            Field (\_SB.PCI0.ISAB.FDIS, DWordAcc, NoLock, Preserve)
+            Field (\_SB.PCI0.ISAB.FDIS, WordAcc, NoLock, Preserve)
             {
                 Offset (0x01), 
                 F0DS,   1, 

-- 

I just think it is very cool when open-sourcing actually works the way that it is supposed to.


posted at: 15:31 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Tue, 12 Aug 2003

Trying to graduate

Well, as soon as I hear from my professor, I should be able to get the final grade that I need for my bachelors degree. It turns out, that it will only be a few weeks to late for my mother to know about. She had looked forward to me graduating for much longer than she should have needed to. I regret missing all those opportunities to graduate in the past, but sometimes I wonder if I would have been content with where my life would have led if I had taken those other paths previously. I think doing things the hard way has forced me to mature a bit, and that's probably a good thing.

It looks like August is going to be a busy time for me. I'm trying to get pairNIC version 2.6 done this month. I'm also getting ready to go to an OA weekend and train the new web-tech chairman that I will be advising next year. Natalie will be having her birthday party this month. Leanne and I are planning a Vacation very soon. Oh, and did I mention that I should be getting my degree?

In the programming arena, I've recently been exposed to Class::DBI. It seems to be a very good database abstraction module. I expect I'll probably start using it quite frequently in my coding from now on. I'm also beginning to finally "get it" as to why mason is neat. I've been playing with it more and more, and I'm getting more comfortable with it. Hopefully, this will help me build web sites more quickly in the future.

I've also been keeping a close eye on the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit. I think this lawsuit is probably the best thing that could have happened to IBM. They are getting tons of free publicity and gaining credibility in a certain section of the open-source community that they didn't really have before.


posted at: 01:24 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Sat, 02 Aug 2003

A very long week

My mother's funeral was on Thursday. That took a lot out of me. All in all, I guess I'm doing pretty well. That kind of scares me. I wonder if the reality just hasn't set in yet.

I'm still fighting a deadline to get my school work done. I'm really down to the wire now on that.

I spent some time today trying to get FreeBSD 5.1-CURRENT running on my Dell Inspiron 8200 along with mysql and other stuff so that I can develop from my laptop. I haven't had much success. There are some well known problems with the ACPI driver that are standing in my way. There have been some patches posted, but they haven't helped me yet.
posted at: 02:36 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Sun, 27 Jul 2003

Suzzanne L. Wright (5/8/1938 - 7/27/2003)

My mother passed away today. That really sucks. I'm glad for the time we had together, and I'm grateful for the example that she provided for me. I guess there isn't much else that needs to be said.


posted at: 16:56 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Thu, 17 Jul 2003

Progress continues

I got some more work done on patchtrader.info today. Which is a good thing, since I have to have it done in August if I want to get my degree.

I'm running into a problem where I find myself focusing more on the interface than on the actual programming. I'm not sure what that means. Ideally, I'd like to be able to push through the code and build a minimal interface until I'm finished with the code. Unfortunately, it seems that in order to test any of my code as I go, it requires that I build a full interface also as I go. The result is that I'm dividing my concentration between two tasks that are really dis-similar. That's both distracting and de-moralizing. Its de-moralizing because it takes a task that I know I should be able to complete in very short order and turns it into something that is taking forever.

I'm starting to wish that I had a mod_perl server to play with. I think this would be an ideal project for learning how to use Mason. In the mean-time I'm just pushing for getting it done and leaving efficiency for later. As long as I can demonstrate the code works, I get my degree. Then, I'll worry about making it work without crashing the server when more than three people hit it at the same time.


posted at: 20:52 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Wed, 16 Jul 2003

A hint of progress

pairNIC 2.6 is slowly coming together. Most of the big design decisions are behind me, and I'm getting to the point where I can write code that can actually be run. That is always a good feeling. It lets me know that everything up to this point really did have a valid purpose.


posted at: 23:47 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Coding like crazy..

I'm getting really tired of working on pairNIC version 2.6. The features are going to be really cool and all, but this is becoming the project that just wont die...

Every time I think I'm on the last component, I realize I need to create two or three new components. Or, while I'm working on a new component, I realize I need to go back and change the way I did things in a previous component. System integration really sucks. I have the utmost admiration for people who design aircraft or spaceships or anything that requires taking everybody's different stuff and making it all work together.

In other news: no, wait... there is no other news. I've been working 10 hour days on pairNIC. Between finishing my directed study project for school and doing actual work, this is becoming the programming week from hell.


posted at: 00:37 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Mon, 14 Jul 2003

While the cat's away..

Leanne went on vacation with Natalie. She went off to the beach with her parents, so I've got the house to myself. I'm finding myself with all sorts of extra time now.

On Friday, I went to a scouting meeting at a friends house. We ended up watching movies once the meeting was over, I finally made it home around 2:30.

I spent most of Saturday doing desperately needed yard work.

On Sunday, I started the day working on my fish tank. I bought some new plants and cleaned it up a little bit. Then, I visited with my parents for a few hours. Finally, I came home and spent some time working on wagion.org

Today was a big day at work. We finally got another programmer. Today was his first day. Hopefully we will get some more and then maybe we will be able to keep up with the work load. Having Leanne away is also giving me an opportunity to get some extra overtime.


posted at: 22:31 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Wed, 09 Jul 2003

Got a new keyboard at work.

My old keyboard died when a bottle of soda exploded over top of it. My new keyboard is a Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard. I'm sure its nice if you are using a Microsoft OS, but for FreeBSD, its horrible. Took me a while just to get the F-Keys to work in X-Windows. They got rid of the scroll lock and insert keys! I guess that's because MS users don't have much use for them, but I sure do. I keep trying to do shift-insert to past my copy buffer, but it just doesn't work. There's a bunch of neat buttons at the top of the keyboard, but I think I'm going to have to wait until somebody comes up with an xkb mapping for them before I'll be able to use them for anything. Google found only one other person that was trying to do the same thing as me, but without luck. I guess I'm going to need to wait until more people start using these.


posted at: 23:57 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Wed, 25 Jun 2003

I learned a good bit about using perl modules to parse HTML today.

I did a bit of research in using HTML::LinkExtor, HTML::Parser and HTML::TreeBuilder.

The problem I had was that originally I had been doing some very simple stuff on www.patchtrader.info where a user would log in, edit one page worth of data and then submit the form. Now, I'm planning on expanding the functionality so that once you are logged in, you will stay logged in and will have more stuff you can do.

I don't like cookies, so my only choice is to encode session data into all of the URL's. Since almost all of the links are GET links, I needed to encode my session data in every single link. I could write some template closure to generate the links, but that would mean always having to use some contrived method of generating links. Worse yet, it means going back and updating all of my previous links. I wanted perl to do the thinking for me.

I finally ended up using HTML::TreeBuilder so that I could magically re-write the output of my web pages so that they always encode session information without having to re-write all of my templates:

sub add_sessions {
    my $root = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content( shift() );
    my $session = shift;

    foreach my $link ($root->look_down( '_tag', 'a' ) ) {
        next unless my $url = $link->attr('href');

        if ( $url =~ m|://([^/]*)/| ) {
            # $owned_sites is a file scope lexical compiled regexp
            # at the top of the file.
            next if ( $1 !~ $owned_sites );
        }
        
        # Look for mailto: links.
        next if ( $url =~ m|^[^/]*:| );

        my ( $path, $params ) = split /\?/, $url, 2;
        my %params = map { split( /=/, $_, 2 ) } split( /&/, $params );
        $params{session} ||= $session;

        $url = join( '?', $path, join( '&', map { "$_=$params{$_}" } keys( %params ) ) );
        $link->attr('href', $url);
    }

    my $html = $root->as_HTML;
    $root->delete();

    return $html;
}

I know I should probably use URI::URL instead of parsing those url's by hand, but that is a project for another day.


posted at: 22:52 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Fri, 20 Jun 2003

Lots going on - Long time since I said anything.

Let's see.. what's happening lately.

Well, I finished yet another class at school. I got a 4.0 in the database class that I was taking. My school project to work on wagion.org was a success. 3 credits left to my degree.

Wagion.org is going very well. I've agreed to another year as adviser to the website committee. I also recently attended the Northeast Region Order of the Arrow National Leadership Seminar. It was held at Camp Woodland in Constantina, NY. It was a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to this summer. Its very hard to get any work out of my chairman during the school season (and I totally understand that), so hopefully there will be a lot of progress to make up for that in the next few months.

Work continues on Perl6.org. I gave it some attention and cleaned it up a bit. It still needs work. It needs to be archiving more mailing lists. It also needs more content.

I'm also updating Patchtrader.Info with a some neat new stuff. I have some ideas that I'm going to try to use as a directed study project for the last three credits on my degree. I'd like to make a user-contributed patch directory of all OA patches. I think user-contributed sites are the only way to go anymore. Who has time to do it all on their own?

In the personal area, Natalie is doing well. Approaching her second birthday in August. I'm not sure what we are doing about a party yet. As far as presents are concerned, clothes are good, toys that can be used and thrown away (like makeup) are good. Toys that take up lots of space are bad. We have enough of those.

Also, in the personal area, we bought a new car. Leanne is now driving a bright yellow 2003 Chevy Cavalier. She is very happy with it.
posted at: 05:51 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Sat, 08 Mar 2003

Went to the zoo today.

Leanne and I took Natalie to the zoo today. We had a pretty good time. This is the first time that we went when Natalie was actually able to understand that we were looking at something interesting. Natalie really enjoyed the Aquarium and the monkey exibit. I think that's mainly because she was able to get real close to the animals at both of those.


posted at: 22:59 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:

Sun, 23 Feb 2003

Actually updating some of my sites today.

Leanne took Natalie up to her parents today for a birthday party. So, I had some free time to update some of my web pages. I updated my "What's new" section with a new program that will help me organize stuff and hopefully make it easier for me to post stuff (and thus, more likely that I actually will).

Besides updating dwright.org, I've also started working on perl6.org. I had hoped to get that site up and running months ago. Its nowhere near completion, but at this point it at least does something.

I also help the scouts run wagion.org. I'm glad that I got to spend some time on that this week. I needed a project for my database class that I'm taking right now, so I'm going to extend the publishing system that I wrote for wagion.org so that it uses CGI and a database back end. That will give me an excuse to continue working on it.

I know most of the pictures here are a bit dated. That's intentional. After September 11th, I don't feel as comfortable posting pictures of the family. I'm probably going to create a password protected area and only give out the password to friends and family.


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