Great job Leanne
posted at: 18:27 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Kitchen re-finishing done! I have completed the project to re-finish my kitchen. Tasks completed include:
Photos from the project are available in my gallery here.
Curling Rocks! Slides from my latest talk for The Pittsburgh Perl Mongers are now available on my site here.
My talk was on implementing the condorcet election method in Perl in order to get a consensus of team rankings from different points of view. I used Curling as the theme. People seemed to enjoy the talk. Speaking of curling, I'm going to be heading out the door very soon to go to another game. So far, my team is 4 and 2, and tied for second place. After curling, I'm heading over to pair's Christmas party at PAPA headquarters.
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Pittsburgh Perl Mongers
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Section NE-4B at Camp Alpine
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Northeast region section officers seminar
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At the circus.
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Zoo Boo
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Natalie the naturalist
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Sick and tired of Comcast. I can't stand companies that have the attitude that you can't do without
them and therefore they can do whatever they want to you. I'm fighting with
Comcast right now, who is doing an awful job of taking over for Adelphia (who
would have thought it was possible to do worse than them?). Some of my services have been down for over a week now. When I try to talk
to Adelphia, they won't talk to me because I've already been "transitioned".
When I tried to talk to Comcast they told me that I haven't been transitioned
yet. I spoke to a person at Comcast about a week ago that promised me that I'd be
up and running by this Saturday. No apology, no offer of credit for the
service I was paying for and not receiving.. just "check back in a week".
Well, the week has passed, and surprise surprise... still not up. So I spoke
to Amy tonight, who told me that "Please be advised that We have started the
transition, it is not completed". Let me translate that from customer service
speech to what this customer hears: "Please be advised that while you continue
to pay us money, we see no need to move any faster than we feel like. We've
already passed the promised deadline and nothing bad came of it." Next, she gave me a real nice bonus: Once the transition is complete,
they'll send an e-mail to my Adelphia e-mail address. Sounds reasonable,
right? Problem is, I don't have an Adelphia e-mail. My Adelphia account was
configured to send any important mail from Adelphia directly to my real e-mail
account. I told Comcast support that I didn't have an Adelphia e-mail
account, and that I'd like to continue the same arrangement. Their answer: No.
They don't do that. I have to have an Adelphia account so that I can get mail
from Comcast letting me know when they've gotten around to fixing my service.
So, Amy, how am I supposed to get an e-mail account from Adelphia when they
consider me already "transitioned"? Well, it turns out that she can't help
me with that. If I didn't have Altell as a phone service provider, I'd be switching to DSL
in a heartbeat. But until that changes or until they make affordable 2-way
satellite, I guess Comcast gets to continue doing whatever they want to do.
posted at: 00:27 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Sharing a drink
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Delmont Apple & Arts Festival
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Calendar
I have added a Google Calendar to my site. If you have an account with Google, you can click on the button here to subscribe to my calendar. If you don't have a Google account, you can still view my calendar by clicking on the "Calendar" link on the menu bar to the left.
posted at: 14:59 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
New Wagion officers
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Following the rainbow to Camp Conestoga.
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Pittsburgh Perl Workshop
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Going Curling Thanks to pair's Q-Fund, I've joined the Pittsburgh Curling Club. I go to
my first instructional class tomorrow. This will be my second time curling. I went a couple years ago on a Scout
trip, and had a good time. I tried to join the club last year, but because of
all the media coverage from the Olympics, they had to close membership (too
many people wanted to join). This year, I managed to get my application in
early enough. Work is still progressing with the Pittsburgh
Perl Workshop. I visited the CMU campus today and met with the conference
coordinator. We walked through the conference space and worked out several
details. Several more details remain to be worked out between now and next
Saturday. Afterwards, we went to the Penn Brewery to check out a potential venue for a
social event after the workshop. Looks like Oktoberfest started this weekend,
and runs through next weekend also. So, that venue is probably out.
posted at: 22:41 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Oktoberfest at the Penn Brewery
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Big Stuff I've been doing a lot of work lately to prepare for The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. There are three
of us running the event and only 11 days left until it is here. After a year
and a half of planning, the event is almost here and things are crazy. Registration has really picked up in the past week. We had intended to
have a conference with 120 people. It looks like we may go over that
number. As soon as PPW winds down, we will need to determine if we want to do this
again next year. It is all going to depend on how it turns out this time
around. The weekend after PPW is the October OA Service Weekend for Wagion Lodge #6. It is going to be a sad
weekend for me because it will be my last weekend advising an Officer. I have
already started my role as an adviser for the 2008 Section NE-4B conclave.
And, starting with the new year, there will be a new Program Vice-Chief
adviser. I will remain on as an Associate Lodge Adviser. At the OA Weekend, my Conclave Chairman will be conducting interviews for
all of his sub-committees. I hope we get a good turnout for the interviews.
Having eager subcommittee chairman will make things run more smoothly. The
October weekend is also when we will find out who our new lodge officers
are. This November, I'll be heading to Camp Alpine in Alpine, New York (This will
be my second
time heading to that camp).
I will be attending the Northeast Region Section Officers Seminar along with
the conclave 2008 youth chairman. We'll be getting training on all of the
procedures for running a conclave. Hopefully by the February banquet, we'll have the training and chairmen in
place and we can start putting together an awesome conclave.
posted at: 18:41 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
First day of school!
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Playing in the park.
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Chip off the old block.
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New car.
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Ocean City babysitting
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Sunrise on the beach.
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View from our balcony.
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On my way to the airport.
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Chicago
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YAPC 2006 Day 2 recap. This day went by amazingly fast. I went to several talks on testing in the
morning. Most of those talks were exceedingly dry, and seemed aimed only at
people that don't already do testing. There doesn't seem to be much new
information out there on testing. Except for perhaps the one gem of the
conference: Selenium. This rather
interesting application allows you to write regression tests for your web
application that actually launch and use a real web browser to test the
application. This makes testing things like AJAX and JavaScript possible. In the afternoon, I attended an amusing talk about ACME modules, and then I
spent some time talking to some other companies that were up at the conference.
Then, it was time to get ready for the evening dinner. The dinner was held at Dave and Busters, Chicago this year. We had a large
part of the building blocked off exclusively for us, and many of the games were
set to free play. There was a Pump It Up game present, and many of us were
playing that throughout the night. Plans for PPW are coming together nicely.
Best Practical has agreed to be a
sponsor. This pushes our total sponsorship up into a comfortable level for us.
Casey will also be giving a lightning talk on PPW tomorrow, and I hope that
helps drum up some more interest in both speaking and attending.
posted at: 02:11 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
YAPC dinner at D&B
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Chicago subway
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Chicago
posted at: 16:56 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
YAPC 2006 Day 1 recap. Today was the first day for YAPC::NA
2006. I went to five different presentations today. Some of the talks, like the talk on
Sub::Exporter, and the talk on using AJAX with Perl were very informative.
I got a number of ideas from these talks, and I'm looking forward to playing
around with them to see what I can do. These are the kinds of talks that make
conferences like this useful. On the other hand, some of the talks were not so good. I had a number of
people ask me why I didn't give a talk this year. The reason was simple: I
didn't have anything new to say. Some of these talks that I go to are the same
thing year after year after year. And while I can appreciate that a lot of
the people that come to each YAPC are new and haven't heard the talks yet, I
think there has got to be a limit to how much repeat material goes into a
conference like this. Otherwise, the reasons to come back next year just
reduce with every year I go. Several of the talks I went to today seemed to revolve around the speaker
more than the subject they were speaking about. I really hate these talks.
It reminds me of politicians repeating popular thinking, like "crime is bad",
but not really providing any solution to the issues they are brining up. Tonight, I have some free time to sit back and relax. I'm going to try to
work on some Perl code tonight and get ready for tomorrow.
posted at: 21:13 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
YAPC Day one done.
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Chicago
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Andy
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Arrival at Chicago It's 1:00 in the morning here, which is about 2:00 back home. It has been a
long day. Things started this morning before any of us were even at the airport. It
turns out that an earlier United Airlines flight to Chicago was canceled.
This left a lady with 17 kids that needed to get to Chicago so that they could
get on a flight to Poland stranded. So, United tried to cram all 18 of those
passengers onto our flight. Problem was our flight was already completely
booked. This, in turn, led to an extremely long line at the check-in, which was
exasperated by an under-staffed check in counter, including some new lady that
had no idea what she was doing. It took nearly 2 hours to get checked in. I
had planned on arriving at the airport at 3:00 for my 4:44 flight, it is a good
thing that I actually ended up getting there a half-hour early. Of the 5 of us flying to YAPC from Pittsburgh, three of us ended up getting
on the flight. I made it on the flight, but Andy, who was about 20 people
behind me in the check-in line did not. Joe and Andy ended up catching a later
flight, and arrived in Chicago around 10:00 in the evening. United did give
each of them a voucher for a free flight, and they also provided them with a
free meal. That was nice, but it would have been nicer if they hadn't screwed
up in the first place. With all the commotion with the boarding and people not getting on the
flight, we were actually about an hour late in taking off. Eventually we got
to a taxi and asked him to take us to the IIT campus. That's when we found
out that there isn't just one IIT campus. After checking some of our maps, we
thought we knew where we were going, and away we went. As we were nearing the campus, I'm certain I heard gunshots being fired.
And as we were getting out of the cab, the driver told us to be careful because
it was a very high crime neighborhood. Then, as the driver pulled away, we
discovered that he had taken us to the wrong spot. After walking around a
couple blocks, we discovered that our map was only about a block and a half
off, and fortunately it was a walk in the opposite direction of the gun
shots. The rooms themselves, as you can see from my
earlier post, are basically concrete. That includes the floor, walls, and
ceiling. The bed is a standard steel bunk with a mattress. These rooms are
very cold, and as it turns out, there is no thermostat in my room. Also, each
room apparently comes with only one thin blanket. When I asked for another
blanket for my room, I was told "we don't do that" I never thought we could
find rooms worse than last year's YAPC, but it appears I was wrong. After getting checked in, the extreme boredom began to set in. There
really isn't much to do around this campus. We found a Chinese restaurant not
too far away in a safe direction, so we decided to get some food there. Then
we came back and waited for Joe and Andy to arrive. I'm really hoping that tomorrow things will get better when there are more
people around. So far, this trip has been pretty lousy.
posted at: 02:12 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Welcome to IIT. This will be your cell.
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A big milestone
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Sprained Ankle I sprained my ankle this Sunday. I was carrying a big cooler full of
drinks out of the house to the car so that Leanne, Natalie, and I could go
fishing when I tripped and twisted my ankle. I went to the ER and got an X-Ray. They gave me a splint I'm supposed to
wear for the next week. Fortunately, I'll be done with the splint before next
weekend when I go to Chicago for YAPC.
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Happy birthday to me.
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OA Weekend I attend the Wagion Lodge 6 June Service weekend the past weekend. We had
some rain, but also had some nice patches of weather as well. The Scouts seem
to like playing Pump It Up. They asked me to bring the game up for Friday
Snack. As it turns out, it started raining just when Saturday snack should
have happened, so we ended up moving back inside and playing Pump It Up
again. I have posted some pictures
from the event on my site.
posted at: 23:27 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
First school bus ride.
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New Pictures I've updated my Gallery with some new Pictures. First, here are some
pictures from the Mark
Jason Dominus talk at the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers from earlier this
month. Also, one of our fish produced some new baby fish the other day. Here are
some pictures of the new
fish, several minutes old. I also included a picture of our new cats, Lily
and Spirit. Finally, some pictures from the Wagion
Lodge #6 April 2006 Service Weekend. The weekend went well, except for
the record setting rainfall. Fortunately, we were already planning indoor
activities for Saturday night anyway. We had one new vigil this weekend.
The youth vigil also voted on the Vigil for next year. We'll find out who
those people are in August.
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Waiting for the Easter Bunny.
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Spent the day at Grandma's.
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It must be spring
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MJD at the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers
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Announcing the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop - 2006-09-23 The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop has officially
been announced. This comes from an idea that Casey and I dreamed up last year while we were
at YAPC. I'm a member of the Cabal, so I'm going to be pretty busy this
summer getting ready for the event. Thankfully, we already have our first sponsor. pair Networks has agreed to sponsor a room for the event. We will need about three more sponsors to contribute at the same level as pair in order to fully fund the event.
posted at: 01:25 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Nice day for fishing.
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Council Camping Committee Meeting.
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Thunder-bird award Wagion Lodge #6 honored me tonight
at our banquet by presenting me with the Thunder-bird award. This is the most
prestigious award that can be given by the lodge. Only one adult and one
youth is selected for the award every year. I am very proud to have been
selected. For those of you that were there tonight, my bio is a bit out-dated. I am
no longer an EMT, and I did receive my bachelor's degree a long time
ago.
posted at: 00:09 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
DBD::Multi My second Perl Module is now available on CPAN. DBD::Multi is a
module that implements transparent load distribution and fail-over for read-only
queries on a cluster of replicated database servers. This is something that
I've been using for a while at work now in conjunction with our Slony replicated postgreSQL servers. I designed most of the module. Credit goes to Casey West for most of the initial
implementation back when he still worked for pair.
posted at: 23:46 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Random Stuff I was doing some volunteer work for the scouts today. There's a condemned
apartment building in Greensburg and the Scouts were given permission to
salvage some useful items out of the building for camp. I was helping pull a
window fixture out of the wall when I stepped on a nail that went all the way
through my shoe and into the foot. I spent the rest of the day in the
Emergency Room getting x-rays and a tetanus shot. I finished reading "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Price." I've also been
trying to ready "Ribsy" to Natalie, but she isn't all that interested. Presently, I'm reading "Perl Best Practices" by Damian Conway. I've started adding some content to the Westmoreland-Fayette Council website. I expect
that project to pick up some momentum soon. The Wagion Lodge banquet will be coming up on February 25th. As program
adviser, I've been monitoring the planning closely. Things seem to be exactly
where they should be right now. We have an Executive Committee meeting
tomorrow to make sure we haven't forgotten anything. The large project that I've been working on since November is just about
done. I can't say much about it until it is officially announced, except that
I'm really pleased with the way it turned out and I'm excited to get it out the
door.
posted at: 23:39 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Remember Challenger 20 years ago on this day, as President Ronald Reagan put it, the crew of the
space shuttle Challenger "waved goodbye and slipped the surly bounds of earth
to touch the face of God." I still remember where I was on that Tuesday morning. I was nine years old
and laying on the couch at home. It was cold out and I was covered up with a
blanket watching television. I do not recall if school was canceled that day
due to snow, or if I had just stayed home sick. I remember watching television
when the show I was watching was interrupted by breaking news that the space
shuttle had exploded. I shouted to my mom, "Mom come look, the space shuttle blew up". She was
on the phone in the kitchen. At first she didn't believe me. So I called
her again, she came walking into the living room and looked at the TV. She
watched for a minute, still paying more attention to the person on the phone
than watching the TV until they finally re-ran the footage of the explosion
once again. Then she said "oh my, it really did blow up, didn't it?". They would re-play the clip of the 73 second flight of challenger over and
over again, forward and backwards.. fast and slow. Then they would switch to
a shot of the sky where the accident had happened. I strained to see
parachutes coming down. But, of course, there were no parachutes. For the next day or two, we watched them play the same 73 seconds of footage
over and over again. We kept waiting for them to say something new. But it
would be years before the most of what happened that day would finally come
out. A long time passed before NASA would finally admit that it was not the
explosion that killed the astronauts, but the 200 MPH impact with the ocean
that happened after a 65,000 foot descent that lasted 2 minutes and 45 seconds.
Some controversial evidence indicates that the astronauts were conscious and
making efforts to save themselves during that time. It would take at least a day before any regular television resumed playing.
In the mean-time, we all gained a thorough lesson about the crew and their
mission. Of course, I knew there were space shuttles, I even knew we had been
to the moon (I had seen Superman 2, after all). But in that day, I became
just a bit more aware that going to space wasn't something ordinary. The
astronauts were not business people heading off to work, they were heros.
posted at: 22:32 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Lens Crafters
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Scouting in January. I just attended the Wagion Lodge #6
Lodge Leadership Development Course this past weekend (pictures).
There were a number of very good training sessions put on. I was especially
happy with the quality of the training sessions put on by some of the youth.
The lodge banquet is coming up next month, I'm looking forward to seeing how
well the youth will pull that off. I was recently given the postion of Council Webmaster for
Westmoreland-Fayette Council. I've been working on updating the site for
quite a while now. Last week, I was able to demo the progress I had made so
far to the council and get approval to move forward. My strategy will be
small, frequent updates, rather than very large infrequent updates (which
usually get de-railed before they happen). The council web-site was just cut over to my
control today. I've started to make my first set of small changes. Next Monday will be the Council Program Group meeting. I'm looking forward
to the meeting because there's some promising news on the Camping Promotions
front. This year, Wagion intends to focus on Cub Camping. I'm interested to
see what becomes of this strategy. I think it is a really good idea.
posted at: 17:08 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
New dishwasher
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D&B
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Back from a two week vacation.
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