Matt D's Blog

The last few days have been pretty good. I learned a bit about our database
system, got some practice with dropping and re-loading data, and fixed some of my issues with my databases at home. All in all, good days. I’ve been hanging out with my friend Jay, who I met through my friend / former co-worker Rich…Watched some movies and had a good time. I also met up with Ben last night, to discuss business…We should be ordering the SCT software either tomorrow or Monday, so we can really start to get this off the ground…I will be tuning Fords, mostly Mustangs at this place called Absolute Performance, Inc. in Yonkers. The only thing that kinda sucks is that I was unaware that I would have to put the cars on the dyno myself, but that shouldn’t be a problem with a few cars practice. I think the time and money investment will definately pay off in the long run, which is good for me, and it’s good for those in Westchester County, because as of right now there is no economical place to get Fords tuned in Westchester…The closest place is on Long Island, and the problem with that is that they are too far away, and on top of that, they charge a crazy amount of money for a tune, for one that will definately not be as good as something from SCT. I should meet the owner of the shop on Saturday. We shall see what unfolds.

Today was pretty decent..though time’s speed changed considerably depending upon when it was in the day lol…We finally got all the boxes that I was setting up working correctly, which I was very happy about…So I get to take the box that I setup, clean it, and do it again. But we got them working, and that’s the imporant part. It apparently helps when you point the machine to the correct database in all the locations. However, the Java code for authentication is sloppy - if it can’t connect to the database it throws an exception, which should be handled in the app…Ah well. Took some time to look up car prices, found some good Cobras for like 26 - 29k…Yellow…I’d rather Blue or Black, but I can go for yellow
:: Sigh :: I can’t wait.

Finally got the ad controller talking to the extranet boxes, and everyone was happy…sort of…There were database errors that we really couldn’t look at because it was too late in the day. So it wasn’t too bad. Tomorrow tighten everything up, see if we can get it to work right…Then rebuild my test extranet machie that I started…Try and do it from the beginning to make sure I have the concepts down pat. Building the ad controller wasn’t too bad. I’m going to try and get a snapshot tar together tomorrow as well, so I’d have something to start from next time, rather than having to copy things from other machines…and have diffs so I can make just the necessary changes rather than changing the entire file. As for tonight, I hope to be able to relax a little bit…Gonna see if I can get together with friends tonight. On a side note, I got my check from school yesterday as well, so I can take that and deposit it tomorrow - that covers my credit card bills for this month. Then I’m going to use some of my “new” money
to get the timing belt done, as well as have the brakes looked at / fixed.

Today didn’t work out too bad…Finally got the Oracle SQL*Plus client working, which was giving me headaches. All that was necessary was to copy my tsnames.ora file to my home directory as .tnsnames.ora, which sqlplus picks up without trouble. Oh yeah. You can’t run sqlplus as root…it just doesn’t work. Not sure why. Anyways, after getting that far, we tried to get a nice GUI to work. My coworker and DBA for the office recommended TOra, which works mainly on Oracle, but has some small support for MySQL. Unfortunately, it didn’t work right for Oracle, and I have no use for MySQL lol…So, I set out to find another client, this one is written in Java (yuck, but, eh), called SQuirreL..Works nicely…and it works with anything that has a JDBC driver, which includes Postgres (Yay!)…Tested it, and it works with both. Not excellent, but not bad for a days work.

I finally got the ad controller working today…Which was about the extent of the good news for today. We had a meeting about deploying something during the vacation period of the DBA, which would leave me if something were to go wrong…and that didn’t sit well with me. So they’re gonna do their best to get everything up before the DBA goes on vacation. In other news, my grandmother got not one, but two dogs. I can’t believe she did that. She did express interest in getting a dog, but an animal is a big responsibility, and I am not around much anymore. Therefore it’d be pretty much up to her, and I don’t know if she can handle it…They’re small dogs, but still. They’re being dropped off on Wednesday at like 7:30 PM…We shall see.

Tonight was actually somewhat productive in that I got only 3 or 4 slides scanned, but they were much better scans then what I had originally. VueScan is decent software - but Mr. Hamrick needs to work on the film profiles that he has…It may take a little work to get it to match what’s on screen, but at least the brightness and contrast are correct, which could not be said for my scans from last night using VueScan. So, I think I’d recommend it, but test quite a few items first, not just one or two. Oh, and to shut off those possibly good, but possibly pesky film curves, (as there is a lack of non-Kodak curves), change the input type from Slide or Negative to Image, which bypasses that part of the processing algorithm.

Upon arriving to court, early, no less, I was greeted with the ability to…sit and wait. I got there at about 4:15 PM, but traffic court apparently does not start until 5:00 PM. However, getting there early was not a complete waste - there was one person there waiting before I got there. There were about 10 people waiting when court started. The person that made it there before me was the first case heard, and I was second. The judge was not very nice to the first person, who ignored a right turn only lane…The person got 2 points on their license, and fined something like $120. Needless to say I was kinda worried at this point lol. However, they called my name, and I went forward. The prosecutor noted that I was carrying a few items, which included the paper with the inspection from the Yonkers PD saying I made the correction to my car. He said “this satisfies me, move to dismiss” and said I was free to go. I was happy, and got out of there.

Today is an exhausting day so far. Again, not much done, but the stress is definately there. Made progress on the ad controller (last thing I was working on), and made up some documentation on the build up process, but still did not successfully get it working today. Both my co-worker and I had things to deal with in the afternoon, so neither of us was really able to get anything done after lunch, because I didn’t really know what else is missing, and he wasn’t there. I had to leave at 2:30 PM, to get to my house by 4 PM..which is crazy. I have to go to court by 5:00 PM, I hope I make it there on time and everything is ok. It certainly is a good thing I left at 2:30 PM to catch a 3:16 PM train to my house, becuase the Times Square shuttle was only running on one track because of some problem. So I hopped on the 7 for two stops and made it to Grand Central in about 8 - 10 mins later than I would have probably, but, with a lot less crowding, and I got there with no problem…Just had to find my way back to the station from the subway, because I am not used to coming in from that way. The escallator that you had to take to get up to the Mezzanine level of Grand Central was near verticle…But I’m here, sitting on the train, listening to my music and writing my journal/blog entry. Soon I will be able to update it in real-time – I ordered the data cable for my Samsung phone, and I should get it in a few days. Have I mentioned that I’m running Fedora Core 1 on my laptop? Ugh. I am running kernel 2.6.7, which runs pretty darn well. But, udev support doesnt work quite right in Fedora. Some things are better left to more ‘testing-friendly’ distributions - ie Debian (in my opinion, of course)… Enough for now, I’ll finish this when I get back from court. For now, music will suffice.

One of my coworkers was later than usual today, so I was on my own for part of the morning. So I attempted to get the test box setup on my own. I got it working to a point, but there are still some things missing which will need to be filled in. The only other major thing I did today was start to setup another box which performs one of the other functions that we need. This particular box was a Solaris 8 box….Ugh. There was a problem when I attempted to build Apache. Apparently there is a “bug” in that if the directory you’re compiling Apache in has a symlink somewhere in the path it screws up the exports.c file by including certain header files twice, which causes major errors. There is a perl script to fix this, located in the Apache bug tracking database. Ran that on the file, and it finished compiling without a problem. Aside from that, I looked for some photo labs near my job, and I found two which should work out fine - Company Photo for E-6, and another place which is 2 blocks away from there for B&W (of which I have only shot 1 roll so far, and we shall see if I continue to shoot B&W stuff or I shoot color negative and make it B&W - I shoot mostly color slides right now), so on Monday I should be able to drop off both films and get them done shortly.

Today we tried finishing getting a test box setup with one of our applications. Frustrating would be the word used to describe the process. Nothing worked like it should have. I think we got things working by the time I left. I have to verify it when I go into work tomorrow. Other than that, on a completely unrelated note, don’t waste the time buying a Strawberries and Creme Frappachino from Starbucks…It’s basically a colder, thicker version of a Quik Straweberry milk lol…Which if you like that sort of thing is one thing, but it’s not what I expected to get after paying $4.51 for it.

I got my first paycheck today, it’s quite a good feeling to get some serious cash for similar work to what I was doing before.
At Unicast though, things are a little more important. Screw-ups must be avoided, and there’s a little more of a workload. I started my Oracle training yesterday. We started by going over the scripts which collect logs from Akamai and process them into a usable format. The reason we did that comes from the idea that most of the errors which occur will occur during processing, and it’s a good idea to understand what is going on during that process. It went well, and I think by the end of the month, I should be in decent shape. We have an alert system in place which emails us in the case of any abnormalities, and things have been pretty quiet since I started. Hopefully things will stay that way. I don’t think that will be the case, as this is our “slow” season apparently. So I’m in for some fun times (riight). We shall see.

Well, I got through the first week ok… I like it at Unicast. There’s still a bit for me to learn, but I think I’ll be able to do it by the end of July. Today was a very slow day, didn’t do too much. I got my new hire kit finally…Health insurance isn’t bad…$38.13 a month..So I’m happy. I still don’t have my building ID yet though :-/ I got lost going across town today in an effort to reach New York Film Works to process some Kodachrome. Took me longer than I wanted, and I walked more than I wanted..but I got there…

Today is my birthday. It was kinda blah. But, I had good cake. Nice carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.

I went to see Spiderman 2 with my friend Steve and this girl Stephanie at the theater in Greenburgh. First, I decided to take the parkway instead of local roads…Well, on the parkway, about half way there, this car in the left lane (I was in the right, behind a Dodge Caravan), swirves in front of the Caravan, onto the GRASS..Thank God, the Caravan slowed down, I slowed down, nothing happened…But it was something to shake me up. I got to the theater early, so I went over to Steve’s house, and then we picked up Stephanie a little while later. We then went over to the theater, got our ridiculously overpriced food and drink, and went into the theater…7 minutes before showtime. Oops. Well, we didnt’ get a very good seat…We were in row “D”…So thats 4 rows from the bottom. Ouch. Ah well. The movie was very good, I liked it a lot. There were quite a few comedic parts in the movie. We went back to Steve’s house after dropping Stephanie off, hung out for like 5 mins, but by this time I wanted to get home, and Steve wanted to get to sleep, so I left…I don’t like to take parkways at night, so I took the local roads…Well, late at night, there’s nobody there, so I kinda got carried away with my speeds a couple of times…Well, on the border of Greenburgh and Ardsley, it goes from 45 MPH to 30 MPH, and well, I was a lot closer to 45 then 30 :-/….I got pulled over..DOH. Thank god the officer wrote me up for “broken license plate lamp”..otherwise I would have been toast..my license would have been revoked because of my 6 month probation which ends in August. The irony is that I stick to the speed limit STRICTLY in Ardsley for this exact reason during the day. I guess I’ll have to watch at night too.. :-/

Well, I went back for a second interview at Unicast. I was interviewed by 3 people, one of which gave me a jump-into-the-fire type of test, and I did ok. The people there are very nice, which I like. Through a very strange sequence of events, I was told that I didn’t have the job, but then later given the job at a higher pay rate than what I asked for. So, needless to say, I’m very happy. Goals for year 1: Pay off half my loans or more, do minimum service on my Nissan to keep it running, and a Maaco paint job, and save up for a nice 2001 Mustang Cobra…Dunno about the color yet…Maybe yellow or blue or black. I’m so excited! I can’t wait.

Well, the past couple days have been interesting…I got my slides and photos back from Adorama…The photos didnt come out as well as I would have liked..They did come on time, which was good. The prints were decent, but not spectacular (the film is grainy, but not bad for 800)…The slides…grrrr..They scrated every one of my slides! I wont go there again for film processing (I havent even looked at the negatives, they’re still in their protective sleeves)…I got my car working on Tuesday thanks to my friend Mike. He helped me tremendously, and I’m gracious for it. But today I went to get an oil change, cause it’s so damn cheap at Nissan…Downside…Apparently, I have to make an appointment…grrr…So I do..Then I went to Sam’s Camera Exhange in Scarsdale, BS with them for a while, and find out there’s a local lab that does slide film! It’s in Hawthorne, called The Color Group..They do color negative, slides, and b&w film developing on premesis..in 3 hours…and the place is like 25 mins from me..much better than going to the city and having a two DAY turnaround lol.So, while on my way to The Color Group, which is on 9A in Hawthorne, I missed the place at first, and ended up getting on the parkway, and travelling into Pleasantville before getting back on track..But it was fun. So now I have a working car, a local lab, and a decent place for digital prints (Adorama is still great there…).