1. I walked in to the men’s room at $LOCAL_GROCER–a 1 and 1 set up. There was a pair of legs visible under the stall wall and the urinal was empty. The odd thing? The stall door was wide open and there was weird grunting coming from the other side of the wall. I did not tarry.
2. The brewing room smells marvy what with a Belgian Wit, Nut Brown, and Gooseberry wine all burbling away.
3. While WIX v3.6 is pretty much awesome when looked at from the perspective of WIX v3.0, it is still Windows Installer we’re dealing with. Which sucks.
4. Being the mayor of places on Foursquare creates more obligations than one might expect. Well losing a mayorship makes one more inclined to visit a place than one might normally be. Why is it important to be mayor of the Bag ‘n’ Save? Especially when I cannot do anything about grunty open stall? I do not know.
5. Rick Santorum headlines are pretty much always unintentionally funny these days.

I did not blur the URL to the probable malware site linked. If you’re fatheaded enough to type it into your address bar and browse that site, you deserve what you get. Just sayin’…

First I hooked up with my pops (KD0INW) last night on 2 meter. He was in Lincoln and I in Bellevue. We used K0ASH to bridge the distance. I had to mobile my rig across the street and up the hill a bit to get a quality connection while his trip up 70th Street in Lincoln was pretty S9 the whole way. We ran in to some issues when he passed through the industrial park so signed off. Still, it was pretty awesome. Hope to find him again.

Second was this morning on the way into work. After hitting K0ASH a few times I started scanning the programmed stations. I came across a CQ call on the KA0JTI 440 repeater and had an Internet-mediated conversation with N4LOS in Florida. Pretty great and sadly ran out of time (pulled in to the parking lot at work) before we could chat a bit more. Chatted about growing up in Lincoln and compared the weather between NE and FL. Pretty much the same this week.

So, that was fun. I’m feeling a bit more confident on the mic and carrying on open-ended conversations with folks I don’t know. Hopefully this is a continuing trend and not a blip on what has been a pretty silent hobby to this point.

73

So we go through troubleshooting away. For twenty minutes. I cannot reproduce his problem even using his authentication credentials. We’re at the part where I ask him to use the command line to do his checkout—and if you knew this special needs person, you’d know I’m asking quite a bit here.

Just then, and I shit you not this is 20 minutes into the troubleshooting I get this on IM:

special needs guy [4:52 PM]:
the OK button is now enabled. Seems pretty wierd but it stays dithered unless you enter something into the checkout directory – using the browse button to place a path there does not enable it

special needs guy [4:53 PM]:
I am good to go now

It’s yer birthday.

Go Otis.

It’s yer birthday.

The Toaster marks two years with us and somewhere between four and six IRL. No party for the Cat Box Raider—and he is certainly ripe today—this year. We didn’t mark Morton’s in August so it just wouldn’t be fair. At any rate…

Go wish the blockhead happy birthday yourself…

Big in all of this, of course, is the lateral move at work into CM—something that happened in the middle of Elz’s hospital stay. Gone are the lazy days of writing VBS under the auspices of QTP automated testing. This was the position I was hired on to at [convergent telephony management software company]. Back then I could write a little code, refactor existing tests, and leave at 5pm every day. Now my life is consumed by a team of devs who are trying to repay about three years (and change) of technical debt fostered by purchasing a startup company with negligent agile methodology. The negligent piece being a total lack of refactoring and documentation.

Since the beginning of June we’ve come up to speed on an archaic, fragile, poorly documented build system. I, personally, have also come up to speed on the spanky new build framework homegrown by another dev team. We’ve more or less completely massaged this new system to incorporate most of what a less insular company would have adopted outright from the open source community. Instead of a stripped down implementation of NAnt (yes, we’re all .NET here unfortunately) we’ve backdoored the whole NAnt framework into the existing system.

In addition to coming up to speed and doing *gasp* presentations on this build system, I’ve been migrating modules into this new system. It’s all too funny because I am overcoming a lot of my own technical debt as it relates to learning the Microsoft environment, to include .NET framework, C#, and the generalities of building multi-million lines of code worth of application. In short, I’ve had a stretch of 60+ hour weeks since the beginning of June. Then again, I’ve learned and accomplished more in this two month period of time than in the previous two years. It really feels good to be in a dev position again.

Outside of work I’ve been trying to save the remnants of our tiny garden. This late spring/early summer has been extremely wet and what the rabbits haven’t gotten the weeds have choked out. All that remains are three stringy eggplants, four heirloom tomato plants, a single basil plant, and one extremely anemic pepper plant. The boxes haven’t fared much better as the only thing with any potential are the cantaloupes. We’re trying to grow them on a trellis and using panyhose to support any fruit hence our minting them “pantyloupes.”

Which isn’t to say there haven’t been some victories. The grapes look marvelous and the blackberry bush has been extremely productive. There’s just one bush but we’ve pulled a few quarts off it already and there’s still a lot of unripe fruit hanging. Blackberries + homemade vanilla ice cream = teh bomb.

Reports of the Egg out in Portland show she’s the very best baby two people can make. She’s awfully fond of sweet potatoes, has almost mastered crawling, is exceptionally mild mannered, and is cute as a button. I have a gallery/sub-site in the works but time has not been easy to come by.

I perfected my hippo impression in California. Not a day went by without me nose-deep in the backyard pool with non-Egg niece and nephew doing their very best to drown me. Photos of this are also in the offing.

Elz is the picture of loveliness as well. After her trying hospitalization at the end of May she’s kept herself relatively healthy. She’s also been a supertrooper w/r/t keeping on the O2 even though it cramps her style. The two of us spend as much time together as work permits and as we approach two years together things just get better. Not bad given I went into the relationship just looking for a quick bit of “female companionship.”

Anyway, I’ve droned on enough for the time being. Also, the VisualStudio SP1 install is finally drawing to a close so back to work for me. Thanks for getting this far, gentle reader, more frequent postings are [as always] promised in the future.

Can’t say as it wasn’t a surprise. She was still on some pretty heavy O₂ and they had shot her up with morphine just the night before. I didn’t think we were getting out of there before the weekend. But, happy day, she came home.

The first few days were kind of scary because she was still so physically beat. OTOH, getting her out of a place where her most comfortable position was sitting in a chair hunched over a table with her head in her hands seemed to do wonders. The swelling everywhere went down pretty rapidly and her mood perked up exponentially. We even went outside once or twice over the weekend.

Home for a week now and she’s mostly back up to snuff. We still bump the O₂ up every so often during physically demanding tasks but the snappy wit and willingness to laugh at nearly anything is back. Things are good at the house and everyone is way less tense these days.

In other news…

The garden is coming along slowly. Flea beetles are doing battle with the eggplant and the rabbits decimated my first row of snap peas. The rain is keeping everything kind of stunted too. The grapes look gorgeous this year although one of the concord vines is kind of meh. Not sure what’s wrong there but it looks like it is muddling through. The mulberries are about 3 – 5 days from feasting and I think we’re going to get raspberries this year too. We got jack from the raspberries and mulberries last year due to the late frost so we’re trés eager this time around. Ice cream and pie crust is at the ready.

That’s all the big news for now I guess. Just wanted to push the previous entry off the top of the page because it’s increasingly irrelevant.