Once I posted yesterday, I decided to start investigating my stat options. Some should be fairly easy to get once I figure out the right query. Others will appear to require a little bit more creativity on my part. Did you know that SQL will let you get the length of a string of text but not the number of words in a string? Highly inconvenient to me considering I wanted to use that in one of my new stats. See, now I have you wondering exactly what I want that count for. You’ll just have to wait and see…
Tomorrow technically I have a training class in the afternoon, but it isn’t one where I have to go to learn stuff. Since it’s related to one of my areas of ownership on our product, it seemed like it would be a good idea to go hear what other people were being told so that I could take it into account while doing future planning. Aside from the class my day is pretty empty which is a very good thing considering that I’m going to be BFFs with Word for about the next week and a half, so the more non-meeting time the better.
Personal - Seattle
Come Saturday, no, there won’t be any radical design changes. No, there won’t be a vlog-like event. No, there (probably) won’t be anything happening with my other website. What will there be? Well, we’ll have the usual stat post (hopefully with new, more interesting stats to look at), maybe another page or two that acts as a summary location for all of my review posts (bonus points for me if I can somehow make it so that I don’t need to remember to update it each time), and ideally a plan for year 7. The latter is a little too ambitious knowing me, so just expect the first and hope for the second.
While I am in no way adjusting my stance on them, an iPad would be quite convenient to have for my upcoming plane trip for TV episode watching. I am, however, content to wait for the Adam (or see what becomes of the HP Slate if the WebOS rumors are true) and just use my laptop. In reality, I’ll probably only watch one or two episodes at most since I’ll also have my Kindle with me, and that + my Zune (for music) should be just as entertaining.
Personal - Seattle
So, all those stat ideas I’ve been coming up with? Yeah, I haven’t actually made sure that there’s any easy way for me to get them. I mean, they should be easy enough since I know SQL and the data is in the database somewhere, but I haven’t actually tested it yet. We’re under a week now, so someone should remind me about that later on this week when I’m playing WoW or SC2.
While I have my daily assortment of meetings this week, I also have lots of writing to do. The specs for our next milestone are due to be finished up at the end of next week, so between now and then, most of my otherwise free time at work will be going towards that. As luck would have it, by the time I get around to my vacation, all the work I really need to do should be done. If you can’t tell, this is a very good thing as it means I don’t have to squeeze n weeks worth of work into n-1 weeks amount of time.
Personal - Seattle
Now that I’ve replaced my PSU (the part yesterday that I felt could potentially give me problems), I’m back in business with my desktop. Not to hate on my Macbook or anything, but what can I say, I really am a PC. I figure it’s about time to start using Boot Camp so that I can have Windows 7 on it also. However, even with that, it would mean that a catastrophe that took out my desktop for a longer period of time would leave me in a state of limited computing ability. In Dallas, this was easy to work around due to the sheer number of computers I had. Here, the story is slightly different, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about fixing for a while.
My older monitors are still sitting unused around my apartment, and having a secondary desktop to handle things like DVD ripping/encoding, app installs that I don’t want to clutter up my main desktop with, and maybe even something to throw Linux on is an idea that I basically just need to decide when I want to pull the trigger on it. I know exactly what I want as far as size and power, and buying all the parts should only be about a $400-500 venture. Unfortunately waiting for my desktop upgrade next summer won’t really help since my current motherboard is too big, and I don’t want to do my upgrade now because Intel is supposedly doing another CPU change next year (also, my current desktop can handle everything perfectly fine). I’ve obviously been able to justify it to myself fine, but just doing that doesn’t equate to me actually following through the the idea apparently.
Personal - Seattle
In attempting to figure out what was going on with one of the fans in my computer, I discovered that the problem may run deeper than I initially expected. While nothing has gone horribly wrong yet (and there’s no indication that it will), I’m thinking that I probably don’t want to risk it. This means that a Fry’s trip just got added to my plans for tomorrow. Fortunately that isn’t bumping anything else, so I’m still good schedule wise.
Starcraft 2 continues to be extremely fun, and Andrew and I even played a couple of matches together today. With him being an RTS noob and me yet to fully regain my SC skills, we didn’t play awesome, but we did manage to split our matches 1-1. Hopefully as the beta continues I’ll keep improving, and then my skills will carry over to the released version since that’s when everything will get a lot more competitive.
Personal - Seattle
May 20th, 2007: A countdown on Blizzard’s website ended and a game announcement and trailer came out that definitely had the gaming world talking. Now, about three years later, I’m playing said game and loving every second of it. Between Starcraft 2 and WoW, I don’t think any other games are getting played in the near future. If they are, then I really need to reexamine my priorities.
Tomorrow is once again Friday (funny how that happens) which means that I once again have to make weekend plans. Well, I guess you could say that my plans are already made for me based on the first paragraph of this post. I was contemplating going to see Iron Man 2, but I think that can wait for another week for the crowds to die down since I seem to have enough entertainment for the near future.
Personal - Seattle
Almost every time I star writing a post, I’ll open up this site in a window just so I can peruse what I talked about the previous couple days as some sort of inspiration for what to write. Sometimes this works quite well, but at other times it can be extremely distracting because of the Random Posts section. Since I aim to make my titles both informative and sometimes slightly humorous, it can be a game to see if I remember what some of my more notable titles have as their post content. Usually I’m extremely far off, but on occasion I can remember enough to guess right (or the title is just that unique).
I need to start making slightly more concrete plans about all of the tech changes I’ll be making at my house in a few weeks. Upgrading computers to Windows 7 is definitely on the list as is doing something with the HTPC downstairs (still slated to be replaced by a 360). That then leaves the question of what to do with the HTPC, so it could get moved upstairs theoretically. I expect that the Microsoft store will be seeing quite a few visits from me in the coming weeks as I stock up on everything I need to take home for this so called “vacation”.
Personal - Seattle
Let’s see, what did I have going on last May? Well, to start I had baseball playoffs. I was also still in school at the time, so I had my classes to wrap up. Then, of course, there was my UTD graduation. There was a Seattle trip in the mix. On top of that, there was also the planning that I had to do on my end to prepare for my move to Seattle. And in addition, I was actually doing some work with Mr. McDonald at the time. If you take this month and look at it, I basically have two things: my current work (which pays quite a bit better) and my upcoming Dallas trip. Sure, time wise there might be more of my schedule taken up this year, but it’s a lot less hopping around between various things and seems much less busy as a result.
Starcraft 2 finally has a release date set for this summer, so I can hope that that plus the ongoing beta means that it’s finally ready to come out. I already have a copy preordered on Amazon, and that should get me access to the beta in the near future. As if I didn’t have enough games to already play, now SC2 is going to be part of the mix? If I’m not careful, I’m going to start building up a backlog for my backlog.
Personal - Seattle
I’ve been unable to access my work email via the web since yesterday once again, so that’s kept my evenings fairly Microsoft free. Except for the fact that I use Windows 7 on my computer, or that a 360 is how I stream shows to my TV, or that I use a Zune as my MP3 player… You know what I mean, it’s only those stupid people obsessed with Apple or Linux that don’t use Microsoft products at all, and even then I’d bet it’s near impossible to completely avoid them.
I can’t really tell you my schedule for the week for obvious reasons, but I think it’s fairly mediocre. If there is anything big happening, I definitely don’t remember it. At this point, I’m more than happy to just have evenly balanced days throughout the week. It doesn’t take much to make me happy at work; a meeting here, a presentation there, and I’m set to go.
Personal - Seattle
My mom, for whatever reason, felt that I needed to watch a movie that she had seen on one of our movie channels: The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest. Doing a little bit of research, it was quite clear why I had never even hard of this movie before. It came out in 2002 in the amazing total of two theaters for a single week and made something like $5900 dollars. Not exactly what you’d call a successful film. Anyway, it finally made its way to the top of my Netflix queue (because let’s face it, this wasn’t a movie I’d probably be able to walk into Blockbuster and rent), and it was…decent. I don’t feel like I was robbed of any movie watching experience by not being able to see it back in 2002, nor do I feel that my movie repertoire would have been incomplete had I not seen it now. My score: 6.5/10.
With less than two weeks to go until A-Day, I still need to make sure I can get the stats that I’ve been coming up with ideas for. Many of them would be near impossible to collect manually considering I’m over the 1500 mark now, so I should probably have a fall back plan just in case. Such a plan would likely lack the desired excitement and interestingness, but that would be why it’s plan B and not A.
Personal - Seattle