Software Developer, Media Nut, and Proud Father of Two

Since I have such an awesome job, boss and supervisor, I had the opportunity spend a full week in New Orleans for Thanksgiving. Typically when we travel to New Orleans, it's a weekend trip that starts early Friday morning, but since I have a company provided laptop with wireless broadband, I was able to extend the amount of time I spent there, and as a result, had a much more fulfilling trip. A lot of times Becky and I rush to see one or two people before having to make our trek back home on a Sunday afternoon, not being able to see family and friends outside of the initial visit to their home and at church. I was tempted to extend my visit by a few days since my best friend Anthony's wife is going to have their third child on Wednesday, but I was ready to come back home. Not only did I spend time with family and friends, but I also got to ride in a helicopter and get majorly defeated in UNO by the Queen of UNO (Becky). During some of my down time I decided to become more acquainted with social networking sites, partly for work related research and partly due to curiosity since I have seen and heard plenty of social networking, but never got involved.

Man, it's been a while. I don't even know where to begin or what to ramble about. In a nutshell, here's what has been going on: Anna is now five months old and has broken her first two teeth in one day, my father-in-law has celebrated his 57th birthday today (Happy birthday Mike!), the Saints have been mediocre while having the #1 offense in the NFL, I've been rocking the NFL Pick 'em group (to my own shock and amazement), my boss supplied me with a sweet laptop that has wireless broadband, I've delved deeply into Mass Effect, experienced the NXE update on my 360, played the Left 4 Demo demo several times with Tim on expert, played Nazi Zombies on Call of Duty 5 with my neighbor, almost went insane dealing with C# and MonoRail, decided to start wearing a new hair due, jogged/walked five miles to raise money for Speed The Light, had my parents over as guest for a weekend, had Anna dedicated at our church, took a family portrait (arriving tomorrow), flooded myself with numerous TV shows, began the initial steps in becoming more involved with BuyFromAChristian.com, and have fought way too many times with my health insurance provider about their crappy coverage. Whew, what a busy two months it has been. Here are some recent photos to share:

My oh my. I moved my sites to my VPS in August, with this site being among the first. Everything was hunky dory until today, when a plethora of hits came from StumbleUpon.com, a link sharing website. Someone on there decided to share a link to the jQuery Autotab plugin. I don't have an accurate number, but I have several pages worth of Drupal logs showing hits from that site for today and I suspect that it is the cause of my VPS' sluggish behavior. I've enabled caching, so hopefully I won't have any more problems, but if you people do that again, well... I don't know what I'll do. I'm working on getting an entry ready for jQuery Autotab on SourceForge.net, so maybe that's the best route to go.

Monday was the three hour premiere of Heroes, with the first hour being a long promo that was built up to the real two hour premiere. I'm happy to have Heroes back, and there were some big twists in the story, shocking revelations and a big start to what I hope will ultimately be a successful season. However, as an avid watcher and reader of the online comics, I can't help but feel that there were some issues with the story that made this opener feel a bit rushed, and by rushed I mean crammed with so many different plot elements so as to create a "shocking" and "crazy" two episodes. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but now that I look back on it and think of the inconsistencies, unexplained circumstances and apparent continuity errors, I can't help but feel that the writers of the show are aiming harder for crazy twists and turns than they are with producing a quality story. Spoilers ahoy, so read with caution.

I finally got off my butt and added more pictures to my Flickr account. I'm fortunate enough to have a great view of the sunset from my front door, even better from my upstairs bedroom, so I added a new collection of pictures called Sunsets from the Front Door. By no means am I professional photographer, not even a hobbyist, but when I see a beautiful sky, I can't help but shoot. The ones attached to this blog post are the sunset before Hurricane Ike hit Houston. I also took a some time to figure out how I could connect to my Flickr account and place the latest batch of images that we have uploaded on the left side of my site. I had to rely on the Flickr module for Drupal 5 because the Drupal 6 version is a tad slow in being ported... oh the joys of development. I hope you enjoy!

The time has come for me to depart from AssignByWeb. While I leave the comfort and security of a job that I have invested so much in, I am moving on to bigger and better things. I'm thankful for what they have done for me, but the grass finally looks greener elsewhere and thanks to my good friend Tim, I have the chance I have been looking for for quite some time now. Next week is my last day, and nothing personal, but I hope it will be the last time I have to work for them. While there are plenty of negative things I could say, I won't. They have done plenty of good for me, and while there is a lot of history between us, it is finally coming to an end. I will not be burning any bridges since I'm too nice of a guy to do such a thing, almost, arguably, to a fault.

What a crazy, and tiring, night. It started with Becky and I hanging out with some of our neighbors. As the night went on, the wind grew strong and the rain more drenching. They both beat against my house ferociously, and the power finally went out at 4AM. It was rough going to sleep with all that wind hitting my house constantly, and I don't remember any storm being that violent that I sat through. I didn't get much sleep during the early morning hours because of the storm, so I frequently looked outside and checked the radio to see what was going on. By noon time, the worst of the storm was long gone and we had remnants of the storm's tail end giving us rain and wind.

Becky and I moved from New Orleans for several reasons. The biggest one by far was the fact that we couldn't afford to buy a home there since the prices shot up after Hurricane Katrina. Another was to move to an area less prone to hurricanes, and now here we ware facing a direct hit from Hurricane Ike. Can you sense the excitement and the thrill? I can't either.

After receiving some great feedback, I have finally worked my way into updating Autotab with some key fixes and handy new features. Before I release this as a final version, I'd like additional testing and critiques to be done to make v1.1 final and release it to the masses, so please download, test, and critique! Detailed descriptions can be found in the source file.

It's that time again; cool weather is beginning to move in, TV shows are starting their season premieres, and it also marks the start of this little American sport that gets me all worked up, for better and worse, called football, you know, the one where the "wimps" where pads (according to some rugby fans). I'm happy that football is back, and I think Becky kind of is too because the background noise from the TV helps her take a nap, forcing me to restrain my joy, frustration, or amazement during whatever game I'm watching. There were some interesting developments yesterday, but I'll let NFL.com be your one stop shop to all things NFL. I'll merely comment on interesting things.