ace’s blog

WoW is awesome! I’m not addicted as some people I know are but I enjoy playing. I won’t be playing much once my family is back with me but until then, I’ll be playing me some Wow!

I talked my boss into letting me work from Memphis two weeks at a time, instead of our originally negotiated one week. Two weeks with the family at a time?! Who would have ever thought I wouldn’t be spending all of my time with them?! This has been one of the more difficult times in our lives, especially now that Aaron is fairly aware of what is going on.

Meri took Aaron trick-or-treating tonight and she said that he loved it. Aaron got to knock on every door and say “Happy Hawoween” (he has issues with his L’s). The when the people would put candy in his pumpkin, he would fish it out, tell them what it was, and then say “Thank you for [insert candy name here]“. I really wish I could have been there with them! He asked Meri if tomorrow was Happy Halloween again and then asked if there was going to be any more trick-or-treating again tomorrow. This is the first year that he’s been into it like this. Next year will be fun too! I’ll just look forward to that.

In other Wood family news, a woman came to look at our house for the second time in 3 days! I’m going to take that as a sign that she liked it a lot the first time. Our realtor seems to be stepping up lately and really getting the ball rolling. As much as we disliked her style initially, she does seem to have a fire under her ass now, for which we are thankful.

Now, back to WoW! I’m Nakhand on the Ner’zhul server in case anybody is interested…

I just wrote an “auto complete” script in Lansa utilizing the Yahoo UI which passes back data from the DB2 database as a JSON string!

I told you I would go on to be the Lansa programming ninja I’ve always aspired to be!

Now, the funniest clip of any movie, ever… http://youtube.com/watch?v=oXjO7BnNIQ0

In all of my years of life (over a 1/4 century!) and all my years of flying on planes (as opposed to flying on anything else), I have never missed a flight….EVER!

Well, that couldn’t last my whole life could it? The most important flight in my long life and I missed it. The woman at the gate, in an almost too chipper voice, told me “you just missed it by a minute…maybe two!” Now was that supposed to make me feel better? Cuz if it was, I think that totally flew over my head. It put me in a worse mood.

So here’s how it was supposed to work out: I wake up, parked, go to my gate, sit on a plane and then two hours later, I was back in Memphis and hugging my family again. Here’s how it actually worked out: I woke up, I DROVE for two hours (to an airport that is 45 minutes away), parked at a much more expensive lot ($9 per day versus $30 for the entire time I was away), I sit on a shuttle for 15 minutes, I finally walk my ass into the airport and RUN around, looking at all the boards for my gate number since it wasn’t on my ticket…guess what?! No gates listed for my flight…super. So now I have to educatedly guess which security check point I’m supposed to go through and after that, guess which tram I’m supposed to take. So I eventually get in the correct area (gate) and am informed that my plane JUST left, like milliseconds ago. Now I am booked on a different plane. Now keep in mind that I was supposed to be on a direct flight from Orlando to Memphis. Now my new flight is SOOO much better cuz I get to go to Minneapolis and then to Memphis. Somehow, my 2 hour flight turned into 5 1/2 hours AND a 90 minute layover.

But after all that, I’m home and Aaron’s loving it. He keeps hurting me though…yesterday, when we were playing, I said “Aaron, I love you” and he replied “No go bye-bye daddy”. I told him that I wasn’t going anywhere as I walked away shedding tears. My son must be scared that I’m going to leave him for a month at a time everytime I tell him I love him. It makes me want to cry even thinking about it again.

So if you read my post about joining a gym, you may (or may not, in which case, screw you!) have been wondering about my level of soreness!

Well, the level of pain in my abdominal region in almost unbearable.  I should be pat on the back by everyone that sees me for having to deal with all this pain in one area of my body.  Holy shit it hurts.  Why is it that I can pedal my ass off for two 45 minute classes and not be even the tinsiest bit sore in either of my legs but 10 minutes of ab exercies makes me want to just inject my muscles with morphine?!

But enough about that…actually I’m done.  I have nothing else to bitch about at the moment.  Other than my abs hurting, but I think I’ve said that already.

I’ve wanted a bike for a long time. I have never ridden one before so I don’t really know what I’m looking for. I know I don’t want a bike with a large engine for my first bike. I found an Orlando bike dealer with a lot of models on their website and they are up front about their prices and all that good stuff. Ideally, I’d get a Harley Davidson bike but since I’ve never had a bike before, I don’t think I should go out and get the bike I really, really want and like right now (VRSC VRod). So I thought I would just get a mid-price but good starter bike, something like a Honda Shadow Aero or Honda Shadow Spirit, both 745cc bikes . I will probably just go up to a dealership and talk to a salesperson at some point but I don’t want to do that quite yet. The problem is that I don’t have a clue what to ask about and all that jazz. I guess there is only one real way to learn what you don’t know…just do it!
Now for the pictures!
Honda Shadow Aero:

Honda Shadow Spirit:

Harley Davidson VRSC VRod:

Ok, so I was just screwing around online since I’m all alone and nobody is around and saw this GREAT NEWS! (end sarcasm)

The day is upon us, IE 7 is going to be released, sometime this month. Well ain’t that just the grandest thing you’ve heard in a long ass time.

As I have just recently become the lead developer on a major web application with many users (notice how I made my new job seem oh-so-important!), a new version of IE can only be a BIG ASS thorn in my side. The MS blog link below can only mean that things that worked are now going to break and that there are going to be all kinds of screwy bugs.

Thanks Microsoft, thanks a ton. I know it’s been 6 years since there has been a new version of IE and normally I would have been excited about it but not now, not with my new job. Now that I’m the one in charge of “just making it work”, this can’t be good news. I’m sure MS was just sitting back, waiting until I took a lead web developer position at some company and since I just did that, they thought “let’s release it on this poor kid”…and so they did (notice how I made myself the center of the web development world? nice huh?).

Oh well, job security huh?

November 8th will be our third wedding anniversary! Three years! Who would have ever thought that that I could get a woman, a real live woman, who possesses both the ability to hear AND see, to stay with me for three whole years! And that is just the length of time that we’ve been married. I think we dated for 4 years (on and off) before we got married.

You know what’s great about the third anniversary? There are two types of gifts that correspond with the third wedding anniversary: the traditional and the modern. If you don’t want to click those links, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of them: the traditional third wedding anniversary gift is leather, and the modern is crystal. Now being the technology minded kind of person that I am, I would generally go with anything labeled “modern”.

Not this time! What says “Baby, I’ve missed you so much since we’ve been away from each” other more than leather?! My isn’t getting a wallet or belt, she’s getting something we can all enjoy…well, something I can enjoy…

Hm, that’s probably a little too much information for all of you. I hope neither of our parents reads this. In fact, if you know me, just pretend I didn’t write any of this and also that you didn’t actually read it.

Now since it is officially Saturday, I can very, very happily say that I get to see my gorgeous wife in one week! Just seven more days and I get to see my wife and son. They must both be really excited! Haha. I’m really excited. I will be able to see and touch my wife and be able to pick up and toss around my son. I am so ready to go back home and see them! I hope my house sells soon…this whole being apart from my family is the absolute worst part of my otherwise cool new job.

The YMCA in East Memphis that I belonged to was not a great place.  Sure, they had some weights, some basic weight lifting equipment (not much at all),  and a few pieces of cardio equipment.  If you factor in the shape of the facility, the look of the locker room and shower area, it wasn’t exactly crap but wasn’t much higher on the scale.  The Memphis Y cost about $40 a month for a single person membership and that was about on par with other gyms in the area.  When Meri told me to check out the Y down here, I was a bit skeptical and basically didn’t want to even waste my time.

I got to the downtown Y a few days ago and was immediately shocked!  This place is gorgeous!  There are 2 separate cardio areas; 3 weight rooms, two of which have free-weights, the third has the hammer strength type of equipment; there are 4 racquet ball courts; 1 large basketball court; and two very large pools, one indoor, the other outside; a spinning room; and finally several large rooms for stretching or aerobics classes.  After my tour was over, we talked price.  This is also where I was shocked.  The cost of a single membership was $58…just for me!  The cost for a family membership was $90!  Plus there is a $100 “application” fee for a single membership and $150 for a family.  I thought, “Damn! This is ridiculous!”

So I joined the downtown YMCA today at lunch and had some clothes in my truck just in case I got out of work early and felt like going.  This particular YMCA has spinning classes every morning and evening at 6.  I really liked spinning in college so I thought “what the hell, let’s do it!”  I was proud of myself.  For not doing a really labor intensive cardio workout in over 5 years, I did very well.  I made it through the entire 45 minute class and even did a little ab workout at the end.  It was great fun!  We’ll just see how I feel in the morning!

The newly redesigned Google Reader is so much better than the old Google Reader.  Not only was there a face-lift to the site, there are a few other features that make it one of the best RSS readers on the web today.

Perhaps the newest feature I like the most is the fact that I can view the items as an expanded view, showing all of the text of the article, or as just the headline itself.  Now that sounds simple right?  I’m sure it was.  The two options are just a click away.

I’ve abandoned bloglines.com for the new Google Reader.  It’s now my homepage, since I like being able to just glance at news and figure out what is going on in the world.