AlanBarber.Org
Friday, November 11, 2005
Goodbye UPS
Such a sad day, heh yea right!
Today was my last day working at UPS. It’s been mostly fun but it’s time to move on to bigger and better things now.
It was a pretty easy day, thankfully. Volume was 147,000 total and 8000 for the area. That means none of us had to work very hard which was nice. We’ve been getting out butts kicked every day this week. The idiots running the unload would screw around all day and barely move anything, then the last hour of the shift they would go crazy and dump on everyone. As a result the PD would burn down and it would take forever to clean up.
Anyhoo, it was a nice day. I joked around with everyone and several supervisors and staff members stopped by to wish me well.
My girlfriend made cookies for me to take in and they were a hit. Everyone was happy to have something good to eat.
The day finally came to an end and I took off. I’ll probably never see the inside of that building again, which will be just fine by me. No more noisy machinery, dirty trucks or heavy boxes to lift.
It’s time to move on and start using my brain every day instead of my brawn.
So Goodbye UPS, it was fun!
on 11/11/2005 at 06:38 PM
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Findlay Area .NET User Group (November 30th, 2005)
Just want to pass this on to anyone in the Findlay, Ohio area…
The FANUG website is at http://groups.msn.com/FindlayAreaNETUserGroup
Next Meeting: November 30, 2005
Topic: Applying Architecture and Design Patterns in .NET
Presenter: Martin L. Shoemaker - The Tablet UML Company
Meeting Sponsered by: INETA
Description: Investigate how particular design patterns are represented in a mix of C# and VB.NET code.
Martin L. Shoemaker
Martin L. Shoemaker is a software developer with 17 years experience in the industry. He has worked in the fields of color science, on-line shopping, databases, material handling, medical imaging, and customer relations management.
Martin is also an accomplished speaker, having presented to the Detroit Colour Council, the Ann Arbor Computer Society, the Ann Arbor IT Zone, the Rubi Con security conference in Detroit, the Visual Studio Live/Visual C++ Developers Conference in San Francisco, and the UML World Conference in New York. His most popular presentations are Richard Hale Shaw’s UML BootCamp, written and presented by Martin. He has presented this course both in public settings and for individual clients.
Pizza and pop will be served.
Time: 5:30-7:00 PM
Location: Marathon Findlay Offices, 539 S. Main St., Findlay, OH
Cost: Meeting is Free. Drawing held at end of meeting.
FANUG Purpose: To assist developers with their education in Microsoft’s .NET technology. This group seeks to attract professional software developers and students from Findlay and the surrounding areas. Our meetings will encompass presentations from area experts that will contribute to the learning of each individual. Through our membership in INETA, we hope to attract internationally known speakers on various .NET subjects.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Download Visual Studio Express 2005 For Free
Man you have to love those guys at Microsoft.
For the next year, until Nov 2006, they’re going to let you download any of the Visual Studio Express programs (Visual Basic, C#, C++, J# and Web Developer) plus SQL Server Express for free. Normally, these programs go for something like 49.99 I believe.
They aren’t that bad in size. Under 100mb per program so go ahead and download them. You never know when it might come in handy. Burn it to a cd and keep it for future use.
Thanks MS!
Thursday, November 03, 2005
I have a new job!
Actually, I take that back. I don’t have a new job, I have a career!
What’s the difference you might ask?
A job is something you go to every day to earn a paycheck. Flipping burgers at McyDy’s and loading boxes at UPS are jobs. You come to work and earn a paycheck. It’s not something you like to do and it’s not something you dream of doing for the rest of your life.
A career is something you dream of doing. It’s work that you’ve planned to do by going to college or some other educational program.
Without further ado, I’m happy to announce that starting on the 14th I will begin my career as a Programmer/IT Person for Corporate Research International.
Simply put, CRI is a market research company. Companies hire them to do the so called “mystery shopping.” People are paid to go our and eat at a restaurant, buy something at a gas station, etc. They then fill out a report for CRI about the place. All the data is then compiled into reports and stats that the companies can use to do whatever they want.
CRI was recently featured in Inc Magazines list of the 500 fastest growing private companies. Here’s the quote:
What it does: Call center monitoring and mystery shopping for companies such as Papa John’s and K-Mart. Why it’s growing: Its fastest-growing area is integrated voice and Web response, which sends consumers to a website or toll-free number printed on the back of their receipts and surveys them on service.
Anyways, I’m coming onboard as a Programmer/IT Person. For the most part the job is about developing the websites for the customers to fill out surveys and clients to view the compiled reports. However, the job isn’t just sitting in a cubicle hacking code all day. You also do all the general IT work for the company like: system administration, providing tech support for all the employees, networking the offices, whatever else there happens to be.
It’s a very fast paced and active job and that’s just one of the many reasons I’m excited about working there. I’m glad to finally have a job that works my brain for a change.
I’m just such a happy guy today!
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
I'm Digitizing My Brain!
Ok, I’m not really digitizing my brain. He he he!
What I’ve done is install a Wiki on my home server, Monkey1, so that I can keep a knowledge base of information.
I’ve reached a point where I’m doing so much stuff that it’s getting hard to remember what I did. For example, I recently updated my home server which runs Windows Small Business Server 2003 with the SP1 (Software Patch 1) that Microsoft released.
Hopefully, everyone is familiar with the idea of Microsoft SPs but incase not here’s the short on it. Occasionally, Microsoft will take all the individual bug fixes and patches they release for their Operating Systems, be it Windows XP or Windows Server, and roll them into one big patch for that OS. The idea being that if someone has to reinstall their system or whatnot it would be pain in the butt to have to install several hundred individual patches. Instead you can just download and install one ubber-patch and get up to speed.
Now back to my example. I had just installed the patch and shortly after I noticed some error messages showing up in the windows event logs. I spent probably a good 2 hours searching message boards and websites for how to fix the problem. I finally managed to dig up the info and solve it. Hey, everything was good so I forgot all about it.
A few days ago I saw a message board post where someone had a similar problem and I was sure the thing that I did to fix my problem would work for them too. I sort of remember the steps to fix the problem but couldn’t remember exactly what to do. Well, crap to me if I didn’t spent another hour digging around just trying to find the website with the instructions I had used.
After this little incident I sort of started to realize that I need a way to keep track of this info and any other techie info I might want to use in the future.
So, I went out searched for Knowledge Base systems, FAQ systems, etc. Nothing seemed to work exactly how I wanted it to.
The problem is I wanted something very free flowing that I can build not only the information but also the very structure of how this info is organized. Someone suggested I use a Wiki.
Stepping aside again. A Wiki is basically a website that allows anyone to easily create and make changes to the contents of the website. Probabbly the largest and most well known Wiki is Wikipedia.
Again back to my story. I did some searching and came up with OpenWiki as a viable option. I was looking for an ASP based wiki because I don’t have PHP installed on my server and I don’t want to. That is another story in and of itself!
I went and installed OW on my server and so far things have been working well. I’m slowly converting over several folders of text files to the wiki and just dumping in anything else that comes at hand.
Going back to my example from above. I’ve made a wiki page called WindowsErrors. I put on it all the details about what the error you get is and the instructions on how to fix. Now if I ever need to fix that problem again, I can just open up my wiki navigate to the WindowsErrors page and there will be the solution. That’s 30 seconds to find the solution and not 1 or 2 hours of searching the web.
It’s really nice to just click a button and make a new page and add content and then have it there to reference later on. I know this is going to make my life much, much easier!