New Job

I started a new job this week after only eight months at my previous job. I came to the realization that being in IT/IS in the manufacturing sector sucks. You're last to get money and resources, and first to have them taken away when some other department needs them. I also found that when I was programming for someone with a genuine need that appreciated the work, my day flew by. Recognition of good work increases employment satisfaction? Who knew! Unfortunately, such work was hard to come by. I did a total of... ready for this? One programming project while I was there. It was a project I could've banged out in a day or two if I had a written spec.

As of March 20th, I started working for a political campaign web programming shop. I've already done a site for a cable industry lobbying group, and start work on an NRA (yes, that NRA) related site next week. Did I mention I also got a substantial raise over my previous job? Yep. By the way, the picture to the right is of my dual monitor PC at the new place. Oh, I also get to wear whatever I want to work unless a client is coming in. That rocks. I like it here and won't be looking back anytime soon.

Auto Show

I got free tickets to the private preview of the Auto Show this year, so I thought I'd check it out. I'm pretty much glad I didn't have to pay for it. For the most part it would be like paying to go to a car lot, except that the salesman don't bug you, and you're not allowed to test drive anything. Maybe the salesman thing had to do with the fact that everyone attending the preview were supposedly in the automotive industry? Oh well. I weep for those that go this weekend and pay full price. In general people were pushy, rude, and anything worth looking at was swamped with people. That means good luck sitting in and checking out anything affordable that didn't lool like crap (the Scion xB... and the new Honda Civic looked nice, and anyone who knows me knows I HATE small cars).
I snapped a few pictures (with my cell phone) of some of the more interesting cars I saw (like the interior of a new Audi A8), a new Dodge Viper, or a couple Aston Martins) which can be viewed here. Overall, there really wasn't that much "wow factor" to the show. That's probably why 62% of people on a cleveland.com poll said they wouldn't be attending.

Safari hunt

This is just an update to my post from yesterday. After wasting well over 35 hours of troubleshooting time with this damn Zebra printer, I finally isolated and solved the issue with it either not printing or partial printing labels. What was it? Their DRIVER! And not just any driver... the latest version of the driver off their own website. After wasting days upon days talking to tech support, sending this thing back to them twice, and using multiple parallel, USB, and serial cables I came to isolate the problem to their own latest and greatest driver.

Great, right? Well, I figured I should tell them about it. Get this... they already knew about it not working with the .NET Framework. Mind you, I emailed like six people in the company and only one bothered to respond. They are well aware of the issue with their newest driver not working with the .NET framework (the old version worked just fine). Funny, it wasn't mentioned ANYWHERE on their website. It also wasn't mentioned in the "known issues" readme file that came with the download. So I guess it's OK for them to know and distribute CRAP drivers and leave it up to end users to play the "is it my cable? my printer? my program?" game.

The sweet and sour

Sweet! I was surfing around on Digg and found this cool site called Meebo. It's basically an instant messenger interface for Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, and MSN but strictly over the web (no software to install, no special ports). You may be saying "so what, some of those services offer their own web version". The difference is any corporate firewall that blocks IM is going to have those web addresses blocked. I've tested Meebo from at least two secured networks and it got by without a hitch.

I'm really sour on Zebra printers. If you need a thermal printer, find something else... ANYTHING else. I've got one of these pieces of crap (TLP 2844-Z) and suffice it to say its super picky and their tech support is worthless. It's been back to the manufacturer twice. They've told me "don't use USB" (then why the hell does it have a USB port?). On four separate machines now (3 XP SP2, 1 2000) the reliability of whether it'll print or not can best be described as erratic. God I hate this thing.

HA! HA!

I got a laptop in for repair today. Apparently the person was using it in the kitchen and knocked it clear off the counter while it was still running. Defective hard drive! Yah that was boring. However, next time he brings in a machine for repair, something tells me he'll think to check the contents of it first. *points and laughs* HA! HA!. The best part was when he asked if I had accessed then disc in the drive, then non-chalantly attempted to remove it and hide the label side from my view. Hell, given a few more minutes I would've made copies. Mwahahaha!

Falling sand is fun?

So I found a fun new time waster called "The Falling Sand Game". Sounds lame? Yup! But it's addictive as hell. There's basically four "faucets" along the top of the screen dropping salt, water, sand, and oil. You can build walls, grow plants, mix the elements, set fire to the oil or plants amongst other things. Still sounds boring? I thought the same thing. Then I ended up screwing with it for 45 minutes. Check it out (picture to the right is clickable).

In the Quick Links bar on the left I added a link to Digg.com. It's supposed to be a "Slashdot killer". If you don't know what Slashdot is, just move along and pretend you didn't read this. Digg is basically a news submission blog type thing; or, as Digg says "With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."

I just got my girlfriend set up with Dragon Naturally Speaking software (speech recognition) and a Plantronics headset for voice recognition. This stuff seems pretty sophisticated and actually works. No more typing? Say it ain't so! I can see it now, me, programming: "public int Get Customer Balance Open Parenthesis int Customer ID close parenthesis open curly brace sequel connection cust db equals new sequel connection..."

If you like pina colada!

Why the hell is this song stuck in my head? I actually had to look it up... it's Escape (The Pina Colada Song) by Rupert Holmes. Whoever the hell that is?
I moved a bunch of older posts off to an archive page because they were slowing down the load time on this page. Thanks for the "kickass" 256k upload and blocked port 80 Cox! I'd host the site at work like I have in the past, but thanks to wonderful Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, it would be considered a breach of proper security policy. Yay.

I just went to register for Tri-C web based courses and was pissed to find that every single damn web course is filled. Sociology. Humanities. History. Archeology. The hell? *sigh* I ended up signing up for English Technical Writing. Another exciting action packed semester ahead for me! I think Junior's reaction (picture on right) about sums up how I'm feeling about things right now.