Come Adventuring

(August 19, 2008 8:52 am) Tropical Storm Fay made its second landfall on Florida this morning at 5:00 am over Cape Romano. It had strengthend to near hurricane Cat 1 status, just 4 mph short of the category. It was moving N at approximately 9 mph. The projected path set it to go straight up the middle of the state.

Now almost 4 hours later the project path has been altered to take it possibly East of Orlando but hooking back towards us in Deland. All reports say it will stall just North of us and linger. That’s going to make it rough for us the rest of the week.

However if TS Fay stalls over water it’s predicted to rebuild. Reports also indicate that if that happens it could shot West into Texas.

So far at 9:00 am in Deland we haven’t had any storms, yet. I expect to see them in a few hours. Current reports are:

2 Confirmed tornadoes
over 35,000 residents without powe
Winds still 60mph, Confirmed gusts to 75mph
Has not lost a lot of strength since making landfall.

Oh and we have our share of stupidity here: Kite Surfers

Last Wednesday I had a very important task to do when I got home. That task was to call the Internal Revenue Service in order to have the $17,000 that they say I owed them removed. A 1099 had been generated in 2006 against my personal Social Security number but I had filed all that income against my business taxes. I didn’t know about the 1099 and the IRS only recently notified me of the owed taxes, plus the penalties they have been charging since 2007.

So this phone call was going to an extremely important one. I arrived home to a very nasty storm outside. What it was really a feeder band for the hurricane that was hitting Texas at the moment. So with everything ready I prepared to make the call to the IRS.

“No service available”

WTF? My phone had no service, Rai’s phone had no service, Abra’s phone had no service. All three dead. I drove up the road to the in-laws. They had cell service, but I still didn’t. The difference being that we had 3G phones and they didn’t. I ended up calling the IRS on their land line. Only took 5 minutes to clarify with them how to removed the tax debt, yet I was on hold for over an hour to have the 5 minute discussions.

Same thing Thursday night. My phone service was fine in Orlando, but in Deland it wasn’t available. So we called AT&T. Another hour on the phone with them, changing conigurations, rebooting phones, etc nothing. So the tech transfered us over to another tech.

The second tech informed us they had just spent the last three hours on calls similar to ours. Seems the hurricane in Texas has sporadically wiped out service in Louisiana, and Florida. Now I’m not sure how that’s even possible since 15 miles south of here I get good reception. They opened a case for us so that the repair crews would look into it.

On Friday I got a text message from AT&T that problem had been fixed. Sure enough, when I got home I had phone reception.

It’s things like this that drive me absolutely mad.

IZEA has done some restructuring to improve efficiencies and along with it I was made a senior dev. In the role I’ll be given projects to manage which includes project development of requirements and project resources planning.

With this I’ll be able do both the things I love, project management and coding!

I’ve spent another weekend writing code on my off time. It’s a bad habit of mine that I understand. truthfully if I could find the key that brings the whole family together in what they want to do and have fun I would certainly throw the computer in the lake and be with the family. That being said we are all fine with doing what we want and need to.

Kel did give me a Father’s day present of her name in Egyptian Hieroglyphics and that was very cool.

While I punch away at the keys I can only keep in mind this one poem by and anonymous author:

What Makes a Dad

God took the strength of a mountain,
The majesty of a tree,
The warmth of a summer sun,
The calm of a quiet sea,
The generous soul of nature,
The comforting arm of night,
The wisdom of the ages,
The power of the eagle’s flight,
The joy of a morning in spring,
The faith of a mustard seed,
The patience of eternity,
The depth of a family need,
Then God combined these qualities,
When there was nothing more to add,
He knew His masterpiece was complete,
And so,

He called it … Dad

Wishing you and your’s a Happy Fathers Day.

Last Wednesday I accepted two new feature sets to work on that are to be delivered by this thursday. It is so nice not working only on fix tickets. It also meant that I needed to work all weekend to get ahead and ensure, at least from the backend, that the features were complete.

Friday night consisted of a quick dinner at the in-laws. Afterwhich Kel had her school play. It was the “Wizard of Oz” and her part was a munchkin. I was really beat since being up at 3:00 am that day. The play was really kinda neat.  We got homw around 9:00 pm and decided that I better get some shut eye for what was going to be a long weekend.

Up a 2:00 a.m. I got started on the feature that I planned for that day. Refactoring a bunch of python code and changing a few functionalities within SocialSpark messaging wasn’t difficult, just taking a long time. Kel has a friend over about 2:00 p.m. Subsequently it was a trip to the grocery store for me. Afterwhich I hung out with the family and watched a movie.

6:00 p.m. Kel left with her friend to stay the night over there. Back to coding for me until 9:00 p.m. Then crashed.

Midnight! Back up back to coding. I didn’t complete the feature from the prior day as I hoped since the second feature was way more complicated. I was having a strange problem where a service I was contacting wasn’t authorizing a clearly correct username/password. several hours later I figured out that a simple extra whitespace was causing the problem.

6:00 a.m. feature one complete and time for a nap! 8:00 a.m. and back up again. To my surprise the second feature was rather easy to finish and by 10:00 a.m. I had done so!! That left me time to do the household things I needed to do.

Grocery store for a full list, we now have food in the house. Laundry, I now have clean clothes too. Flushed the radiator in Rachael’s car. It had been overheating and as a temp fix I added a bunch of water the other day. Now with fresh anti-freeze it takes a lot longer to begin to overheat, something I need to explore, but only if sitting idle for like twenty minutes.

Checked the A/C in my car to figure out why it blew hot are in really hot weather. Discovered the front end had damamge and the condensor had been bent, but not leaking. Resolved myself not to worry about it for a while. Went out for Chinese with the family about 4:00 p.m. as I was starving.  

All in all it was a long weekend and I got plenty done. I really do prefer to code in the early mornings and leave the day for the family. It just makes for long days. Sleep came early at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, yet back up at 3:00 a.m. for research on a new idea.

Well it has finally happened, Abra has graduated high school. In a three hour ceremony that we had to sit through she finally received her diploma. I’m proud that she finally did am am relieved that the pressure is off of us as well.

Being her parents does place that pressure to make sure whe has everything to succeed. While we have tried it’s been difficult as, well, she still is a kid and thinks she knows everything.

I found it funny that while the victorians were giving their speeches about how the graduates where now entering their adulthoods, having passed the toughest years of their lives, I could only chuckle that they had no idea of what was in store for them.

It’s awesome though, Abra is working on going to Fashion college to get her Bachelors Degree and I will support her anyway I can. Her father came down for the event and at the moment they are both fighting on where they want to go to spend the day together. I’m trying my best to stay out of it.

Abras graduation pictures are here: Abra

Last year around what October Google introduced its rank spank to a vast amount of blogger who had supposedly had paid posts and links. I say supposedly because my original site Tech Raving got zerod in the first round of the hit.

Tech Raving had absolutely no paid posts and at the time no advertisements as well. So why did I get hit. I theorized because I work for PayPerPost / IZEA. Although after researching a great many blogs outside the PayPerPost system I don’t see where it was strictly targeted towards PayPerPost.

Fine, I got spanked. Big freaking deal as I was still indexed (without PageRank) by Google but the amount of indexing but metacrawlers and the other search engines I wasn’t even concerned about Google. Nope not in the least. Keywords were still moving me forward even if not on Google.

So I set up Come Adventuring here two weeks ago. Just to completely speak my mind outside of technology and the what not. One thing I did however was attempt to make peace with Google by asking for a re-evaluation of Tech Raving.

Funny thing that, Come Adventuring was a page rank of ZERO when I added the sitemaps and no posts. Tech Raving was spanked. Now Come Adventuring is a Page Rank of ONE and Tech Raving is still spanked. Not in the fun sort of way either.

Fine let’s test this theory. I work for IZEA, PAYPERPOST, ZOOKODA, URLBRIEF, BLOGGERS CHOICE AWARDS, IZEA RANKS. Now lets’ see how long I hold onto PageRank. If I lose it now, then yes Googles targeting certain keywords. If not then there is nothing to worry about. Other than Google is way to big for its britches and needs a spanking (stocks) of it’s own.

I always listen to music at work. Trevor is always saying the DJ in my head is playing the music too loud. Well that’s because I love music, in most forms at least. Country is, well, not my style. So I’ve been listening to Live365 and several stations there for my daily fix.

When I started to work for IZEA on of my sites was starting to because over-bearing because the popularity took of. I had to consider creating more servers for a full genre network in order to meet the demand. That was not an option as it was a free site.

Here a little over a year later I have restarted the streaming. You can listen here http://urlbrief.com/6ff99c . I’ll run it for a while to see how it goes. If it goes well maybe I’ll add back in the live shows on a weekly basis.

So yesterday was my birthday. I generally don’t give it a whole of thought as after 38 years it’s really just another day to me. I did get to go out with Rachael and have a good dinner after work and that is what’s important to me.

Last month was my one year anniversary with working with IZEA and I was sick and had to leave early. I fully expected to do a cake plow today to make up for it today. However as I have a sinus infection and even moving my head, much less breathing, causes pain I didn’t raise a “Hey I was supposed to do one as well” when I wasn’t included.

Seriously there is good pain and bad pain and sinus’s are not good. Especially slamming your face on a hard surface. Since my birthday is May 5 any how I will have to do a cake plow this month. I suppose if I’m not sick again I’ll have to do a double. Now just how do I do two at once and make it interesting?