Come Adventuring

Now don’t get me wrong, IZEAFest was a big event for me. Just a long road to get there. I’ve spent the last three months working day/nights/weekends coding a new feature for IZEAFest only to have it pulled at the last minutes because the QA department got backed testing other projects. Although extremely dis-apointed in this decision I do understand it. It just sucks.

However as IZEAFest came around Rai and I did have a great time.

Thursday was of course the meet and greet. I got to see our friends from last year Cass, Colleen, and Heather. Plus got to meet a few other friends as well. The meet/greet was alright. Such that I seem to be always on the job, made a new contact for the sales department and talked to a few advertisers about how to help them with social media. All in all not a bad evening.

Friday was all about trying to help out the event. Although I was only supposed to be a floater for half the day I stuck around the whole day pitching in as needed. Since none of my code was going to be deployed for the “big” event I felt I wasn’t needed for the deploy. Paid off as other dev’s got called away so I got to help run the sound board. Just doing my part I guess.

Even though the request was in that we attend IZEAFest I didn’t go Saturday. Idid learn a lot of great stuff on Friday and the live video feed I choose to stay home Saturday and work on an interface for my project. Although I couldn’t help tuning in and listening to the widgets/plugins panels. That was a mistake.

All they wanted to talk about was “What widgets and plugins” they used. Please, I wanted to hear some meat. How do you qualify a widget/plugin? How do you handle security? I logged into the chat room for the event and became very active in the discussions.

Saturday night after the party however I was an IZEAHunt team captain. After a little team shuffling we got started. I really was awesome. I say that as I didn’t have to get all dirty this time. Rai was on my team and she enjoyed it. I had to other poeple on my team and they were awesome as well. They found it amazing that just a simple little contest like this would bring out the fun. Never did either of the two think that the other would do something like this.

With the input of the IZEAFest conference I have sorta redesigned by blog. Still a work in progress but looks a lot better than it did. After four months of working nearly non-stop I think I’ll just go watch a movie, or really anything a way from a computer at the moment.

(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.