Installing KDE 4.2 on a Thinkpad with 256MB ram, Running AcidRip, Dreams about pressing F8, QA database testing and the working on a "Drag" part

Feb 22 Sunday

Penni woke me up at 8am to shower and go shopping at Target. I got a coffee at the mini Starbucks inside the store. It was surprisingly good. Penni bought some clothes and I got a pair of cheap sunglasses. We returned home and I showed Penni how to remote into the LinuxTVserver and watch Hulu.com videos on the TV. Penni went out to have dinner with one of her friends from twitter. I worked on upgrading my old 256MB ThinkPad to kde4.2. I tried to do it without upgrading to Ubuntu Intrepid. I some how hosed my kdm-kde4 login manager and X-org modules. X-org has really improved in the last year, crashing it is quite difficult now, but I managed to do it! Go Me! I gave up and started upgrading it to Intrepid from the terminal and went to practice. Scott worked on mixing and re-recorded some guitar parts. After practice I has some coffee and finished the upgrade. KDE 4.2 looks great and runs surprisingly fast on only 256mb of Ram.

Feb 21 Saturday

I did not sleep well, I was dreaming about watching a debugger F8 through loops of recordsets (God that is depressing!) I slept late and ate junk food all day. Penni worked all day on knitting gloves and napped. We played scrabble twice an won. I picked up Burger King for Penni at 11pm. We napped on the couch after a late dinner and finally went to bed at 3am.

Feb 20 Friday

The SysAdmin created a SQL database for me to start the 2821 database. Several QA department users and telecommuters logged in to test the new database. There was one weird issue where the QA power user was unable to change one record in a specific table but able to change the other records . I walked a lap at lunch listening to the Poison The Well, Versions album. The SysAdmin emailed me a clip of code to drop an ADO recordset into a Excel spreadsheet in one step instead of looping through each row. I owe him lunch for that. On the way home I picked up some groceries for the weekend at Harris teeter. I fixed a couple of frozen pizzas and played scrabble with Penni while I was ripping media to load to the Linux TV Server. I am using AcidRip instead of DVD::RIP now.

Feb 19 Thursday

My homie Niki was back at work today from visiting family in Virginia. It was good to see her. I finished the list of changes that the QA Power user gave me and added a function in the On_Current event to deal with behavior of the Status=Closed/Open/Pending with empty user input fields. I walked a lap during lunch and listened to more of the Nine inch Nails Ghosts Album. I picked up some burger king food for Penni and took a quick nap after work. Scott called, He wanted to do practice later so he could record Jessica's brother Ben. I listen to the Mountain Goats, Tallahassee Album on the way to the practice space. I heard Ben's recording it was a live acoustic cover of the song "23". Ben is great. He needs to start a band, maybe with Davie all-star and Danny, that would be awesome. We worked on recording more versions of the "legal drag" part.

Feb 18 Wednesday

My Boss found an error in the Month End Reports that were published late Tuesday. The error was not my fault, (Woo-Hoo!) I was tapped to work through lunch and fix them before any upper management noticed it. After fixing the reports, I ate lunch at Niko's, It was cold and rainy so I could not walk during lunch so I sat in a booth and read a little of the book that I bought for Jury Duty. On the way back to the office, I noticed my front right tire was low. I used some flex time and left early to inflate it. As I was inflating it I heard air hissing out through a pin hole. I went to Harris teeter and bought a few cans of fix-a-flat and drove home to google local tire shops. I found one of south blvd and got 2 new tires. I listened to the Nine Inch Nails ghosts album and read more of DUMA KEY while my car was being worked on. Later I when to practice and worked on the "Legal" song's "drag" part. Practice run a little late. I called Penni and she told me about getting coffee with her friend Tommi. She has just moved to Africa for her husband's job and this was her first visit back in the states. She told Penni one of the Guards that her husband hired had raped a neighbor's young daughter. Tommi was trying to get the local police involved but the victim's mother was trying to cover everything up and not make waves. Penni and I are worried that Tommi is going to get hurt over there. She said money is tight and if her and her husband decided to move back now they could not afford to ship their clothes and personal belongings.

Feb 17 Tuesday

I started working on the new Credit Processing 2821 Worklist Database. I met with the power user from the QA department. She typed a list of bugs/improvements. Her list was organized by the tab in the application was made fixing them easier. Most were just requests for rewording labels, button text and message boxes. I walked a lap at lunch, it was cold and windy. While walking, i listened to the first 8 songs on the Nine Inch Nails ghosts album. There are 48 tracks on that album. I had never listened to them all. I received work that the Month End reports were available for publishing. I worked an hour and a half over to finish assembling, linking and publishing the PDF files. when I got home I ate a huge salad for dinner. I looked online for all black skate shoes, they were pretty hard to find. I ordered some shoes and Penni finished knitting a hat that she was working on.

Feb 16 Monday

Worked, Went to practice and worked on writing a new slow draggy part on the end of the "Legal" song.

Black Hole by Charles Burns, Jury Duty, Valentines Day, Custom Strings for WHERE clauses and My Systolic blood pressure

Feb 14 Saturday

Woke up early, Penni had stomach problems and was up all night. I had some coffee and worked on Java homework all day. Penni and I went out and bought groceries and returned a RedBox movie. As we passed the Cheese Cake factory Penni said she saw a few hundred people waiting outside, that is pretty insane. The Cheese Cake factory is really overrated. We returned home and I had a frozen pizza and a salad. Penni called the police on our neighbors for playing music too loud at midnight. She said it was loud in front of the townhouse too. I can sleep with low bass bleeding through the walls but Penni cannot.

Feb 13 Friday

I woke up early and remotely logged into my work email to change my out of office message for one more day. I went to the second day of jury duty. During a break, I called the flower shop and sent Penni some pink roses for Valentines Day. At lunch I grabbed another turkey burger from the courthouse cafeteria and walked to Target to get a Stephen King book. It was a long walk but i made it back in time. We returned a guilty vertict. We got out later than the judge estimated, around 3:30pm and I had to cancel my dentist appointment.

What I learned from my peers through the jury selection/deliberation process:

50% of all people, Black, White, Male, Female, Young, Old, Rich and Poor, are completely insane. If you are ever forced to be judged by your peers, Good Luck!

On the way home from the courthouse, I bought a headphone to RCA cable to hook up the server audio to the TV. Penni got me a card and took me out to dinner at Bentleys on 27th for Valentines day, It was great. I gave Penni a box set of the X files. I moved the server out of the TV stand and sat it up behind the TV. It runs cooler there but it is a little louder.

Feb 12 Thursday

I went to jury duty at 8am. While I was waiting, I read a black and while graphic novel called Black Hole by Charles Burns. It was great. I plowed through it in about 4 hours. It covered the dark alienating hormone-driven weirdness of been a teenager. There was a lot of loneliness, drug-use, suicides, and a sexually transmitted disease that turns people into deformed freaks. It was amazing. It made me thankful that I survived those teenage years. A lot of kids are not so lucky. I need to find some more Charles Burns books.

I ate a turkey burger from the courtroom cafeteria and then walked from the courthouse to the main bus terminal, looking for a book store. I was selected to set in a jury on a criminal case. Whee. When I got home, the VGA to RCA converter I order arrived. I hooked it up to the TV/server and put the server in the TV stand. There was not enough room for the computer to get cool air with the door closed. I copied some Media onto the server and tried it out. Penni was impressed. I had a salad for dinner and crashed early.


Feb 11 Wednesday

I ate at Showmars with the usual crew and brought lunch back to my homie Tzoua. She was stuck at her desk covering reports for Niki. I ran a couple reports for her and emailed them off to help out. I added a Manage Users tab to the QA database. The database is finally ready for testing. I bought a book for jury duty/waiting tomorrow and I rented a Family Guy from the Redbox. There was no Practice while Scott battled with recording vocals. Scott and Jessica are officially dating now. I made a salad for dinner and took a nap with Penni. I woke up, made some coffee and beat Penni in scrabble.

Feb 10 Tuesday

I added a custom select statement ComboBox to the Pull Raw Data function. it allows the user to type in a custom "columnName='filter'" string that adds a where clause to the SQL statement that query the information. The strings can be saved to a local table with the press of a button, and are editable.

I walked a lap during lunch and listened to Portishead. I went to the grocery store bought stuff for ground turkey tacos. Penni Cooked the meat and shells while I showered. I ate them all and then took a long nap on the couch. I woke up and played Penni in scrabble. She won. I researched Photo Theremins and crashed early.
Feb 9 Monday

I went to my doctor for a check up. My systolic blood pressure was 90. It need to be lower. I blame it on the setting around that I have to do while Scott is mixing at the practice space (and been a weak gluttonous pig). I plan on seriously working on it. I went in to work and walked a lap during lunch. I wrote a function to pull raw data in the QA database. I went to practice and we ran through a few song. Scott and Jessica are an item now. Aww. I was feeling kinda weird/medicated from the exercising/not eating as much sugar as usual and crashed early.

Feb 8 Sunday

I slept late, played scrabble, ordered a VGA to RCA converter, and went to the practice space for solo practice. Scott stopped by for a while. Scott was bagging on Robert Smith. For some strange reason I have a soft spot for the guy. I remember buying the single to "High" as a little kid. At the space, I worked on the bass drum line for Mermaider and blood ocean with a click and my ipod. I need better beater control. I finished up the BleepLabs kit and came I picked up cookies and a salad on the way home from the practice space. I watched a new king of the hill more Simpson FLV files in bed.

Zombie ADO recordset fixed with cursortype=aduseclient, DVD::RIP settings, bass drum line on Blood Ocean, KDE 4.2, and Mangione's sucks

Feb 7 Saturday

Woke up late, went with Penni to the knitting store, bought some Pocky and went to meet her friend for lunch at Quiznos . We were a little lost and my buddy Scott googled up some directions there, quality guy. We came home and i worked on some Java homework while Penni napped. She woke up, I made some more coffee and we played scrabble. I won. I ate about 5 boxes of Pocky with coffee, then cooked Penni some spaghetti, I test ripped some DVDs with DVD::RIP on the LinuxLappy to check out the different in quality with the different settings. I Called chuck in Japan and we talked for about an hour on Skype. He is doing well, the classes are hard but he is worked hard and making progress.

Feb 6 Friday

I accidentally brought Penni's keys to work with me. I had to run them home for her around 9am. My boss emailed everyone to get the total hours the Special Projects team has automated for 2008. The sysadmin has racked up many hours with Boston Workstation. My power user buddy needs to report the total hours automated by my Medicaid web tool. There was an email about the small claims database import file having unavailable information from STAR. My Boss hopped on the chain, and the AVPs and executives were copied on it. We are going to wait for the bug in STAR that is denying us the data to be fixed before proceeding with the development of the small claims database. I still working on the QA database reporting, sick of programming excel to format ADO Recordsets to look like MS Access report; lots cell formatting, lots of counting loops while incrementing down the spreadsheet. I need to find a 3rd party plug-in to do this...

I ate a quick chicken pita for lunch at Niko's and walked around the loop during lunch, listening to Dethklok. (Yes still on Dethklok. The bass drum line of Blood Ocean is amazing, He switches back and forth from a 4/4 16th note pattern to a double triplet (24th note) pattern. awesomeness.

Penni and I played Scrabble and Penni won. I am so proud of her.

Feb 5 Thursday

I worked on the reporting for the new QA database all day. I ate lunch with my homey Tzoua and the sysAdmin at Miguel's and nerded out with Database/Programming talk. After work, I called Scott, he wanted to buy a vocal mike and record vocals super late at night so I let him have the practice space to himself. I stayed in and played scrabble with Penni and won.

Feb 4 Wednesday



It snowed! I checked the News and there were a lot of wrecks due to ice on the road, so I drove Penni to work. I worked on handling some new financial codes in the ATB database and formatting Excel reports from the new QA database. I ate Nikos for lunch. There was no practice. Scott wanted to do a late night solo vocal recording session. I downloaded a KDE 4.2 preview live CD, It was pretty good. KDE gets a bad wrap so I posted a compliment to the KDE forum. Chuck called, he is doing well in Japan.

Feb 3 Tuesday

I worked on the productivity reporting for the QA Database rebuild. My homey Kursty had a weird pink splotch on her head. I tried to fix Penni's dad's router but there was a weird issue with his Cisco resetting to 192.168.0.XXX instead of 1.XXX. We ate dinner at Mangione's. The calamari was OK but the rest of the food was terrible. Later I beat Penni in scrabble.

Feb 2 Monday



I added an import log to the QA database and worked on a weird "zombie object" ADO error that popped up. I fixed it with the ADO.cursortype = aduseclient. I ate Nikos with the crew. I met with the manager of the QA department and the QA power user about the qa database reporting. I went to the bank after work and then out for groceries with Penni. There was no practice because Scott and his friend needed to vote on some animal cruelty bill in Rock Hill, quality guy. Penni and i stayed home and played scrabble. I won. We watched SquidBillies and ATHF.


Feb 1 Sunday

Penni had to work at the retirement home for a super bowl party. I watched some Simpson FLV files and went to the hardware store for wires and drill bits. I drilled the holes for the case of the BleepLabs Thingamakit. Penni taped American Dad for me and was asleep when I got home. I watched more Simpson files in bed before crashing at 2am.

Gig at the Alley Cat, QA Database Imports, soldering the BleepLabs Kit, SquidBillies and Drawn Together DVDs

Jan 31 Saturday

I woke up late, had coffee and got the house ready for my family's visit. My Dad brought down a spare tire for the van. We went to cheesecake factory. there was a thirty minute wait. My mom/dad were drinking and cutting up. The Manager came over to check on us, it was a little embarrassing. After dinner everyone came back to my house for coffee and scrabble. I won. Later, I download a lot of Simpson's episodes FLV files from the Watchsims.com site.

Jan 30 Friday

I finished the BO import function and added a neat wizard-based MS office chart control to the QA database rebuild. It works great with the "Views" that are setup on the SQL server. I made a card for Traci's birthday, bought my mom a VCR/DVD player combo and two Neil Diamond "Live in Concert" DVDs. I bought a used Drawn Together too. DVD I played scrabble with Penni and she won. Penni said we are going to start saving the scrabble scores and add them up and see who is the long-term winner. Penni's dad lost his job due to his company closing down. She was pretty upset.

Jan 29 Thursday

I worked on the Business Objects import and created an import log function. The Manager of QA called and asked for it to be finished Feb 15th. I said it is possible but I cannot write it in stone. I can get pull off it and assigned to a different project for my boss in a second. I ate lunch with the usual crew at Salsaritas. I fixed the manager of the Correspondence Department's printer. I went to the practice space and soldered on the worked on BleepLabs kit while Scott worked on mixing. I powered the kit up. The sound and one of the LED antennas things to work. Success!

Jan 28 Wednesday

I finished the STAR import and tested it on fifteen different files. The imports ran really fast. I emailed some screen-shots of the times and quantities of claims to my boss & Manager of the QA department. Everyone was happy. I ate Nikos for lunch with the usual crew and started working on the QA Database rebuild Business Objects import function. Penni texted me. She was about upset about her coworkers giving her grief over evacuating her residents for a fire drill.

I went to the blood drive across the street and there was a long wait. The guy in the chair before me had his needle pop out and bled all over the chair and floor. Comedy! The hematologist seemed a little frazzled. she cleaned up the chair and i went next with no problems.

I went to the practice space took my BleepLabs kits and soldering kit. I worked on it while Scott mixed the last recording and removed a lot of copied octave parts. They sound great in quiet parts but make the tremble of the guitar distortion sound static-y.


Jan 27 Tuesday

I worked all day on the new QA database STAR file import function. I am making it display the number of records and total lapsed time fir imports. That way the database can "defend itself" if a user calls it slow. I still have a blister on my foot from walking outside during a breaks with dress shoes on.

I uploaded video clips of the Alley Cat gig and a clip Scott of throwing a chair at me in the hallway of practice space. Good Times. The SquidBillies DVD that I bought on eBay arrived. Penni and I ordered a pizza and watched it, while I upload the pictures that Penni took at the gig and sent them to Scott to post on MySpace.com. Penni took great picture, I did not have to edit any of them.

Jan 26 Monday

My department went to the CHS Arts and Science counsel meeting and all had Niko's for lunch. I worked late remoting into a legal department telecommuter PC to install PDFCreator. I went to the practice space and we sat to the gear from the show. We also hooked up the cheap mixing monitors.

Jan 25 Sunday

I slept late, bought Bojangles for breakfast and went to the space to get ready for the gig at the alley cat. We loaded up the van and went to the venue. It is a huge place but has no load in ramps. We had to carry all the 8 by 10 cabs and gear up a flight of stairs. fun fun fun. We played, got paid and split. I hurt my shoulder unloading the cabs at the practice space. (I am soo out of shape from recording/mixing...) Penni took some good video and pictures at the gig. And she taped American Dad for me when she got home. She is so amazing!