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There was an extension to the Fair Credit Reporting Act that now requires each of the three credit agencies to provide you with a FREE copy of your credit report once every 12 months. It is being phased in across the country, will be available in Texas on June 1st.
I apologize if this is old news, but everyone should check their credit now!
Well, it's been an eventful 2 days. MR is now a solo operation, and 1250 in orders came in today. On top of that I have to schedule a drive across the country to retrieve the remainder of the equipment.
Now the tough decision... do I cancel my trip to Chi-town in light of these recent developments? Stay tuned for the answer.
P.S. anyone have small, cheap, and secure commercial office space available in the Austin area? Didn't think so.
Oh yeah, I've decided to play do Ultimate summer league this year... I need to get in shape!
I just had to pass this link on:
http://ringtonedancer.contagiousmedia.org/
My personal favorite is #4
NOTE: annoying music, video, SFW (safe for work)
From Accuweather.com:
Saturday May 21st
High: 98° F
RealFeel®: 102° F
I now know the dangers of owning a car with an all black interior. I nearly burned myself no less than 4 times today in the 2 hours I was running errands.
In other news I caught up with my friend Ryland today, turns out she is currently doing research on entrepreneurial failure, and the area she is focusing on is Austin. Hopefully I won't become 'just another case study'.
Happy Birthday Sam! The big 3 - 1.
Here are some goofy pictures I pulled from the archives:
That phone is grafted to his ear...
"Where am I???"
Sam, what are those all over your shirt?
I agree, shopping is tiring.
Lately I'd been having some trouble with the trusty old Maxima. At only 121,000 miles young, nothing serious (*knock on wood*) has cropped up yet, but I've been having trouble starting it on the first try. I usually have to let the car sit with the key in the ON position for a few seconds before I try to crank it. I also have noticed rather shitty gas mileage. This led me to believe that it was a problem with the fuel pump or filter. I realized that the fuel filter has a life of about 15k miles and I had last replaced it about 45k ago. Since it is relatively low hanging fruit (compared to the fuel pump), I decided to go for it.
Now the apartment complex I live in doesn't allow car repairs on site, but I'll be dammed if I take my car into a shop to do something as minor as a fuel filter swap. I mean I still shudder everytime i go in to the local jiffy lube for an oil change.
So I got a filter, read up in the manual and went to town in a remote corner of my complex's parking lot.
Two problems:
1: fuel filter hoses are tough to remove
2: the jackass at Boardman Nissan who last changed this filter stripped the screw holding the bottom of 2 clamps!
This thing is hard to reach already because its deep down in the engine bay, so boy was I pissed. I already had to remove a lot of peripheral parts to even access the filter (FSTB, and assorted vacuum hoses). It got dark so I had to put it all back together and try again a few days later. I was all ready to just cut the hose and use a new clamp but somehow the next time i tried it I actually got the clamp off. Then I realized that the filter was stuck on the hose. I spent 45 minutes pulling and twisting, at one point was even sitting inside the engine bay of my car to get a better angle on it. Finally with the aid of a screw driver and a lot of elbow grease I got the old filter off. Put the new filter in, buttoned everything up, and 4 hours of effort later, I'm good to go.
Moral of the story:
The job looked like it was going to take 5 minutes
People on the Internet said 15
After I tried the first hose, I thought 1 hour
Actual time required: 4 hours
Maybe next time I should just take it in.
P.S. I don't know why I just wrote a long post about replacing a fuel filter. It's not like I tried to make it into a tutorial with lots of pictures or anything. If you're still reading down here, thanks you actually care about what I have to say.
Congratulations to the Shift2Ingres TU2k4 team! They entered the Computer Associates Ingres Challenge and came away with the largest prize, $400,000 US. Read more about it here and here.
The idea of the challenge was to write migration tools for CA's recently open sourced DBMS. They decided to offer large cash prizes out to the developer community rather than develop the tools in house. The Shift2Ingres team developed tools to migrate from Oracle, including support for all kinds of Oracle-only stuff. This just goes to show that TU2k4 was in fact the best TU ever.
Congratulations guys!
I usually spend weekends catching up on MR stuff, going on bar excursions, and sleep. I did all those things this weekend but I also added in some badly needed physical activity. Friday I spent an hour or so wakeboarding on Lake Austin. The whole "getting up" thing came back to me immediately, unfortuantely the "staying up" part wasn't quite as easy to recall. All my interactions with the wake ended up in meeting the (really cold) water face first. I had fun and will definitely have to practice again soon. Friday night was a 4 hour D:Fuse and Bonham tag team set. There was much RBV fueled dancing until the wee hours of the night. Saturday I rested my aching body by driving to San Antonio to see some family friends in town for a wedding. Sunday rolled around and the only appropriate thing to do was to go play paintball! It was my first time partaking in the activity and I have to say it was a good time. All the running around, diving under bunkers, crouching in uncomfortable positions for long periods of time, and avoiding the murderous pack of 10 year olds left me pretty beat. I've got battle wounds too! Welts on my legs where I was hit and a cut where a paintball hit me right between the fingers.
Overall it was a fun and active weekend, but it's now Monday night and I'm still sore as hell. Maybe I should start working out again, I was off to a good start in India. Send words of encouragement please.
Congraulations to the class of '05! I can no longer say that I 'just graduated' from college (2nd post in a row to make me feel old).
RIP Doc, you were one of the few great professors to grace the Case campus. Your passion and enthusiasm is irreplaceable.
Sigh.
I know, it's been 4 months and 8 days since I've last posted to my blog. Motivated by a fellow 'seldom blogger' who shall remain nameless, I decided to try again (even though I don't have major life events to report like him). I'll try to keep this from being another one of those "hey I really am alive and promise to keep blogging" posts, but it doesn't look likely.
My life since January:
1) FO folded into a hobbyist thing, and I wish I had more time to dedicate to it. It sucks because I really really believed in the idea. Text messaging will take off in the US in 2005, and unfortunately the FO team won't be the visionaries leading the pack.
2) 3rd time is a charm right? Picked up MR in early Feb, spent a month and a half perfecting the workflow with Sam and got up and running in two locations. Got over the initial star shock of the contacts to be made in this biz, now working on a set of projects designed to take MR big(ger) time.
3) Continued working hard at TR, earning myself some awards and a promotion. Getting settled into my role as a prototyper, but loving the pre-sales, idea generation part most of all. I've become extremely comfortable with Flash in the last 6 months, and I promise I'll link to some of the products I helped influence as soon as they are live :)
4) Took a pleasure/work trip to Asia. Visited with KK in Singapore, went to China to help with TR recruiting, then rounded out the trip with a few days on the Thai island of Ko Phangnan. KP was my favorite part of the trip: a mostly undeveloped area frequented by European backpackers; beautiful beaches. Due to adding the China leg at the last minute I managed to miss the full moon party and piss off KK. But let's plan a return shall we? P.S. check out these pics (flash). Check out his other galleries too, INCREDIBLE photography.
5) Turned 22. Shit, I'm old.
6) Continued to see really kickass EDM shows here in Austin. Gabriel and Dresden, NuNRG, DFuse, Infusion, James Zabiela, and more I'm sure I'm forgetting.
7) Canceled my TV. Yes, I'm jonesing for comedy central + FG and the Simpsons, but hey BitTorrent is my friend (maybe not for too much longer). I really disagree with 97% of the programming on TV these days-- reality this, fake news that.
How's that for an update? I'm looking forward to the shocked responses I'll get when those of you who have been grabbing an empty RSS feed for 4 months see this. More to come? We'll see.