Let's Go Wings! 

I have purchased a Hauppauge PVR-150 MCE off Ebay (Hauppauge no longer ships any analog cards like this due to pressure from FCC). It should be arriving Friday. I had wanted to do this all a few years ago, but the limitation was I am using DirecTV and you had to use IR Blasters and such to control the DirectTV. This has sinced changed. The DirecTV box I have(D11) includes a USB port on the back which can be used to send control signals to the the box. All that is needed is a USB->DB9 serial, a Nullmodem db9, and another DB9 cable to connect to the PC. There are a few different scripts depending on your DirectTV box (all this info can be found at http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Controlling_DirectTV_D11_via_USB ).

I am currently awaiting the delivery of my cables and capture card, once they arrive will update and continue this post with the MythTV setup and how it all works.

I got a bunch of the Hockey gear I ordered last week in the mail a few days ago. My plan as of now is to start the "Adult Hockey Introduction Program" at Icetown, the ice rink I go to in Riverside.  It will be a 10 week course that goes through all the on ice stuff for people like me who are starting a bit late. The course starts on september 14th. It is like 200 dollars and also includes free entry to the public sessions during the week. Icetown also has an hour of "puck play" every night where I can go and practice in full gear and such. The public sessions don't allow any sticks/pucks so that is just for working on my skating.

I think 200 dollars is a pretty good value for 10 weeks of Hockey + public sessions. After I do that I plan to talk to some guys at work who play there so I can get on a regular team. I have delusions of grandure that even though I'm about to be 22 years old and just starting that I could somehow end up playing as a profession. I know it isn't realistic buy a guy can dream!

I was kicked out of my room all this week so that it could be painted. I just moved all my stuff back in today. It feels good to be back in my own room, it is awkward sleeping somewhere you are not used to. Plus that room was smaller so all my stuck was packed in like a game of tetris. I moved all my stuff back in inbetween jamming on my bass (Some Nine Inch Nails, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Black Light Burns songs) and catching up on Mad Men. I'm a few episodes into Season 2. I LOVE the show. It has prompted me to consider buying a Fedora. I think I could pull it off. 

So almost 5 months of working 40+hours a week (lots of plus in there) I still really like the job. ESRI is a great company, and while not everyone on our team are the easiest people to deal with I still think right now it is the best place for me to develop my career. I've been learning a ton and absorbing as many skills as I can.

In July we had the user conference for the company to interface with all the users and show off software and such. Our team was down there to setup the network and phones for the entire thing. It was held in San Diego, at the Convention Center, the Hilton and the Marriot. It was not an overly complex setup so it there wasn't a huge technical challenge. The Challenge is the sheer size of the event. Everything went off without a hitch. I feel I did a really good job of getting in there and doing everything I could, "Above the call of duty", as it were. 

My manager Terry is a good guy, he is however a hand off manager for the most part. This can be positive because you don't have someone over your shoulder all day, but at the same time it can leave you with the yearn for some more structure, if not for yourself, to motivate some other members on the team. I'm just starting to get comfortable with some members of the team. They're all good guys, but you have to learn the specific ways to deal with each of them. 

I'm making pretty good money, especially for someone my age right out of college. I'm always looking higher though. If i made more I could comfortably move out and buy my new car. I think I still could now. It would be nice if i had a dependable friend to rent a room of whatever I buy to help relieve some of that pressure. Not to say I don't have dependable friends, but well, my friends are my friends...

I have been spending a lot of money lately. I get kind of depressed and buying something helps. I bought a netbook(ASUS EeePC 1005ha), A Bass(Dean Edge 10a 4 string), lots of Hockey Gear and of course tickets to pretty much every concert I have even the slightest desire to go to. I need to stop, but then I feel kinda empty about working and not seeing any payoff from it. Its hard to balance. I'm still saving more than I'm spending so I figure I'm not doing too bad. 

Just a few days ago I realized I only really have 1 close friend from High school and back still in my life, and even that is a relationship in a downward spiral. I think this is something that has to happen to everyone though. A time comes when you can put your insecurities behind you and cut ties that you may have felt you needed before. If everyone isn't pulling their own weight its not fair that you should have to pick up the slack. Sometimes it is actions from those people. You can know someone for 10 years and suddenly something changes. You don't know them at all. Did you ever? 

My dad had a tumor in his colon recently. It was pre-cancerous, so they got it early and he is fine now. Another good friend's mom(for all intensive purposes) is fighting cancer. I just found out another friend's dad is really sick. What is going on in the world? In the last case it couldn't have happen to a nicer family, and it is really disappointing that is has. 

I just watched Lost in Translation and I'm listening to Our Lady Peace's new Cd, Burn Burn Burn, so in writing this I think my emotions and thoughts were sort of skewed in one direction. Anyway, I just wanted to post something so my site didn't look pathetic with the last update being in April. I'll try and come up with some regular content to post... if anyone is reading it and wants me to. Comment, let me know. 

I just decided to pipe a twitter feed into my navbar at the right of this post, so now even if i don't update the page with much there will be my tweets. 

It took me about 45 minutes to clone (still working on it too) the look of the old page that i enjoyed so much. So far it has been a great experience. 

We discussed things including the groundbreaking features currently being worked on internally, along with some stuff to think about in the future like twitter integration and mobile access to the environments. It's really cool to be involved in something from the ground up. I look forward to seeing the current code being finalized and running.

If you're really focused on a setup with x, y, and b, on a specific flavor of linux you'll need to follow another set of steps to create images locally and so forth. The way i did it was to Star with an existing image. Those amazon documents take you through a basic setup of getting an image going using amazon's provided command line tools.

I discovered for myself that amazon has a beta product in the AWS account called AWS management center. It is a bit slow and clunky, but it allows you to bypass all the command line stuff on your own system.You do however still need to do the command line work to bundle the new AMI IN the existing AWS image you startup using the the management console. You can then use the guide to learn the command line tools on the instance you start, modify, and image.

After you modify the running instance to how you want it, you'll image it onto it self (i suggest using the /mnt directory to work in, as the ec2-bundle command will ignore that directory. No use in having an image containing your image, now is there? Once you image it you'll upload it to a bucket on your S3 account and register it either with the command line tools on your desktop, or using the AWS management console.

Anyway, after I woke up the next day i went and checked out what exactly they were hiring for to see if it did match what I'm interested in. I did find a position in which I posted my resume for, while not exactly what I want, while I wait to hear back from some contact regarding other possible positions it can never hurt to get another few sets of eyes on my resume. Who knows, maybe I'll be their perfect candidate.

I'll be in Las Vegas from the 25th of this month until the 29th. I'll have my G1 and my Macbook Pro and be very contactable, feel free to drop me an email or contact me if need be. In preparation for this trip I called ahead to the hotel I booked to inquire about their internet offerings. They want 11.99 for 24 hours of unlimited use of their "high speed" wireless. Rather than pay that outrageous fee every day just to do some simple tasks online I researched the tethering "hack" which has been available on the G1, and android, for some time.

Graham Stewart wrote a nifty little application called Tetherbot which you run on the G1. You can then if on Windows or Linux install the G1 USB driver, not necessary on OS X. With a quick download of the Android SDK and a change into the tools directory you'll find the adb app. It's Android Debug Bridge. It allows you to do a variety of things, such as a shell into the phone, or in this case, create a forward of data onto the phone. With this you can create a nice SOCKS5 proxy allowing you to use the phone's data connection. I tested it out briefly on EDGE at my work and it worked pretty good. In Vegas the coverage map shows that I should be able to use 3G, which would be more than adequate for what I'll need to do. 11.99 saved, Thank you Graham.