MikeBrum.com

I fly out to Portland tomorrow. I’m far from being “packed”, but I’m “very organized” right now since I did all laundry-related work earlier in the day and there’s nice piles of clothes ready for me to pack up.

I don’t depart tomorrow until 4:45, so I should be totally fine as long as I don’t sleep until 3.

Beyond “dealing with the weather”, it’s a very open trip.

Not looking forward to the flight, but I’m happy that it’s a non-stop flight from BOS to PDX. Could be a lot worse.

I have to say, traveling with an iPhone is pretty damn awesome. There’s very little that I couldn’t do with an iPhone that I do on my laptop. If I was so inclined, I could make this post with my iPhone, but I just happen to be on my laptop and it’s that much faster to type.

With the integration with my MacBook, all the Mail settings (I pull down from 3 different servers) and all of my contacts were imported without issue.

Battery life can definitely wind down with hours of app use, but I don’t think that anyone should expect otherwise. On the flip-side, the iPhone seems to charge rather quickly, so while it’s a PITA to have to stop and charge it, it luckily doesn’t end up being a problem.

At the end of this week, I’ll be in Portland and away from my laptop a lot more. We’ll see how that works out. Tomorrow I’ll be back in Boston, which I’m excited about.

No work for about 2 weeks. Nice.

Tomorrow I fly out to Wilmington, NC for a few days. I’ll be back in Boston for two days. Then I’m leaving for Portland, OR on the 10th, returning on the 18th.

It’ll be nice to get out of Boston for a bit. The real stress will be the airports. BOS-ILM needs to connect through Charlotte, which is a pain in the ass. I always have to cross the ENTIRE airport to get from my arriving to departing gates. At least BOS-PDX and back are non-stop flights. Can’t beat that.

I’ve been neglecting this blog for a bit. It also happens around this time each year. I also noticed that I have 113 spam messages to blow away. You’d think that getting a lot of spam would be some indication of popularity. That doesn’t seem to be the case. At least they’re being captured. Better than comments being filled with garbage Viagra ads.

Hopefully fun things happen and I’ll have more to chatter about.

I’ve been super busy lately and haven’t been updating like I should be.

The week of 12/8 I was nighttime upgrader and I was scheduled to work the weekend of 12/13. That got bumped, but completely ate my Friday night. Then from 12/18-12/25, I’ve been on-call, which means 24-7 support coverage by phone. I also did that weekend work that got rescheduled this past weekend. It’s all very exhausting and totally screws up my sleep schedule.

So on the 25th I’ll be “free” for a few days before I go into two solid weeks of traveling. Just being away from work will be nice… but traveling has its own exhaustion associated with it. I just wish I was going somewhere warm and tropical. I need to get somewhere to dive soon else I’m going to go stir crazy.

I just downloaded a wordpress app for the iPhone and seeing how well it works. So far, it’s pretty slick.

Later, if this goes smoothly, I’ll figure out how it works with images. Definitely neat!

I just left negative feedback for an eBay seller for the first time. I’ve had the same account on ebay since 2000 and I really like buying things, so I’m not stranger to eBay.

All-in-all, I tend to prefer buy-it-now “auctions” since they’re almost always simpler, faster and you don’t have to deal with other people that bid in stupid ways. I’ve recently been buying Magic: the Gathering cards and where possible, getting multiple cards from a single seller to reduce shipping and handling costs. It’s been working out well so far.

Unfortunately, most sellers seem to not properly set up the shipping configuration properly so I always have to “request total from seller” to get the proper shipping cost for multiple items. A minor inconvenience, but nothing too severe.

For one seller, I’ve requested a proper shipping cost five separate times over the past 12 days. That’s almost two weeks with no response at all. Unless the seller simply doesn’t have the items that they’re selling, I can’t understand why they wouldn’t respond to my requests. I want to give them my money, after all!

Oh well – I hate having to get to the point of giving negative feedback, but I don’t feel that I had any other option. Lame.

New England is known for having crazy weather. Being a weatherman up here has to be one of the easiest jobs because nobody really expects you to be right the majority of the time.

That all said, in the past couple of months we’ve seen some really huge temperature swings. Today flirted with 70 degrees while Wednesday won’t hit 50. That’s a twenty degree swing in two days – at the highs. If you look at today’s high (69) with whatever Wednesday night’s low is, and it might approach a 30 degree swing in 60 hours.

This isn’t the fucking desert – this is Sparta! Boston.

Now, I love warm weather. I really do. I’m not complaining that it was almost 70 degrees today. I can definitely do with some more warm weather – especially in November. But this constant rollercoaster has to end. I’m sure it’s not good for what little local wildlife we have and it’s just annoying as hell.

Seriously – make up your damn mind already!

I bought an iPhone last night. I have no complaints about the device thus far — I’m rather happy. More on that later.

I was asked to take a survey in my email this morning. Surprising for only being awake 15 minutes, I felt like contributing.

Apple Feedback Survey Screen Shot

Click for a larger image.

Seriously, this is one of the biggest things that drives me nuts about the Apple store. I just want to go in and make a purchase — like any other normal store in the world. I don’t want “an experience”. I also don’t want to sit around while some young 20 something tries to make small talk with me and fails miserably.

I just want to say “this isn’t working because you’re an Apple Store employee and I’m not nor want to be one”.

…but I’m sure it’d just be a waste of time — like the entirety of the Apple Store “experience”.

Many people that read this probably know that I do tech work/support for BME from time to time. Starting at 1900 on 20091101, the community site IAM kinda went haywire. What’s somewhat unique about IAM is that it leverages native win32 binaries on the server side. They’re not scripts that a JIT compiler reads or run on the .Net framework — they’re actual win32 compiled binaries that handle all of the CGI requests and respond to the initial requests. I can’t just log in, change a few lines of code and then “the problem’s fixed” like someone can do with PHP, Python or Perl. And since the original developer (Shannon Larratt) is no longer involved in BME, I had to figure things out.

After eliminating any environmental factors, I went code diving. I finally isolated the issue (which I’m still surprised at — it was in no way obvious) and spec’ed out the scope of the changes that were needed.

As I mentioned above, these are win32 binaries — so I then had to set up a dev environment locally before I could recompile any of them. What makes this more fun is that I’m a Mac and Linux user at home — so I had to kick up a VM (thank you VMWare Fusion!) to do all of that work in. Only then could I actually make my changes and spin up some new binaries for testing and deployment to the webserver.

What a pain in the ass!

But after all is said and done, I got everything working and everyone seems to be a lot happier. I definitely feel like a super hero.

I’ve been “getting back into” Lego recently. I have always been a huge Lego fan since I was a kid. I still have a giant tub of Lego from when I was younger and I’ve been recently buying new sets and having a great time with it. I tend to gravitate towards building more interactive models — which is why Technic has always appealed to me and why that’s where I began when I started buying sets again.

Being the nerd that I am, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at other models that people have been making – both Technic models and any assortment of random stuff that people make.

And OMFG is some of the stuff people make AMAZING!!!

Seriously, some of the things people create with nothing but a bunch of Lego bricks is unreal. Mind blowingly impressive.

The sad thing that I’ve realized is that by being “out of the loop” for so many years, I’m not only horribly out of practice, but I don’t have the majority of the cool new pieces that have really allowed people to take Lego model making to a whole new level.

I think I’m just going to have to start branching out begin getting additional sets beyond Technic to supplement my 25+ year old basic Lego bricks so I have better model making options. I’ll just have to add it to one of my wishlists!