Jeremy’s Blog

I think it’s become painfully obvious to me and everyone who actually still reads this old thing that blogging isn’t working out for me. It was a nice thought, at first, but I’ve gotten too busy with work and other life activities to actually maintain this old thing. I’ve disabled user registrations and will be disabling commenting on all entries.

I’m going to put something else up in this webspace (jeremyprivett.com) which will probably be better than a blog. My goal is to aggregate all of my web presence into a single feed and present it here, as well as details on projects I’m working on and what I’m doing on the work-side of life, be it with Highwinds (as much as I can reveal, anyway), Omega Vortex, or otherwise.

Thanks to all of you who followed along and kept me company while I was actually doing this. You all can find me on other places on the net, if you want. I’m @jeremyprivett on Twitter. I still hang out on Anfiniti and it’s pretty easy to find me on Facebook.

I’m currently holding a contest on Twitter to give away a free copy of Left 4 Dead. If you’re interested in winning a copy, check out the rules. If you like this contest and would like to see more like it, give it a Digg. If the return ends up being pretty great, I’ll probably do a few more like it.

Zend has a document in their resources section for Zend Studio v6.1 that “explains” how to install the IDE as a plugin into an existing install of Eclipse. The document appears to be missing some very bits of information for the current version. Here’s a list of update sites you need to add, in addition to the Zend Studio update site, before it will actually install: 

Well, I was going to put a list of update sites that you need here, except I still haven’t found them all. I can’t seem to get all of them that you need and because the resources document is just flat-wrong, this process is pretty much just dead in the water, at this point. It is absolutely pointless to install Zend Studio as a standalone editor when I want to use Eclipse for other things besides PHP (sometimes two different languages at the same time).

I think I’m done with Zend Studio. The Eclipse move frustrates me to no end. Prior to now, I’ve absolutely hated Eclipse with a passion. I’ve tried to work with it, several times. I just don’t like the workflows, the memory hogging tendencies, the fact that it slows to an absolute crawl when trying to do anything in a project larger than a handful of files. It’s ridiculous.

I’ve been giving NetBeans a shot for the past couple of days and it’s pretty decent, but it’s missing something that I can’t really place my finger on. An IDE that doesn’t suck and has support for multiple languages would be a killer app. Aptana seems like they’re on the right track, but there’s that Eclipse dependency that irks me again. I’m not above giving Eclipse another shot and trying to make it work, if someone can come along and make an IDE worth using.

As much as I hate to admit it, Microsoft owns the land of development tools, hands down. I love Visual Studio 2008. If VS.PHP didn’t suck and there was good support for CPython (not IronPython!) available, I think I’d use it for everything. Maybe more language plugins for Visual Studio will start to appear. Even if they were commercial plugins, it would still be worth it, as long as they were solid language support that properly utilized Visual Studio’s features. Even just being half as awesome and intuitive as working in C# in VS would be leagues beyond pretty much any other IDE I’ve used, so far.

… it’s kind of sad, really.

Dutch and I have been playing quite a lot of Soul Calibur, lately. I’ve got a custom character named Atrophius who I created back in November of last year when I rented the game for the first time. Atrophius is a big ninja with Siegfried’s combat style. He’s a pretty awesome character and I can throw down pretty well with him. Atrophius and Nishi, the character Dutch created and is affectionately referred to as “Naughty Nurse Angel Cat”, have been very key characters in our ascent and descent through the game’s “Tower of Souls”.

For those unfamiliar with the game, one of the game modes is the “Tower of Souls” which features a 60 floor tower that you can ascend or descend. Ascending takes it 1 - 4 floors at a time with pauses in between to select different characters for the next set of floors and gives you information on the treasures available and whatnot. Descending is a non-stop run from the top to the bottom and you only get to select two characters for the entire run. So far, we’ve made it to the last two sets of floors for the ascent and have  gone 25 consecutive floors in the descent.

The tower is technically supposed to be a single-player game mode, but in the areas where we’re allowed to select multiple characters we’ve been selecting one for me and one for him and when it comes time to switch character’s we’ll quickly pass the controller over to the other person. It’s actually been quite fun and helpful, because we’re both proficient in different styles of play, so when one thing isn’t working we can pass it over to one another and see if they have better luck.

Maybe we’ll get through the last two sets of floors soon. It’s probably a long way off before we can even hope to manage to accomplish the descent. Unless we do it the cheap way and find a character who we can successfully spam the same attacks over and over again or something.

I’m going to try and start getting back into the swing of writing by writing new development articles to be published here on my blog. This entry is basically a call for ideas. (continue reading…)

Obviously, when you move to a new location, one of the decently high priorities is figuring out transportation. Since I’ve been staying with Dutch, I really haven’t had to be too concerned about getting around. We’re mostly either hanging out at the house or at work. I’ve known for a while that I’m going to need a car sooner rather than later, though. Sometimes, it’d just be nice to be able to let Dutch go to work as early or late as he decides and the two of us just go in and leave at different times.

Ruzena helps me again. Somewhat. Her roommate’s dad was apparently selling a 1997 BMW 528i and was willing to give me quite an astounding deal on it. I have the car now and we went to the DMV yesterday to get everything official. Title transfer, License transfer, plates, etc. I also setup my car insurance in the morning, but for some reason it doesn’t seem like the payment actually took and I’ll have to call Progressive to see what’s going on with that. It’s not letting me print off the temporary insurance cards, so I’m assuming the policy isn’t activated. Can’t really drive without insurance, so I need to get that worked out soon.

The only real problem with the car when I first saw it was a hot-start issue with the starter where it wouldn’t start while the car was hot. He got the starter replaced and it hasn’t had a problem, so far. A few other minor issues but nothing show-stopping. I won’t have to dump a ton of money into it upfront, but there’s certainly a few minor annoyances that I’ll want to fix over time.

Here’s hoping that all goes well with the car and I can get my insurance issue worked out soon.

I’ve upgraded WordPress to the latest version. Since the version I was using previously was a little on the old side, my theme pretty much bought it. I like the one I have setup now, but it decided to place my categories in the header. This brought on some well-needed category clean-up, but rather than placing the categories in a sub-category to be cleaned up later (so they wouldn’t appear in the header) I ended up just deleting old categories that most likely wouldn’t see any more use. This pretty much resulted in a bunch of posts getting moved to Random. Chances are, I won’t fix this. Not any time soon, anyway.

I think what I’m going to do is try to further reduce the number of categories so the header looks a little cleaner and actually start using tags in my posts. We’ll see how that goes. So, this is me trying to start blogging again. I even installed the new version of Windows Live Writer so I can write entries without actually having to visit the site. That was a lot of my problem for the past couple of months. I just forgot this thing was here.

I’m sure I’ll (try to) come up with plenty of interesting things to blog about, now that I’m out in Phoenix. Here’s to more posting in the future.

Since I really don’t have anything interesting to blog about, at the moment, here’s a quickie about my music tastes which is sure to not be interesting to most of you.

I’m an avid user of Pandora. I love the service and I’ve been a premium subscriber since 2006. I have a soft music station that has been meticulously crafted to near-perfection which gives me some of the best music to sleep or work to that I think I could ever ask for. For those of you who know me, you also know that I’m quite a fan of harder types of music. Groups like Blind Guardian, Iron Maiden, Sonata Arctica, and the like. I also have a station for this type of music, which hasn’t quite been crafted and listened to as much as the other station. Over the past week, though, it has produced some amazing things for me. I’ve found three songs in particular this way that made me just stop and listen. That doesn’t happen very often.

I’m going to share these with you, because I just think they’re that awesome. May not be your thing, though. If not, that’s fine. We have different tastes. This is also so I can put them somewhere that I can access them easier when I want to show them to someone else.

(continue reading…)

I’m sure a lot of you will hear just Scott’s side of the story and think badly of me for what happened. I’m here to tell you that I don’t care if you think badly of me. Life will go on. Things will get resolved, one way or another.

I abruptly moved out of my apartment Saturday after quietly absorbing and dealing with all of the crap that I’ve taken over the course of the past few months. I pretty much knew that this was going to happen eventually after I returned from my trip to NY back in July. When the roles were reversed and I was actually doing a lot better than I am now, financially, I went out of my way to make sure that we had plenty to eat and drink in the apartment. We had plenty of food for quite a while and there wasn’t any of this “every man for himself” I’m gonna go get some food, but eff you, you can have a box of noodles garbage that’s been going on for a while now.

Scott, on a regular basis, would also do what he calls “joking” with people. Where he looks for, finds, and pushes every button he can in order to get under your skin. And he quite often takes things too far. Way too far. Far enough where a “STFU” would’ve been warranted well before where he finally stops. This is anything from calling Jessica (his fiancee) a bitch for no reason (none of you can ever understand how much that kind of thing pisses me off) to literally starting fights with people for no reason, sometimes in the presence of other people.

If he ever doesn’t get his way, he throws the biggest fit of just about anyone I’ve ever seen in my life. Throwing things, calling people “gay” or “fag” or whatever. He’s often like a ticking time bomb and will explode on anyone, regardless of whether they’re related to whatever his current problem is, regardless of whether what he’s exploding about is even something worth getting that worked up about. I’ve been told that I have anger problems, but I can noticeably keep my anger in far better check than he can.

But, back to the groceries issue. This is the real meat of why I left. The other stuff is small potatoes compared to this. I have actually lost weight over the past couple of months, due to his inability to properly stock the apartment with food, even when he has money. I’ve never complained about buying groceries when I did, but there was no reciprocation. Whenever a trip to the store was made, the amount of food that actually came into the apartment was just enough for one, maybe two meals and then we were back to this “everyone for themselves” crap where they would often just bring fast food home without even thinking of me.

I don’t even want to hear any of the “money is tight” arguments, because that is complete and absolute horsecrap. Scott has had plenty of money to buy an Xbox, a $125 phone, and he and Jessica have eaten out at countless places. Where are the freaking groceries? I went above and beyond when the two of them were seriously tight on money, when Scott quit his job working at Planet for a while, but nobody seems to give a crap about that when the roles are reversed.

Now, this type of a rant wouldn’t be right without a reflection on what I personally did wrong. It was brought up during our conversation this evening, yes I could’ve taken on a part-time job to help with the food myself as well as bills. There were three reasons that I didn’t. For starters, I was so irritated that there still hadn’t been a proper groceries contribution that I wasn’t willing to go spend money on food just to have it be eaten without any thanks or acknowledgement. Second, I forgot that Scott knew the manager of the place across the street, which would’ve been an extremely convenient place to work and would’ve interfered with my other obligations the least. Third, there’s a lot more to what I do than just programming. This isn’t just some thing where we do little programming tasks for people, this is a full-fledged business. And one that I have to manage alone, currently. This includes the majority of all customer interaction that needs to occur during business hours. Just because you don’t know what I’m doing (if it’s not programming), doesn’t mean that I’m not doing anything. For homework, look up the term “sweat equity”.

Also, the way that I just abruptly took off wasn’t really a good idea. The reason this happened the way that it did was because something inside me had snapped the previous evening. Knowing that I didn’t have any money and that there was no food in the apartment, Scott looked dead at me and asked “What are you eating this weekend?” Well, what do you think there, chuckles?

I believe that the way the rent structure and “separate living spaces” arrangements that the apartment complex set forth have a lot to do with it, psychologically. Because most things were entirely separate, it encouraged the “every man for himself” mentality that was often seen. Scott not paying his rent wouldn’t affect me, and me not paying mine wouldn’t affect him. Except, that it does. Scott wouldn’t physically get evicted if I didn’t pay my rent, but it does put a strain on him financially, now that I’m gone.

He apparently was under the assumption that I was trying to just get out of my financial obligations, though. To the point where he shut my phone off (I was on his family plan, because it was cheaper for all of us), though I believe he did that mostly because he was angry. I sent him text messages during the day Saturday while I was trying to work out how much I owed for this month, for the sole reason that I intended on getting him what he needed to try and ease the financial strain on him. Granted, he didn’t know that, which is why he’s pissed, thus going back to it being a bad idea for me to have left so abruptly. It’ll be annoying not having the phone number that all of my business contacts have for me anymore, but I guess that was his way of getting back at me for “screwing him” as he put it.

Maybe when he calms down he’ll realize that I’m not trying to screw him. I just want to freaking eat. And I couldn’t do that there, so I left. If you made it this far, there’s one last thing that I want to say.

I love Scott like a brother. He’s family and I know that I hurt him because of the way things went, but no matter what I did to try and make him aware of when he either took things too far (and hurt peoples’ feelings, not just mine) or was inconsiderate about things like food, it didn’t change things. I started storing those feelings up and not showing them until it finally got to one critical moment and I just snapped. I’m sorry people got hurt, but I have feelings too. And a stomach. One that especially needs to be filled, because I already look sickly enough as it is.

That’s what all of this boils down to. Nothing else I tried worked, so I had to do something that was absolutely sure to get everyone’s attention. I’m not out to screw anyone, and I want to make sure that those who need the help, get it. I just couldn’t live in the conditions where someone kept “playing” and taking things too far and I only ever got a real meal once a week, sometimes less than that.

I meant to make a note about this when I first saw it in August and forgot. I ran into it again today. A member on Stack Overflow said something which describes some of my productivity problems perfectly:

The irony is that it’s wanting to learn that is distracting me from getting more work done.

I’ll be writing code or solving a problem and will get distracted by some interesting article or code example I’ve bumped into while trying to find the answer to my original problem.