Jeremy's Blog

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.

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power. – Bill Clinton

Say what you want about Bill Clinton, but that one line is probably the single best thing I think I’ve ever heard him say.

The slides for Rasmus Lerdorf’s FrOSCon 2008 presentation are up. If you’re involved in PHP Development at any level, you should go look at them. You might be surprised at the performance of your favorite framework.

I wish I was cool enough to add pictures of myself doing random stupid crap to fan galleries of celebrities on Facebook. Why can’t you people follow the rules? I was looking for a specific picture and ended up seeing some random guy’s exposed buttocks in a gallery for a celebrity. On Facebook. Your bare behind has been reported. Hopefully the picture will be removed so you don’t burn the eyes of others like myself. It’s a lot to hope for, but maybe you’ll get deleted and/or banned, too.

While I was a little strapped for cash this year, I took on a job as a Sales Representative for Planet Celluar, an Authorized Retailer for AT&T Products and Services. It was an okay job, about as glamorous as retail sales can be. Due to some expansion at Omega Vortex and the fact that I didn’t really need the job anymore, I decided it was best that we parted ways. A recent e-mail that was circulated among the people I used to work with makes me glad that I did.

So, here’s my attempt to tear apart an e-mail from a retarded business executive. Some people’s names, product names, and location names have been changed to protect the guilty … or the mentally retarded.

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As classes and consulting work at Omega Vortex keep pushing me more and more into .NET development, I thought it would be a good time as any to try to start learning new things and try to keep my mind working on this stuff. I decided to start looking for an Open Source project that I could contribute to.

After noticing someone on Twitter mention a LINQ to WMI project, it seemed like the perfect fit. LINQ (Language-Integrated Query) is something I’m not too familiar with and want to learn. While I’m somewhat familiar with WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), it’s huge. There’s still plenty left to be learned about it.

I’ve become a developer on the LinqToWMI project at Microsoft’s CodePlex and I’ve already made two major updates for those who are interested. One of which is the ability to generate “Commonly Used” WMI classes instead of just generating the ones you need one at a time. The next is a major speed enhancing change on the ClassGenerator.

It came to my attention while testing the project that it would crash with a NullReferenceException if there were no instances available of the class you wanted to generate. (Example: It would crash when trying to generate a Win32_FloppyDrive class. My laptop has no floppy drive.) In re-working the generator to not use an instance to generate code from, we gained a pretty huge speed boost from not having to search for an instance. Before, it took about 4 or 5 seconds to generate around 15 classes. Now it takes a fraction of a second.

If you’re needing to use the WMI on a project and want an easy way to query it, give this project a shot. If you think it’s good, help us out by contributing patches or bug reports so we can make the project even better.

I’m not rich. Far from it. I get by pretty well from being self-employed, but there are breaks in the income and sometimes I have to make my money stretch across multiple months, depending on what I’ve got going on.

My dad helped me buy my laptop because at age 20, I still have no credit and can’t finance anything more expensive than a peanut. I went to go get him a portion of the money that I owed him out of an ATM and it decided to give me the money in five dollar bills. This is the result:

I almost want to just keep this until I get the entire amount that I owe him and wrap it all up to see how big it is …