Jeremy's Blog

Happy 9’s to you all. I used the joke below in like three different places last night. Might as well be a schmuck and put it here too. It’s still lame, and that’s okay. I was able to laugh about it. A little. Okay, maybe it was just a smirk. Whatever.

[01:11] Jeremy Privett: Oh, and we’re coming up on 9:09:09 9/9/09.
[01:11] Dutch Buckholz: yes, yes we are
[01:11] Jeremy Privett: It was nice knowing you.
[01:11] Dutch Buckholz: nah – that’s 2012, everybody knows that
[01:12] Jeremy Privett: lol
[01:12] Dutch Buckholz: today is just a day without LOLcats

Either way, make some attempt to enjoy the day. I mean, you’re only ever going to see 9:09:09 9/9/09 once in your lifetime, after all. Well, twice if you count the PM version.

I actually scheduled this blog entry to post exactly at 9:09:09 9/9/09. In some timezone. I don’t remember which one it’s set to.

There’s something about this whole blogging thing that, no matter how pointless it may seem, always keeps me coming back to it. Maybe I’m expecting people to read this thing and actually care. (Yes, I know some of you actually do.) There’s a lot of history in this old thing. I still keep making backups of the database, because I don’t want to lose what’s here. I also don’t intend to let the web space go away. I don’t have the time to do anything more complex than a blog at the moment, so why am I wasting the money?

Since I stopped blogging, I’ve looked at this thing almost every day. As if something was going to just pop up here on its own. Or you folks were going to comment on something (oh, wait — you can’t). I’ve been so smashed by work that I’ve sort of lost connection with a lot of really awesome people and I’m really not okay with that. Blogging again is going to be my first step to getting back in touch with all the folks that have kinda been swept aside in the wake of all of the crazy stuff that’s been happening for the past ten months.

I have projects I’m working on that I want to talk about. Life elements I haven’t talked about here. There’s a lot still to say. And a lot has happened over the past several months. It’s going to be interesting to see if I actually will write about any or all of it, but this is me saying that I’m at least going to make an attempt. You’ve all heard that before, though.

I’m still @jeremyprivett on Twitter and I’ll be trying to be more active there, as well. Encourage me! Help me be more active with all of you. I don’t forget about any of you on purpose, I swear. There’s just a lot going on. A lot of stuff has just kind of dropped off my radar and I want to get it all back.

It’s Round … 3, I think. Let’s do this thing.

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.

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.

It’s been a long time, I know. At the risk of giving myself nothing to blog about for another month, I’m going to do a quick catch up of everything that’s been going on lately.

At the beginning of October, I got a chance to go visit Ruzena again. As always, we had a really good time. I was in Houghton for Homecoming and got to be there for all of the festivities, including the Homecoming Banquet and Dance. I think the food was better last year, but it was still good. The dance didn’t quite go “as planned.” The first half was kind of lame, so we ended up migrating to the basement where a group of us had our own little mini-dance, which was far more entertaining. Ruzena and I got to watch our first fireworks show together and became “siamese twins” because we were huddled so closely together because of how cold it was outside.

Omega Vortex has been feeling the situation with the economy with potential clients bailing, citing economic problems. I’ve taken this as an opportunity to look for another job, and I believe things are looking good on that front. I’ve received extremely positive responses, but a few details are still being worked out, so I won’t say more than that for fear of jinxing things. Omega Vortex isn’t closing, we’re just going to be cutting back like any other company does, during a recession. We’re closing extraneous divisions in an effort to concentrate more on our core business. Because of this, we’ve closed the website temporarily because it was only up to facilitate some of the divisions we’re closing. This is giving us an opportunity to go through with our redesign plan and get a new look in place for the re-launch. We’ll have more news on that front sometime soon.

I’ve been doing a lot more gaming again, lately. I’ve given some thought to cross-posting some game reviews on this blog and the blog at Anfiniti. I’m not exactly up-to-date with the latest games and would also be doing some retro-reviews, so my current hitlist consists of Call of Duty 4, Call of Duty: World at War, Assassin’s Creed, Mirror’s Edge, and a few other things. In case I’ve never mentioned it before, I’m always interested in playing games with new people. You can find me on Xbox Live, Xfire, and Steam. For Xbox Live: Atrophius, for Xfire: atrophius, and for Steam: siguel. Maybe I’ll have a PSN name or a Wii Friend Code to share, sometime in the not too distant future.

Things have been extraordinarily dull, lately. I should be moving to Phoenix soon, so I think I’ll start taking opportunities to get out more and explore. I think I’m missing out on a world of inspiration because I rarely leave my desk. Maybe hanging out with Dutch again will get me back on my feet and moving forward. After almost two years of living with or around people that actually do what I do and are willing and capable of having ideas and such bounced off of them, I think my creativity started to die off when I lost that immediate access to people like me. Programming and all of the processes surrounding programming and software development is exciting to me, except when it’s not. When I don’t have people that I can talk to about it pretty frequently, I usually end up resorting to more reading than coding to try and make up for that lack of interaction. Hopefully, being in a new work environment will help.

That’s about all, for now. If I stop letting myself be lazy or distracted, I’ll blog more. Maybe even about interesting things. We’ll just have to see …

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.

It’s been a while since I’ve actually posted an update, so I thought it was about time to, since there’s a lull in the chaos here at Planet.

I’m currently half moved in to my cousin’s place, now. I’ll be sharing an apartment with him and his girlfriend for the next year. I love my parents, but I really don’t feel right living at home after being on my own for so long. Once everything gets settled and I can get my desk and stuff up there in my own room, it’ll be a lot better.

I’ve been working at Planet AT&T as a Sales Rep for almost two months, now. Using it as supplementary income to allow me to cut back on consulting work at OV while other projects are in development. It’s a brain-numbingly easy job, but now that I’m living in Jacksonville it’s a bit of a chore to come in to Gadsden to work. Not to mention with gas prices rapidly increasing, it’s starting to get to the point where I don’t make enough to justify the expense of coming here. After my hourly pay goes away in the next week, it’ll get even worse. The job is entirely hit-or-miss commission, and we don’t make a dime off of 95% of the business we do here, bill payments and pre-paid cards. Chances are, I’ll quit soon after the hourly runs out. I found out they use PHP on their intranet, though. I may take a stab at getting a job there doing PHP stuff. We’ll see.

In other news, I’ll be visiting Ruzena in June, so I’m excited about that. By then, it’ll be six months since the last time I’ve seen her, so I’m really looking forward to seeing her again. I’ve missed her a lot. Six months is really too long to go without seeing each other. Hopefully, I can get things together so I’ll be able to move up to that area, within the next couple years. It’ll be nice when I can just go see her whenever I want, instead of having to plan out trips, make sure they’re okay, spend money on tickets, and only get to see her for a week at a time.

As for Omega Vortex, things are moving along steadily. We’re about to start a plan of expansion over the coming months that includes hiring new developers, unveiling new services, and announcing key partnerships and acquisitions. We’ll be announcing and releasing a new product soon, making some changes to our OmegaFlash solution to bring it back under the umbrella and prepare it for Omega Matrix integration, as well as prepare integration points for the rest of our upcoming Educational Suite.

Well, that’s a pretty cumulative update for what’s been going on lately.

Well, Ruzena wanted her own blog that she could girlify up and such as much as she wanted to. Plus, her readers were primarily her family and such, so my technical posts were confusing people. After a good amount of time blogging together, we decided to split the blogs apart and each have our own place.

My blog remains here. You can view her blog at http://www.ruzenathibault.com and if you would like to keep reading the entries in a combined form, you can use http://www.jeremyandruzena.com … It isn’t completely setup yet, and if anyone knows a Planet-type software built in PHP or a plugin for WordPress that will make it behave like a Planet-type software, that would be great.

Anyway, maybe we’ll both blog more.

For those of you who are unaware, Ruzena’s father is in the Navy. He was deployed to Iraq a couple years ago. Thankfully, he made it home safe and sound. He wrote a book about his experiences, which I highly recommend to anyone who really wants to know what’s going on there, directly from someone who was there. I’ve got my copy and have been reading through it, as I have time. It’s very well-written and does an excellent job of conveying how things were for him.

Get to it on Amazon, by clicking the book cover below. It’s not that expensive, and you’ll learn a lot from it.

Edit: Amazon’s currently sold out, at the moment. Get it at eCampus, or (if the site will work for you) search for ISBN (9781604418613) on Publish America.

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I’m trying out a new time tracking software I ran across the other day. RescueTime drops a little light-weight application onto your computer that monitors what applications and websites you’re in most frequently. I’ve got the widget for my top 10 activities of the last week on the sidebar, now. Keep in mind I just started on Wednesday.

Overall, it’s a relatively accurate little program. It lets you tag your own applications and sites, so you determine what’s referred to as “personal”, “procrastination”, or “work” to take from a few off my list. As you can see, I haven’t been working very much on my computer for the past couple days. I classify “work” as time that I spend doing things for Omega Vortex. Planet AT&T is one of my tags and will probably appear on my top 10 eventually, the more I use my laptop for day-to-day tasks at the store.

My only complaint is it seems to do all of its data management in YAML and it often chokes on various things. It also seems to completely lose the data intended for the request it tried to send when it does choke. Right now, I’ve only got a little over 8 hours logged into RescueTime and I’ve spent way, way, way more time on my computer than that. Edit: As a followup to this, it just tried to process another update and failed because it didn’t like something about the blog. So, it just randomly loses data. The whole last 30 minutes went without being logged. Hurrah. Maybe it’ll lose less data if I make it send updates more often, but they’d probably hate me if I spammed them with updates every 5 – 10 minutes.

Another complaint is that, from the error messages, it seems to be written in Ruby … but, I won’t go there.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with it. It just needs some work on its data delivery and not completely losing data when something goes wrong. I’d be cool if it threw out the offending entry in a parser error, but it seems like it just bails out on the entire request and doesn’t try again.

I’m hoping to use the time tracking in conjunction with my new phone to hopefully get myself more organized. The time tracking will be a motivator to stop procrastinating and doing other things when I should be working. The phone is a very easy way to keep track of important times and dates, because I’m very forgetful. Especially, when I get involved in something and lose track of time.

So, here’s to hopefully becoming more productive. I really need it, about now.