Jeremy's Blog

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.

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.

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 …

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…)