Benfalk Blog

I LIVE!  I haven’t posted in almost three months and things have been drifting for me during these winter months.  I lost my focus on most of my activities and need to get back on track.  With the economy as it is, I am being laid off the week after this one to cut costs, hopefully it’s the only week I’ll be laid off for =\.   I really need to get a good resume together in case the bottom falls out from under me.

I am glad to report however that my Hybertrofy project is still moving forward at a descent rate.  I really need to start putting up some of the modules I’ve made for it on my site.   My hope is once I get the project far enough along other people we ill start noticing it and help me out with it… then again, if nobody else wants to help I guess it would be a good resume stuffer =) .

The remaining of my normal week has been filled with a mixed bag.  On Thursday I was told I can not have anymore overtime, which I think is due to the economic slowdown we are going through… at any rate it is good and bad.  It’s good in the part that I am going to have a lot more time to do things as I’m gaining about seven or so hours extra a week now.  What stinks about this however; is I have been working overtime for so long that I have come to budget that in as part of my pay.  This equates between 20 - 25% pay cut per week depending on the overtime I would have normally received.

I think I can budget around this, but only the next couple weeks will really tell me if I can or not.  One thing I have thought about doing is looking through Rent-A-Coder and seeing if there are any jobs I could pick up and make some extra dough that way.  I did that for awhile last spring and it was pretty cool but it took up too much extra time,lol, I think I’ll have extra time now.

On Friday night Emery came over and him, Vince, Lucas, Mason, and I all played DOTA.. and it was probably the most frustrating five hours I have ever spent.  Lucas, Mason, and I where on a team against Vince and Emery and we never won a single match =( .  After finally giving up on playing I started working on my user library again, it has been awhile since I looked at it and I was disappointed in myself as it took about fifteen minutes to find where I had left off in my code.  I basically spent the rest of the evening familiarizing myself with the library and making sure I had left no functions unfinished.  Hopefully after today i will be done with the base library.  I also want to start working on making some eye candy design for my blog today as well.

PS : I bought this shirt on Woot on Thursday.

Nanonauts

Today was one of my better days in awhile =) .  I finished the first edition of my web based kiosk system at work today!!  It was an amazing feeling to finally see my work come to life and work like it was intended to.  To top it off, not only did I get it working but I found a way to roll out the system to the other kiosk flash cards in a fast way.  I’m going to make a seperate post detailing some of the problems I had to overcome in linux to get it to work so as not to clutter my captain’s logs.  I did find some bugs in the web portion of my display system after I rolled out the image to the other compact flash cards, but it’s not a big deal to fix.

I so far have been slowly enforcing my martial law plan that I set down for myself.  The first part of it was to get to bed at a descent time… which I have deamed to be between 10 - 10:30 pm.  Tomorrow I’m going to lay out a schedule of how I plan to finish my C++ book and set check dates to make sure I am on track for finishing it, and while I’m at it I might as well do the same for my running… for as much as I enjoy running it always seems to suffer during the winter months, but I hope to reverse that problem this year.

I am slipping away from my habit structure… It is time to institute martial law on myself.  I haven’t ran in a week, read my C++ book, or even finished my CodeIgniter user library yet.  I spent the better part of the weekend playing DOTA, a Warcraft Three map style.  I must admit it is extremely fun and addicting, but I can’t spend all of my time playing games or I will wind up back in a slump like I was several years ago.  Starting tomorrow I am limiting the amount of computer games I play and setting up an actual scheduled timeline for finishing my user library and getting my C++ book read.

It seems if I don’t make time for my activities and plan them out they never happen =( .  I’m not sure if it has to do with the winter season, but it seems to happen to me around this time of the year, when I just stop planning and just float through the dark cold season.. it has to be the winter that does this to me.  I’m going to start things right and go to bed now, at a time of 10:40pm, and starting tomorrow I am going to be in bed by 10pm.

The last two days have gone by pretty fast.  I never got a chance to post for Wednesday for a couple reasons.  Nothing overly exciting happened that day and I was incredibly tired from the last several days.  When I left work on Wednesday I ate at Pizza Hut with Lucas, Mason, and Jackie.. When I got home I dinked around for awhile but was getting tired super fast.  I decided to lay down and take a nap about about a quarter after six and ended up sleeping until the next morning =) .

I must have been tired because when I woke up Thursday morning I was still a little tired but could definitely tell a difference. Thursday was a pretty good day for me, I got a ton done on my kiosk system !!  With any luck I will be done today so I can mark this project as complete.  It has been the best project I have ever done at work, but it needs to come to an end so I can get other things done.

I haven’t finished my user library either… which has be upset with myself.  I haven’t been doing almost anything in my normal routine and it’s hard to pinpoint what is happening.  I think it’s partly to do with the shortened days along with the cold.  This is about the time last year when I lost a good routine of activities I was trying to uphold.  These are the things I need to keep in my mind to get done through this retarded winter season!

• RUN !
• CodeIgniter User Library
• C++ Book, Finish it!!!!

The list seems simple enough… I just need to stick to it.  Starting now I’m going to try to once again rebuild my routines that seem to have been slipping more and more the last couple of weeks.

Another busy day.  I tried to do some load balancing of my tasks at work and got some of that tasks that had overflowed from no room on my board… I can honestly say for my part I have spent next to no time in any way wasting time at work in my attempts to catch up and it seems like a constant uphill battle.

Sometime shortly after lunch what looked like a down server at first had me busy pretty much the remainder of the day.  In the end as best as it could be determined, a port failed on the main router which a large segment of the network was feeding into for routing.  The last bit of time I had at the end of the day was spent working on my kiosk system.  I am so close to done with it that I have this urge to go in and finish it tonight almost.

I probably would have gone back in to finish it if I didn’t have laundry I had to do tonight… which was an adventure all in it’s own.  I have been putting of doing my laundry for the last week and a half and I was completely out of anything clean.  I took my laundry over to my brother’s apartment and in between washing and drying we watched a movie.  My clothes weren’t dry after a single run so I had to run them through the dryer twice =( .

It’s 1am now… off to bed.

Today was not good for me.  I have been staying up to late and it caught up with me Monday morning =( .  To compound things worse I haven’t been to work in five days.  I spent most of my day trying to stay focused and get my kiosk project done but interruptions kept me from getting it finished… The grand finale to my work day was when I got back from helping a user to discover my boss had logged me out of my session on my computer so he could log in, setting me back a good hour and a half on a compile I had been working on for my system!!  I am told to lock my computer when I leave my area and I am punished for doing so by setting me back.

I decided against bringing my work home with me tonight, as I feel I have spent enough free time on it and I needed to relax from working on it.   I spent the remainder of my evening trying to stay awake and eventually found my way over to Lucas’s to watch “Hellboy 2″ and “Journey to the Center of the Earth.”  I liked Hellboy 2.. but found the other movie very retarded…. I am regretting staying after Hellboy 2 but ohh well, I guess it was worth the fun we had making fun of the movie.

Tomorrow I need to get into work early and start getting caught up on other projects… as I feel my boss is getting upset that I’m spending too much time on this kiosk project =\ .  With only so many hours in the day it seems like I am fighting an unwinnable war against time… I need to find a way to work on everything, but it’s not something I’m cut out to do.  I’m heading to bed tonight at 10:45 pm, hopefully with more sleep I’ll be able to get stuff better into shape tomorrow.

I am not dead!  I know I have missed three days in what now must seem like a religious posting schedule I maintain in posting… but rest assured I was busy having fun =) .  To recap what has been happening the last couple of days I’ll give a quick break down.

Thursday was of course Thanksgiving.  Lucas, Jackie, and I headed down an hour or so early to help mom with last minute house cleanup and furniture arrangements before the rest of the family guests starting showing up.  The dinner was pretty great and the day seemed to buzz by pretty fast.  Thanksgiving seemed to be out of place a bit with our father and youngest brother not being there.  After a few debates over keeping a Christmas gift exchange draw or not people cleared out pretty fast, but later than normal.  After the Falk side we went to our mom’s side for Thanksgiving, which was just down the road =) .  It was very empty, only a few families were still around… but they were the ones who like to play games, which is what we did until about 2am!!  I didn’t make it back home until about 3am Friday morning.

Friday, of course was supposed to be the great LAN party Lucas and I had been planning for.  I use the word ’supposed’ because except for Ryno, nobody else showed up on Friday =( .  We still had a fun time though.  We played Tactical Ops and Team Fortress 2 for hours and ate corn chips with amazing bean dip made my Mason.  Off an on through out the whole day I was working on my kiosk-box project for work getting all of the Linux packages compiled on it and trying to figure out most of the bugs that I had been running into.  It turns out, at least I think, that I was using the wrong set of base packages… I was trying to use the i686 packages when I should have been using the base x86 ones.  Again I didn’t get done gaming until about 2am or so when we finally crashed and all decided to take a break for sleep =) .

Saturday was equally, if not more fun than Friday.  We played some more Tactical Ops in the morning and around 11am Ryno was making plans to leave =( .  We convinced him to stay for a couple rounds of Starcraft which ended up being the game of choice for the rest of the day.  When I say the rest of the day, I mean until about 3am on Sunday morning lol.  Ryno did end up leaving around 3:30 or so but we kept playing away the rest of the day.  We only played a handful of normal map games and mainly stuck to the modded map games with team based objectives to them.  Around 7:00 or so we got a phone call from Emery, a person we used to hang out with in High School asking if he could come over and hang out and play with us.  It was cool to catch up with him for awhile and play some Starcraft with him as well.  Hopefully he won’t be a stranger and comes back again =) .

Sunday was pretty much a normal Sunday for Lucas and I.  We headed back home to have dinner with mom and helped her do a few things around the house.  She is really fixed on knocking out a wall in her bedroom before she leaves for the Philippines… so I imagine we will be doing to major work in the next couple of weeks on that.  After we stocked her up on firewood in the house we said our goodbyes and headed back for home.  When we got back Lucas didn’t waste too much time sticking around as he packed up and was back out the door in about five minutes of getting back…  Now it’s Sunday evening and I have to go to work tomorrow =( .

I made zero headway on my user library…. read only about twenty pages in my C++ book, and did zero running over the holiday weekend.  In some ways I feel rotten for not working more on these things but I feel hanging out and having fun with others ever now and again like we did was worth it.  As I said, I did get a lot working on my kiosk box over the extended weekend and a final product is almost done =).

Duel OMG Shirts from Woot!

Falk Thanksgiving

Falk Thanksgiving

Falk Thanksgiving

Winan's Thanksgiving

Dangerous Game of Spoons!!

Winan's Thanksgiving

LAN Party!

Installing Linux for Kiosk

Lucas playing a bridge simulation game???

Mason's Bean Dip

A wasted day…  Maybe not 100% wasted, but it feels like it.  I have been struggling with getting everything working on these kiosk boxes all day, on my day off no less.  I slept in until almost 10am this morning after staying up way to late working on this project.  I have been so engrossed with getting this system working that I haven’t really done anything else today =( .  Hopefully I’ll be able to look back on this day as a big learning experience.

Made more headway with the small kiosk boxes I’ve been working on.  While it may sound strange, I am having the best time I have ever had getting these ultra light-weight boards loaded up with Linux and getting them ready to be simple display machines =) .  I messed up the install system before lunch today which had me a little upset, but in the end it turned out for the better because I found a really nice kernel configuration tips page for a system board very similar to the one I am using.  I also learned some more about C and C++ compilers today, as one of the strengths of Gentoo is the fact it helps optimize the compilers for your specific system build.

Kiosk System

I ended up staying until about 5:30 waiting to get some important key programs compiled on the system.  Once it was finally finished I packed it up and brought it home.  I didn’t have much time to work on it when I got home because Lucas had invited me over to watch “Blade 2.”  I must say, it was better than the first one by a long shot.  Lucas was in really good spirits today, and for good reason, as he is being promoted to an admin =) !!  I am extremely happy for him because I know he was getting weary of answering phone calls all day.  I start wondering myself more often now than before how much longer I can answer phone calls and gofer all the time.  I really like developing this system and doing the programming for it, way more than anything else.

Tonight I’ve started an automated recompile of all my system packages on the kiosk box.  Think I’m going to crash on the sofa and wake up in a couple hours to see if it’s done yet and finish working on my user library on my pseudo Friday.