Benfalk Blog

Today was not a productive day for me.  I spent a good amount of my day chasing down problems and fixing issues that probably shouldn’t need to be fixed.  I was reading my C++ book at noon today and I found a very excellent quote in it that I would like to share..

The ability to hold views that are not logically self-consistent is a hallmark of the human mental process.

Stephen Prata

Not a drop of code was worked on tonight.  I left work at 4pm so I could get some stuff done and out of the way before I got down to some good old coding… but it never happened.  I wanted to go out tonight and run somewhere between eight and ten miles but that never happened either.  My legs where not feeling well and the freezing air eventually sent me back home with just a tad over five miles under my legs =\ .

When I got back I helped Lucas fix our uncle’s PC and after he left I decided to take a nap… My “nap” turned into a 3.5 hour sleep and I am just barely going to finish this post before midnight haha.

PS:  I bought this shirt on Woot today…

Woot Shirt, OMG

Today was a rolling, slow day.  I dinked around with some Wordpress templates a little bit in the morning until Lucas, Mason, and I traveled down to visit my mom.  We didn’t do much work, mainly for my part I brought in a bunch of firewood and started a fire in the fireplace.  The TV in my parents living room has developed a jumping picture so Lucas and I took a look at it and found that it’s not the TV at all.  It’s the DVR from the satellite that is goofed up.

When we got back up to Fort Wayne somehow we ended up watching a movie called “Bio-dome” and then Lucas packed up his PC and left.  I made a quick run to Walmart for grocery items and then puddled around the remainder of my evening helping Mason try to get a virtual PC set up so he can play the legacy game “Mist”

I read a bit of my C++ book, almost to chapter eight.  Sometimes the chapters seem like they are almost over and then a whole new subsection crops up.  It breaks my rule, but I checked and I still have 15 pages to read in this blasted chapter seven.  I know I have fallen short on my C++ reading but it seems like there just isn’t enough time to do everything I want to do.  Such is life I guess.

Today was an awesome day for me =) .  I woke up this morning and got ready to head over to my buddy Sam’s so we could head down to run the first annual WOOF race down in Wells county.  It was raining and cold all morning long for the event.  On my first lap through the course I quickly learned that I was over-dressed for the event however and dumped off my jacket and sock hat at the beginning rest area on the end of our first lap.  I had a great time talking to Sam while we ran the event and I was extremely pleased at my fatigue levels through most of the race.  On the last lap Sam kept telling me to break on forward and eventually I did.  I opened up the throttle and ran at about my high end training pace at mile 12 or so of the race and felt great.

A couple people took note of my dress attire and hair, which I thought was pretty cool =) .  I wore my Walrus vs Eggmen T-shirt and a pair of rock-ware Pink Floyd pants (Dark Side of the Moon Edition. )  I saw on Sam’s blog that my time was 2:37:57.  I think that is a pretty good time for the run we did, which was definitely a tad over 16 miles =D .

Once I was back at my apartment Lucas was rearing to head out and get working on his car, which I don’t blame him.  Luckily we found the source of his oil leak which turned out to be the oil pressure sensor just beyond his oil filter.  The part to replace it was $12.95 and the time spent replacing it was only about 2 hours for the whole job.  He was happy and I was also relieved to see his car is in good condition.

I’m pretty exhausted from the day so I’m signing out early tonight.. 10:45.. maybe not so early I guess haha.  Lucas and I are headed back down to the homestead tomorrow as well so I’m thinking I may not get a chance to finish my user library this weekend as I planned, but that’s okay.  I had enough fun today to justify not getting it done.

WOOF Race T-shirt

Eating after the race.

Needless to say…. today was a mixed bag for sure.  Work was okay today, I spent most of the day preparing a PC for the owner, which didn’t bug me really as I guess I could use a break from some of the coding projects I have been working on.

Through the day I kept eyeing a monitor on NewEgg that I couldn’t resist.  Acer G24 Monitor Specs Needless to say, I eventually broke down and bought one; which I know I shouldn’t have done but I really want to get one.  To justify it I am going to try and find some odd end paying jobs I can pick up to leverage the unexpected cost I put on myself.  After awhile I had no regret of buying the monitor and even now I still don’t have any regret.  When I got home tonight however I began to second guess myself as a real unexpected cost has cropped up =( .  My system is still unstable!!!  We put my old memory in my brothers computer and ran the memory test and my old memory is fine.  Low and behold as well, I am getting memory errors with my new ram.  I put my old Phenom processor in the motherboard and ran the memory tests again to see if they would return and sure enough they did.  I ordered a new motherboard for my system as that is the only other thing right now I can think of that is bad.  So as of tonight I have spent a good chunk of money that I shouldn’t really be spending as the economy is doing terrible right now…

On the plus side, I will be done with my user library tomorrow I’m pretty sure.  I’ve been working on it with my laptop as it is doing fine job of a stand in sitting on top of my computer case.  I have a 15.8 mile race tomorrow morning so I’m heading to bed at 10:20 tonight.  Hopefully tomorrow will be a rewarding day for me.

PS: My faith in AMD is wavering and has completely died with MSI… I think my next system is going to be Intel and ASUS based.

Today was a pretty interesting day.  I was tired most of the day due to not going to bed early last night as I had planned.  I was lured to stay away and help my room mate with some PHP code he’s working on for one of his classes.  I told him the follies of too much embedded PHP code and I personally cannot stand it.  Right after lunch I found out I get to visit our Canada plant to oversee the installation of some new equipment.  I didn’t do any coding today as I was swamped working on computers.

When I got home from work I went for a run in the cemetery while listening to Pink Floyd on my iPhone.  I only did 8.8 miles tonight, but I was working on my speed again.  I used a GPS program on my phone to measure my distance, time, and pace on my last lap. I averaged a 9 mph pace for 1.35 miles, which had me pretty happy =) .

– Depressing side note, my system is showing signs of instability, done posting for tonight. . .

Today was an okay day at work.  I spent a great deal of my time today chasing down problems users were having here and there.  As pointed out by my brother this morning I had to renew my license before him and I could rent a vehicle; which we are planning to do so we can drive to Maryland to pick up our youngest brother for Thanksgiving.  Over my lunch time I drove down to the local DMV to renew my nearly one month expired license.  I was shocked at how fast I was in and out of the place! =)

When I got back I still had fifteen minutes of lunchtime left and was pleased to find that the memory I had ordered showed up today !!!  I thought and worried about my ram in my computer off and on since my system started becoming unstable.  I wanted so badly to rush home after work and test it out but I knew it had to wait.  As such, immediately following work Lucas and I headed to Enterprise to rent our vehicle.  From our online scouting we had it priced at about 25 dollars a day; unfortunately, the dingle berry who was helping us told another story.  He told us it would be cheaper to rent it for the whole week and that it was going to be about $260 =\ .  Dumb-founded, we left with talk of returning tomorrow on our decision.  When we got back to my place we popped on the Internet and came to the conclusion that the guy was trying to get us to rent a luxury car instead of the standard that we indicated.  I think tomorrow I’m going to just schedule the renting of the car online and skip the renting salesman.

I am happy to report that after the new ram was put into my computer it hasn’t glitched, crashed, or stalled yet! =)  I’m going to shut it down and start up a memory test and head to bed early to get caught up on my sleep…

Today wasn’t that great of a day.  The memory I ordered from New Egg didn’t come in today.  I checked the tracking number to see where it was and boy was I astounded…  It started in Edison, NJ via DHL and actually went past Fort Wayne to a town in Illinois =( .  From there it was tendered from DHL to the tried and true, fifteen paid vacation days a year, USPS.  Of course today is Veteran’s Day so, “No Ram For You!”  Oh well, hopefully I’ll have it by this Thursday, or by some miracle tomorrow.

When I got home I started working on my user library yet again.  While I was at work I had an idea to segment and break apart the library a bit by segmenting the functionality into separate classes and so far it has really helped.  I was working away on that until Lucas stopped by.  Apparently he went over a speed bump too hard and now oil is leaking out of his car at an alarming rate =( .  He drove it down home to check things out and didn’t realize how bad it was until he got down there and ended up taking our youngest brother’s car home as it’s available for the time being.  I felt bad for him as I could tell how upset and worried he was about it.  I’m hoping it’s something simple we can solve on our own.

I guess for the most part my day was a blurred, disapointing waste =\ .  Oh well, always tomorrow right?

Here is an update on my Top Knot.

The Knot on Top

Today was descent for a Monday.  Coming into work with a clean cubicle and a better list of things I need to get done this week really helped a lot.  I worked on a couple minor code segments to a web display system for most of the morning.  After lunch I fought phone calls and did some miscellaneous gopher work.

Strait from work I headed to WalMart to get some week supplies of tuna, veggies, and pasta.  When I got home I changed into running gear and did some speed work on my treadmill.  I started out doing a quarter of a mile at 5mph pace to warm up my muscles then did quarter miles runs from paces varying between 8 - 10 mph.  After 2.75 miles of speed treadmill work work threw on a sweatshirt, sock hat, and light gloves to do some real speed work outside =) .

My outside speed work consisted of all out sprints which totalled distances of about an 1/8 of a mile or so, followed by a minute walk, 3 minutes of jogging, stretching, repeat.  After my legs were jello-fied I ducked into the apartment workout room and did some leg lifts to help break apart my leg muscles some more to hopefully bulk them up a bit more to get some more distance speed under me.

Since my run I have been working on my seemingly never ending user library project haha.  I’m going to try my best to finish up the library tonight with the aid of some of the best green tea three dollars can buy =) .

$3.00 Green Tea!

I’m not sure where the day went =\ .  I woke up at 7:30 this morning and was hoping to get a run in, but the rainy weather with temperatures in the mid thirties all day kept me from doing any such thing =( .  I ended up watched Lucas play Warhammer for about a half hour or so, then we went down to our parents house to take a vent fan out of their attic for the winter.  That was pretty much an in and out operation; we where back in Fort Wayne by about 12:30 .  I spent the next couple hours finishing up the base of my user library !!  I am still going through it to do some bug checking and probably over lunch tomorrow I’ll post it up.  Then, in a couple days I’ll through up a back-end admin interface to it.

I tried to finish chapter seven of my C++ book today, as I did not finish it on Friday like I was hoping to… but again I have failed.  I fell asleep for about 3 hours while Lucas and Vince continued to venture through the world of Warhammer.  When I woke back up I skimmed through my user library code and put in some extra functions to automate some common tasks and then found myself skimming through YouTubes.

After Lucas packed up his computer and left for home Mason and I played a couple rounds of “Magic The Gathering,” a strategy card game that I used to be into BIG TIME.

Blue & Black Lockdown Deck

Here is snapshot of the cards in my favorite blue and black deck I built back in college.  If you know any mechanics to the game, this deck locked down an opponent and won by take away their card pile hehe. The cards from left to right, top to bottom :  Scalpelexis, Polluted Delta, Isochron Scepter, Obsessive Search, Volrath’s Stronghold, Circular Logic, Boomerang, Counterspell, Merfolk Looter, Careful Study, Tainted Isle, Planar Void, Propaganda, Web of Inertia, Mist of Stagnation, Sapphire Medallion, Tormod’s Crypt, Island, Swamp.

Today was a pretty nice day.  I got a lot cleaned up at work this morning and didn’t have anyone bothering me as it was Saturday =) .  I gave Sam a quick crash course on how to use WordPress and where to look for new templates for his site.  When I got home I noticed there was pieces of egg and pumpkin all over our porch and I was pretty upset about it.  What makes it worst is I am sure who did it; these two snot noised kids who need disciplined like nobodies business.  I saw them last night playing with a metal broom stick beating up a pumpkin and I found that same broom stick on my porch this morning.  Next time I see them they are going to hear from me.

My room mate Mason wanted to go to the Asian store to get some pork noodles so I tagged along to check it out.  I got 100 pack of Jasmine green tea for $2.90, which is a heck of a good deal.  Lucas however didn’t like the store, he was literally on the verge of barfing a couple times.  After the Asian store we went a mini epic to Best Buy and WalMart looking for some cheap GameCube games and to my surprise they are not being sold anymore =( .  When we got home I made quite a bit of headway with the user library for CodeIgniter, I really hope to have it finished by tomorrow night!  Around 4:30 or so in the afternoon I fell asleep for three hours.. which is just what I needed to refresh my train of thought.