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Chatfield State Park

Posted In: Everyday life — March 28, 2005 @ 11:04 pm — Peter

This past weekend Stephanie, Iris, and I went to Chatfield State Park. We have heard about this park and its off leash dog area from many people over the past year. Iris is well behaved at dog parks, but we were worried about her being off leash in an unfenced area. When we arrived at the park, we could not find the off leash dog area. We started out near the largest water reservoir and took a short walk around a short path along the shore. We found some people fishing and asked them if they knew where the off leash dog area was. The person was not sure, but he though he saw several dogs near one of the park entrances. We hiked back to the car and decided to drive around looking for the dog area. We nearly completed a lap around the entire park when we stumbled upon copious amounts of dogs romping around having a good time. We found a great parking spot right up front and Iris proceeded to bark like a maniac upon first sight of the dogs. I was nervous at first, fearing she would run away. Stephanie remained confident and unleashed her. Iris behaved wonderfully and never wandered more than 20 or so feet away. She headed over to the watering hole and waded around a bit. We found a community tennis ball and tossed it in the water to see if she would “rescue” it. Sure enough, she hopped right in and retrieved it. We tossed it a little further each time until our little wiener was swimming! After Iris made it clear that she was done swimming, we took a walk around the reservoir. The views from the park were amazing… This is definitely our favorite state park so far. I can’t wait to go back when the weather is nicer.

The rest of our pictures can be found here.

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Time flies

Posted In: Academic, Work life, Everyday life — March 25, 2005 @ 12:14 pm — Peter

I can’t believe this week is already over. I was supposed to have a batch of software enhancements done by today, but it does not look like I will be finished. I spent quite a bit of time fighting with the Eclipse environment trying to get the Lomboz J2EE plugin to work. It kept giving me errors on my JSP tag library declarations at the top of a few pages. Nearly a day was spent backing through the last few stables release of Eclipse until I found a build that did not produce the errors. So, I’ll send the email out this afternoon asking for a few more days. The timeline I set for myself was a bit tight, I figured it would push me to work harder and get these tasks off my list. No hockey today since we got some snow last night. I won’t comment about it being the end of March and there being freaking snow on the ground! Nothing like the starting Spring with snow :/

Last week Stephanie and I finally committed to a new laptop. I have been stalking ads and reading reviews for several weeks. I came to the conclusion that we would not be able to find an absolutely perfect laptop for the money we were looking to spend. Overall, I think we came pretty close. We bought a Compaq Presario v2135us and we are quite happy with it so far. One of our requirements was an integrated SD memory card reader. We have various devices that use this type of media and would rather read data off the card directly, rather than use awkward proprietary software utilities to acquire data from each device. The card reader works great, however, it is not spring loaded. This is not a problem for people with nails that can grip the nub of the card that sticks out. That is about it. I love the computer otherwise. Some neat features it has are, a button to disable the touchpad, dedicated audio adjustment buttons, a great keyboard layout (the backslash key is in the right place!!!), and an overall rugged design. Funny that I decided to go with a Compaq. While I worked as a computer technician when I was 16, I hated Compaq computers. They were the most awkward machines to work on because they usually had a riser board that contained the CPU and memory. At the time, very few other computer manufacturers did this. They were also a pain in the ass to get upgrade components for. It seems they have come a long way since then. While laptops can hardly be compared to desktops with regards to using industry standard components, it is definitely easier to get upgrade components and stuff now a days. I’m contemplating reloading the operating system to remove all the crap they installed by default. I managed to remove most of it, but some of it remains, with no clear uninstallation option…

Last night I had class and we spent a good amount of the session talking about the Sarbanes-Oxley act. The class is now down to four people, including myself. Since there are so few of us, the professor is considering consolidating one of the class session to give us a bit of a break. I’m not so into this class. I’ve been doing very well, scoring A’s on all my papers so far… I need to get started on the course project soon so I’m not torturing myself with an all nighter to try to finish it up. I’m setting a goal to at least get some ideas organized and setup an outline this weekend.

I think I might take a walk around the building over my lunch. My legs are cramping and I need to stretch. I have alot to get done this afternoon and I probably should venture away from my desk for a bit. To help me concentrate, I brought a bunch of music with me today. The playlist is as follows… I’m not sure what inspired me to bring the Peter Murphy… We’ll see how I like it.

Bebel Gilberto - Tanto Tempo
DJ Krush - Meiso
New Order - (the best of) NewOrder
Nirvana - Bleach
Nirvana - Nevermind
Nitzer Ebb - Belief
Peter Murphy - Deep
R.E.M - Automatic for the People
Thievery Corporation - The Cosmic Game
Tricky - Vulnerable

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Political pawn

Posted In: Editorial — March 21, 2005 @ 6:28 am — Peter

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/politics/21cnd-debate.html

The U.S. government has completely overstepped its boundaries today by assuming the role of “God” and passed legislation forcing the feeding tube to be reinserted for Terri Schiavo. This shocking decision was made by a largely ignorant group of people, the majority of which have no medical experience whatsoever. This knee jerk reactionary motion is yet another brazen attempt from the far right extremist government to win the support the religious rite. Perhaps they should debate the fate of each human being that is denied health care due to lack of adequate medical coverage. I cannot help but wonder who is paying to keep this ailing human being alive. If there was not such a political circus surrounding her situation right now, I doubt the family would have enough money to pay the hospice to continue supporting her life. But now that the bible thumpers and right to lifers are on the bandwagon, some rich tycoon probably seized on the political muscle power that will be gained by keeping this mass of muscle and tissue alive. If only these narrow minded fools could see how badly they are being duped…

What is going on here is anything but natural. I do not understand how those who believe in a higher being can argue this person has a quality of life that should be sustained. I will definitely have legal documentation prepared that explicitly states that I am not to be kept alive in such a state. Terri Schiavo is not alive. She has been dead for years and these selfish self righteous freaks need to let her body die.

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Scary

Posted In: Everyday life — March 17, 2005 @ 7:56 am — Peter

Bullet narrowly misses driver on I-25

Whoa, this makes me feel great about my daily commute to work. This is the second time since we have moved here that a person traveling on interstate 25 was randomly shot at. I take this route every day to and from work. It happened near the I-25/I-70 interchange, although on a different side that I would be traveling on at this time of the morning. As with the last incident, there are no leads because of how random the shooting was. I wonder what DPD can do to prevent this from happening again? Perhaps mount a few cameras near these heavily congested interchanges? I can’t imagine why someone would want to do something like this. The only thing that comes to mind is some sort of gang initiation, testing someone to see how much of a “badass” they are. Whatever their reason, they are a cancer of our society and should sought by the police and removed from the streets.

I thought about taking I-255 to I-36 instead today, but decided against it. This route passes through an equally charming area of the metro area and also requires breathing the pollution of a chemical refinery along the way. I’m not sure which is worse, chemical pollution, or the smell of the Purina dog food factory along I-70. Either way, the route to work stinks!

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Extended weekend

Posted In: Everyday life — March 14, 2005 @ 10:55 pm — Peter

I decided to stay home today when the chest congestion and sore throat didn’t go away over the weekend. To be quite honest, I still don’t feel 100%. I am nervous about taking another day off, since I don’t observe my coworkers doing this to overcome a bout of illness. One the other hand, I don’t want to be “that guy” who comes to work sick and spreads it around the office. For now my plan is to be up and ready for work and if I don’t feel well, I will call in sick again. I didn’t get any flack for taking today off, nor did I expect to… But another day… That might draw comments from some people. Can you tell you that I dwell on rather trivial matters?

Over the weekend, I got an email from my new professor regarding my recently submitted assignment. We turned in paper copies on the first night of class and he requested an electronic version via email too. I submitted a nicely formated PDF export from OpenOffice, which has always satisfied the needs of my past professors. In this instance, I was requested to submit the assignment in Microsoft Word format. My first reaction was annoyance, because he is essentially requiring his students to own a copy of Microsoft Office in order to complete assignments for the class. Despite my best efforts to only use Open Source document publishing tools to complete my master degree, it looks like I’ll have to use the Micorosoft Office export feature of OpenOffice to turn in final drafts for this class. Regis has Microsoft Office loaded on lab computers, so I can’t really say I don’t have access to Microsoft Office. I can’t really give an opinion on the class just yet. So far the course material is quite foreign to me as it is completely nontechnical and very business oriented. I find the text book to be readable and interesting. I’m surprised to see another class with only 6 people in it. It might sound strange, but I liked my first class that had nearly double the students in it.

On Friday evening Stephanie and I went to the Bladium to get some exercise. I met a coworker up there to play some hockey with at the drop in session that was scheduled to be 1.5 hours long. The session got started a bit late, perfect because we arrived a bit late too. It was my first time skating on the sport court surface and I did fairly well. We played some 3 on 2 with a few other people that were up there and tired ourselves out pretty quickly. After an hour passed by I was ready to sit out. My coworker kept egging me on and I managed to drag myself through the rest of the session. Since I had such a great time and I’m certain I will keep up with hockey, I dropped $90 bucks on some gear this weekend. I found some fully synthetic leather gloves on fogdog and ordered some pants and a bag too.

Other eventful things that went on over the weekend were taking our new car to get its features installed. We decided to purchase the security package that includes a Lojack and window engravings. Although our car is not super fancy, it just so happens that the Honda Civic is one of the most stolen cars in the United States. Rather than deal with the hassle of having our car stolen, we figured it would be worth a few extra dollars per month to install some theft prevention gear. This package also came with a clear 3M bra to protect the front end from dings and scratches. Brian gave me a ride to and from the car dealer to get this done. In return I burned him several music CDs. Despite him living so close to us, we don’t see him very often. It was nice to have him come by for a couple hours while I decompressed some MP3s and burned the discs. While over at his place I scored the new Thievery Corporation album. Unfortunately I will have to burn it to audio CD since we don’t have an MP3 capable stereo in our car yet

Last but not least… The chess game between my father and I has ended. As was evident from the very beginning, my Dad won. It took him a surprising amount of moves to seal it up with a checkmate We immediately started a new game, this one has no leader as of yet.

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