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Kids day at Ping!Posted In: Amelia, Work life — October 1, 2007 @ 10:17 am — PeterMy employer, Ping Identity, hosted a kids luncheon last Friday with catered food, gift bags, and other assorted treats for the kids. I forgot my camera, but thankfully one of my coworkers was making the rounds with his snazzy Nikon DSLR. At my request, he captured this snapshot of Amelia taking a break from the festivities to cut some code. Thanks Mark!
Burning down the house!Posted In: Academic, Work life, Everyday life — May 15, 2007 @ 9:15 pm — PeterThings got pretty exiting around the Motyka household last night as we (I) had an incident with a pan of flaming oil in the kitchen. Long story short, everything is fine, nothing caught fire (other than cooking oil), but we had a visit from the Denver fire department just to spot check and give piece of mind that the fumes in the house were not dangerous. Despite a request for a discrete arrival to the fire department dispatcher, trucks showed up with flashing lights and squealing sirens. I learned some valuable lessons, hopefully if something like this should happen again, I’ll be better prepared. In other news, tomorrow (5/16) is my last day as a full time employee at Fiserv ISS. There are some people I will really miss, thankfully I’ll still be working downtown and will make an effort to do lunch with friends on occasion. There is a not-a-going-away-party happy hour tomorrow from 4pm-6pm at Wynkoop Brewery, do come if you’d like to share a few beers with me. On 5/21 I start work with Ping Identity Corporation. This is an exiting opportunity for me as it will be my first time working in a pure software/technology environment. Being a smaller, agile company, I’ll certainly be spending more time focused on challenging technology assignments instead of wading through process and bureaucracy. More to come as I get acquainted with Ping. I wrapped up another two classes at Regis on 4/29 which puts me at the 3/4 mark, 27 of 36 credits. One of the classes was graded with a pass/fail mark and I passed! The other class, I earned an A-. The A- was disappointing, but thankfully it didn’t jeopardize my chances of graduating with honors. I’m really exited to have started my thesis project. When I have some time, I’ll post a detailed entry about the topic. In the mean time, a brief summary: A methodology for assessing open source software solutions for use in non-profit environments. A major component of the project will be a case study performed at Maxfund Animal Shelter. The case study is getting off to a slow start as I’ve spent most of my time fulfilling other requirements of the thesis process. Instead of taking more classes over the summer, I’m going to focus on the case study to avoid managing this while preparing other aspects of the project. Here is a snapshot of my progress in the MSCIT program so far:
Time fliesPosted In: Academic, Work life, Everyday life — March 25, 2005 @ 12:14 pm — PeterI 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
New Ride!Posted In: Academic, Work life, Everyday life — February 25, 2005 @ 10:51 pm — PeterWe have been somewhat shopping for a car for a while now and have spent a considerable amount of time perusing ads and searching Internet listings for used/new Honda Civics. We decided that the Honda Civic would make most sense for us since I have a long commute to work and we don’t have money to throw around on a finicky undependable car. I have spoken with many Civic owners and they have nothing but great things to say about the car. This past Tuesday on my lunch break, I browsed http://cars.com looking for deals on a used Civic. I came across the usually listings, 2003-2004 Civics with about 15-20k miles for 15-17k dollars. Then this one listing caught my eye… It was a “used” 2004 Civic EX with 2650 miles for 16.5k dollars. For a Civic EX, this price seemed to good to be true for a car with such low of miles. Turns out the car was being offered by a Credit Union auto buying service. I have heard about these businesses from coworkers and they said they got great deals and service through them. So I called the place up and arranged to see the car. That same night, I was closing on our home refinance. The closing wrapped up faster than I thought, so I picked up Stephanie afterwards and we went to see the car. Turns out the car was everything we were looking for and more. Power everything, moon roof, CD player… the works. So, we are the proud owners of our first new vehicle. I have driven it quite a bit over the past few days and I love it! Some pictures of it parked on our driveway are here. We took the car out for a cruise tonight and went to walk Shadow, Stephanie’s aunt’s dog. Her and her new husband are on their honeymoon in Cancun and we are looking after her dog. The original plan was to have Shadow stay with us, but we all agreed that was not the best idea. Stephanie’s aunt thought Shadow would feel abandoned and we thought it might be a bit overwhelming for our pets. I think going over there daily to walk and exercise Shadow will be sufficient. It is only for a week… This weekend marks the official end of a 1 year 4 month project I have been working on at work. We migrate the final batch of users from the remote hosting facility to our inhouse servers tonight. I’m going to get to sleep soon because I have to wake up and ~1am MST to import a bunch of data and then sleep again to make it to the office by ~6am. Overall, the project has been a success. Like most IT projects, there have been a few bumps along the way… While I am quite proud of how well things have gone, I recently found out that our largest volume credit union will be leaving the service. My first reaction was to assume they were not happy with the service since being migrated to our datacenter, however, management assured me that this is not the case. While the credit union has not given a specific reason for leaving our service, it is believed the move is political and does not reflect dissatisfaction with our service or most recent migration efforts. Still a huge bummer :/ The hockey game was fairly light today, only 4 people made it to the rink. I played very sloppy today, it seems less people to pass to makes for a more difficult game. I fumbled the puck quite a few times, but scored a few times too. The puck we were using was warn out and kept turning on its side and rolling. This caused many of our shots to lift off the ground and the puck was flying all over the place. One unlucky wrist shot managed to get high enough to catch me in the side of the head. Thankfully I was not facing the other way or it would have hit me right in the face! This game revealed two things, I need a helmet and a new puck… On top of all this, I have a huge assignment to get done for class. This Monday will be the final class for MSCC 610 and we have to submit a paper surveying technologies at the company we work at. A short 15 minute presentation on the paper is due also. I am about 1/3 of the way done and have most of the content locked away in my head still. I should have some downtime tomorrow while at work to spill some more out on paper. I envision the final paper being about 7 pages single-spaced. Amazing how fast these courses fly by. Unfortunately my next class is being held at the Interlocken campus which will add a 30 minute commute after being dismissed at 10pm. Hopefully this will be a rare occurrence of not having the class I need at the Lowell Campus. Stephanie made blueberry muffins! Time for a snack!
Cleanliness is next to godlinessPosted In: Work life, Everyday life — February 17, 2005 @ 7:57 pm — PeterOur house is very clean because the appraisal person came today. We thought having the place spotless would result in a higher appraisal. He was a friendly man that thought Iris was adorable although she spend the entire time barking her head off at him. He was supposed to arrive around 4:45pm but ended up being late. This worked out great since we have some last minute cleaning to do. Based on his remarks, our frantic cleaning was obvious. He said things like “Are you sure you live here?” and “It looks like Better Homes & Gardens here!”. The second comment was obviously flattery since he caught on to the fact that we are very proud of our home. I gave him the grand tour and pointed out all the home improvements we have done over the past year. He assured us that our appraisal amount will be in the top tier of similar recently sold homes in the area. We didn’t really go through all the trouble of cleaning to score a few extra thousand on the appraisal, we simple didn’t want someone coming into our house and thinking we are scums. Now that this is done, we will be closing on our refinance next Tuesday. Amazing that Countrywide was able to move this process along so quickly. Had I stuck with Washington Mutual, I would probably be on another wild goose chase trying to find some obscure piece of personal financial trivia to satisfy their underwriters… Work has been so so over the past few days. I hit a less productive slump over the past few days as I am getting burnt out on documentation. I am working on three documentation projects and all are nearing completion. As a change of pace, I started coding up a few enhancements to a web application I maintain to break the monotony. I am now caught up on a interface design issue, trying to find a way to maximize screen real estate. I grabbed a few javascript menus from SoftComplex and started experimenting to elicit some feedback. So far, I have decided to replace this long form select box with a more attractive tree menu. This gives a facelift to a rather boring looking webapp and saves quite a bit of space when the nodes are collapsed. I might experiment with a few other components from SoftComplex and consider purchasing the Professional versions if any of the extra features would be useful. If you have not tried their products, I strongly suggest trying them out. They are very simple to use and it is quite easy to populate the menus with data from a database. Tomorrow is hockey day! It is not going to be as nice as it has been the last few Fridays, but you never know… I recall a forecast of high 40’s last weekend and it ended up being very sunny and we played in t-shirts. Hopefully all the snow has melted from earlier in the week and the rink is dry. I don’t mind it being cold, but wet patches on the rink make it quite tricky to play. In addition to hockey, another game has been popular at work. Some people have signed @ Red Hot Pawn and I jumped on the bandwagon late last week. I lost my first game by making a stupid move, but I’ll make up for it. I have not played chess in a while and am quite rusty. Actually, I just got a great idea! Perhaps I could challenge my Dad to a match! We loved playing chess together when I was younger and it would be so fun to play with him again. After I wrap up this post I’ll give him a call and walk him through the process. « Previous Entries Next Entries » |
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| motyka.org | January 7 2009 |
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He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool. --Albert Camus |
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