Password Graveyard

I give 9 a 2

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:40:00 +0000

I went to see 9 last night. While I'm not a Tim Burton fanboy, I generally like most of his movies. One of my all time favorites is The Nightmare Before Christmas. 9 is a different story all together. NOTE: no spoilers here.

Let's start with the good. On the surface, the movie looks great. I can't say that I felt I was watching cutting edge 3D, but it was still pretty to look at. Unfortunately, that's all I can think of to praise the movie for.

On the flip side, the movie is short, and by short I mean almost ridiculously short. On top of that, the pace of the movie felt rushed. One of my friends theorized that perhaps it was rushed out the door to meet the deadline of 9/9/9. I almost hope that's the case so perhaps the movie can redeem itself when it comes out for DVD/Blu-Ray.

The other bad news is that it felt like they just ripped out pieces of other post-apocalyptic movies, animated them, and threw them in the movie. Lastly, I felt very little attachment to any of the characters. If the main character was fed to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, I think I would have probably just thought, "hey, nice Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference".

There is one potential bright spot for this movie. It may be that adults are not the target audience and that kids might like it. It's about the right length , it follows the beat to death typical hero formula, and it's pretty to look at. I just hope I save at least one adult from going to see this without being prepared for what they are not getting.

Goodbye Dear Friend

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:26:00 +0000

On April 19, 2004 our pup Katie came to live with us. At the time I don't think we knew what a gift Katie would be. I doubt there are many dogs that can live up to the standard that she has set for future furry residents. Like most Sheltie's she was reserved, but when she got to know you she was the one of the sweetest pups. She was never shy on kisses for people she knew (whether they wanted them or not) and always wanted to be around family and friends. She was always ready to do anything or go anywhere as long as it was with us and she was really tolerant of the kids.

The one thing Katie loved to do more than anything else was to chase a tennis ball. When we were at my parents the mere mention of playing ball would cause her to run the Sheltie circle. My parent's have a large back yard and her paws would propel her like a rocket to the back of the yard waiting for me to thow. We could always tell when she was tired (but still wanted more) when her tongue would hang out the side of her mouth.

There were many other things that she loved to do. Riding in the car was a big one, although to this day we're not entirely sure why. She'd get all excited, hop in the car, and then lay down. She loved to take walks, and I can remember plenty of times when it was too cold or rainy outside in the morning where I would get the "So, we're going for a walk right? right? right? right?" and then the look of "awwww" when we didn't. Nothing like sad puppy eyes to make you wish you could change the weather.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. Late last year she had some problems eating. With a few visits to the vet and some medication we thought her problems were over. Sadly, early this year her problems returned and after many vet visits, an ultrasound, and lastly surgery, we got one of the worst diagnosis we could. It was Lymphoma and there was no way to remove it. While we decided to try chemotherapy, our hopes were tempered by the fact that at best her chances or remission were 50%. It's been a heart breaking summer with plenty of ups and mostly downs.

While her therapy seemed to be helping at first, by some time in July it was apparent that she was not going to be with us much longer. This last week has been the hardest for all of us. There's very few things as horrible as watching someone you love waste away with almost nothing you can do. By the end she wasn't eating, barely drinking, and it was apparent she was absolutely miserable. So this Saturday I did what had to be done. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I took a friend, companion, and in some ways my child to the vet to relieve her suffering. Katie left our house, but not our hearts the morning of August 23rd.

There are two moments in my life I doubt I will ever forget. The first is when I met Katie in the back yard of her foster home. The other is the last moments I got to spend with her before she left us.

I would like to thank all our friends and family for their thoughts, prayers, and support. Without them this would have been all that much harder. I would like to also thank all the Veterinarians that tried so hard to save Katie, especially Dr. Candice.

Rest in Peace Katie Paeth
September 1, 2000 - August 23,2009
"And if these pictures have anything important to say to future generations, it's this: I was here. I existed. I was young, I was happy, and someone cared enough about me in this world to take my picture."

NOTE: The quote is from the movie One Hour Photo, but I didn't feel right about listing the source of the quote considering the movie content and the content of this post.

Reality vs. Writing

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:14:00 +0000

From what I've gathered from tweets from one of my favorite Celebs Felicia Day, this year's Emmy awards will not be televising the awards for writing. While I agree this sucks for many reasons, the biggest is that without good writing most shows would be horrible. The writers that make these shows great should really be recognized for the work that they do.

On the other end of the spectrum we've got the "Reality" shows that are still going to be televised. Just what we need, more recognition for "stupid fun" TV. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Wipeout and some of the other reality shows, but I prefer a well written engaging show with long story arcs like Dollhouse over something that I'll watch and forget shortly after. I guess if you feel the need to award the best of the best wow-look-how-hard-that-guy-just-got-nailed-in-the-head-TV show it's best that it's in it's own category, but do we really need to promote this stuff?

Now for the reality check. No pun inteded. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that most people (at least that I know) don't care who the writers of a show are. I think if they did we'd see the good shows rise to the top much faster and the mediocre shows disappear much quicker. The reason I point this out is that this is probably the reason that the writers awards are not being televised. The producers of the show are trying to get as many people to watch the show as possible and they felt something needed to be cut. Am I saying it's right? No. Is there a solution? probably not in the short term.

I know this isn't exactly the most elegant of blog posts, but I'm not a professional writer. Maybe I should start my own reality show.

EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that there will be some writing awards still shown. Please see the first comment on this post for more info. Thanks "Mathew". This is yet another reason why I don't do this for a living

Yoono Interface

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:21:00 +0000

This morning when I started up firefox, I got an update to Yoono. If you haven't used yoono before it's a great little firefox plugin that allows you to manage a lot of your interactions with a large number of the popular social networks such as twitter, facebook, myspace, AIM, and a few others. After a little poking around the new interface I got a little frustrated because a few of my favorite features were not working the way I expected. So naturally I decided to post my displeasure on my twitter feed. I'm not sure why I was surprised, but I got a response from Yoono's support on twitter in a fairly short amount of time asking me what I was unhappy about.

While I'm not sure if I'm more sensitive then most to user interface issues, I'm certainly moe vocal then some. I think this comes from my background as a developer (web and other). This also means I understand how incredibly hard it is to get a really good interface to a program.

Let me say that any company that wants to succeed should follow the example of yoono. They are actively looking for feedback posted about their product and contacting users to see what they think. On top of that they are doing what some successful companies already know... negative feedback is not necessarily bad as long as you can look at the feedback as a way to better serve your users. I think many people don't really understand what that last statement really means.
My current issues with the yoono interface are as follows:

I can't find where to change any of my twitter account settings. At this point if I changed my password for twitter I'd have no clue where to change it in yoono. I'm sure it's just that I'm not looking in the right place, but if I can't find it, there's got to be plenty of other people that can't as well. Also, don't tell me to look at a user manual, this is the kind of thing that should not require reference material to change.

The @replies that other people post to me don't show up in my updates tab. Again, this might be a setting (that I can't find) or Yoono support said it might be a bug. Granted I can still see the @replies in my @ tab, but that's bit of a pain. One nice thing that they pointed out though is the "More" link allows you to see conversations. While not a replacement for my @replies in the update tab, I still like it

There used to be a way to "archive" the updates from my friends. I really liked this feature, since that meant I could clear my updates list and only see what was new. There is a mark as read feature, but that doesn't seem to do anything. I'm not sure if it's a bug or an error between chair and keyboard.

Like I said earlier I got a reply from Yoono's support and I hope they can either fix these bugs (if the are bugs), or add options to the program to let me use the program like I want to use it. Regardless, I'm still a faithful Yoono user and would just like to tell them to keep up the good work.

Mock Me A Website

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:04:00 +0000

Here's an idea for a product if anyone would care to make it. I'm frequently tasked with creating a new web based product. The problem is that using even a WYSIWYG editor is too slow for what I want when we're having brainstorming or general design sessions. What I need is a program that I could fire up and very quickly lay out the general flow and page design. Here's my wishlist:

I can zoom out to see the overall map of the site

I can zoom into a page and see the rough design of the page

I can draw a component on the page

I can make notes on the page

I can link a component to go to another page

From the zoomed out view I can move pages around

From the zoomed out view I can see the links between pages

I can edit the source of the HTML and when I preview the page the sketched page can be an overlay on top of the page so I can compare the "real" page with the "sketched" page

If this already exists then tell me where. I'd love to spend time and create this, but I know better then to think I can make the time for something like this.

linux + bamboo = still aweful handwriting

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:58:00 +0000

I just spent about an hour or so getting my new Wacom Bamboo "fun" working in linux. It took some time to get it to work properly because of one little tiny step in the How-To that I was following. As you can see though it works and my handwriting is still just as aweful when captured by a pen tablet as it is with a pen and paper.

Fun with SPAM

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:51:00 +0000

So I just got the following SPAM in my inbox and was thinking what would be a fun way to respond...

Your Email Have Won Reference Number: XXXXXXXX Claims of BMW SARLOON CAR AND Â£45,000.00 pounds has been won by you in our BMW STARTING OF YEAR PROMOTION 2009 .get back to this office with your Names ....Depends on who you are, some people call me honey, sweetie, dad, son, @$$hole, smartass, and many more
Address ....Mr. is usually good to start with
Country...Northrend
Phone No...+69-555-byteme
Occupation..Warlock
Sex..Age I'm married, so we'll just go with occasionaly. Do you want physical or mental age? What form or measurement are you using?

Best Regards
Mr Richard Gray.

How Monday should not start

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:15:00 +0000

WARNING! Following these five simple steps will start your day off on the wrong foot.

1. Woke up about 5 minutes before my alarm to my dog whining. This is unusual, but I figured that, like my 5 year old, maybe she didn't drain the tank before bed. So got up to let her out.

2. Just before I let her out, I heard one of those "good luck figuring out where this noise is coming from" beeps of what I assumed was a smoke alarm with a dying battery. So I let the dog out and started my hunt.

3. It only took me a few minutes to discover the location of the annoyance. It was a carbon monoxide detector in the stairwell leading to the basement. Thankfully in reach and we had batteries.

4. As I'm putting the detector back on the wall I hear the dog outside (at 5:30am) barking because I left her out for more then what she felt was appropriate in the brutal cold. So I sprint for the door, let her in and put her back in her crate.

5. As I'm headed back upstairs I begin to wonder how long this whole thing took because my alarm goes off at 5:30 and my wife was still sleeping. Sure enough I make it back to bed as my wife is trying to find the right button to turn off the alarm.

So needless to say not a great start, however, I'm determined to not let it affect the rest of my Monday.

Interesting Music Video

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:47:00 +0000

BLIND

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:47:00 +0000

For anyone out there that like machinima, this WoW video is pretty well done.
The Craft of War: BLIND from percula on Vimeo.

Tech Book Sharing Site

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:09:00 +0000

Someone needs to come up with a technology focused book sharing site. I'm tired of buying a $80 technical book, read some/most/all of it and then rarely pick it up again. I know in some cases these books are available at your local library, but I rarely find any of the technical books that I want to read at my local library or any of it's affiliated libraries.

Someone has to have the time/energey to put into this. As long as the books are there, I'd even pay a small fee per month or transaction just to use the site.

The good with the bad

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:30:00 +0000

Well, yesterday was the funeral for my grandmother. She was 94 years old when she died on New Years day. While yesterday was not a happy day, it did make me realize that I was definitely luckier then a lot of people.

There are many of our loved ones that are taken from us without warning. Whether it's an accident or natural cause, we don't have the opportunity to see or speak with them before they are gone. I was lucky enough to have seen my grandmother one last time on Christmas day and to tell her that I love her.

On a related note, while I was writing this post I was reminded of a blog post of one of my friends (written before I knew her). Please give it a read when you get a moment http://naanad.info/. The theme of the post is something that I've heard from multiple people before, but worth repeating.

You will be missed

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:22:00 +0000

Yesterday I got the call from my father that my grandmother passed away. All I can say right now is that I (and the rest of her family) will miss her.

A little CSS/JS Help Please

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:30:00 +0000

I've been playing around with JQuery for a couple of weeks now. One of the features I love is the datepicker that can easily be added to any text box. One of the things that I've been trying to figure out is how to create a pop up dialog similar to the way the calendar pop up works.

I'd like to have a text box or table cell that has some text in it. In addition I've got an image or button somewhere else on the page. When I click on that element, a small form pop-up shows up under the text box. Now I know that I can do this, but simply putting the form inside a span/div tag, but I want the pop-up to actually pop-up and not affect the layout of the page when it shows or hides.

I know enough CSS and Javascript that I'm not a novice and if all else fails I'm going to attempt to dig through the jquery calendar js code. I'd rather not though. Any help would be appreciated.

Sunrise

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:38:00 +0000

The sunrise this morning was absolutely amazing. I was wishing I had my good camera with me, but had to settle for my phone. I know this doesn't really do it justice, but use your imagination a bit.

Birthday Loot

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:16:00 +0000

While my birthday is a few days away, got some birthday loot already.

My little assembly helper

Trick-or-Treat

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:13:00 +0000

My little candy monsters

Pumpkins

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:10:00 +0000

Our Family pumpkins. The one in the middle is suffering from an identity crisis.

In Love

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:08:00 +0000

I just got back from dinner and I'm in love. No, I'm not going to leave my wife, she's the only woman for me (of course if Alison Hanigan or Drew Barrymore walked in the door that might make that statement a lot harder to stick to). I'm in love with Boston.

I wouldn't consider myself well traveled. I've been to more then a few places in the states and a couple on the other side of the big pond. I've been to big towns and small towns, but there isn't a single city that I've truly said "I would love to live here instead of where I'm at".

I've lived in the Chicago area all of my life. It's a great town to live in/around. The people are generally friendly and hard working. There's a good job market for what I do. There's a lot to see and do in and around the city for everyone. I can think of plenty of other places that would drive me insane if forced to live there (NYC comes to mind), but not Boston.

It may be that I just haven't spent enough time here, but there are so many things that Boston has done right. For one, the public transit system is actually useful and easy to navigate. Did I mention inexpensive (1/2 the price of an El ticket in Chicago). Oh and it goes where you need it to go. The city itself is just beautiful to walk around.

The Italian food in the North End is absolutely amazing. I had a lobster ravioli at Cantina Italiana tonight that would make the chef at some of the high end Italian places in Chicago feel completely inadequate. Seriously, if you EVER come to Boston make sure you at least have one dinner in the North End. I just wish that work would be paying for the whole amount, but it was sooooooooooo worth it.

There's only thing missing in Boston that makes me ready to head home. My family. So at this point I'm ready to head out. One more day at the conference and it's time to head home. I just wish I didn't have to drag my luggage with me everywhere tomorrow.

Quick Response

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:25:00 +0000

I'm not sure if it's through my twitter feed or from a google alert, but one of the developers found my appcelerator posts from last night. Just wanted to mention to anyone that might be reading this to check out his comments. One thing of note is that they will not be requiring the dev network login.

Time to see if I can get appcelerator to do what I want it to do. At this point I'm pretty optimistic.

Hello Appcelerator World

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 01:48:00 +0000

I've just gone through the "hello world" tutorial. So far I'm relatively impressed. The instructions were straight forward worked as advertised. I can't tell you how many "hello world" examples I've gone through that have typos or just don't work because the docs are out of date.

I've already started playing around with changing things around in the hw app. I like the fact that the changes are all compiled on the fly. Even the "service" java class is updated on the next access to the web page. Enough for tonight though.

Auto update

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 01:41:00 +0000

Appcelerator has an automated update feature that runs when you start a new project. I sure hope there is some way to override some of this network related features. While I'm normally connected to the internet and it's not a huge problem, sometime I have little or no connectivity.

Appcelerator - The start

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 01:27:00 +0000

I had a free workshop this morning that was promoting a couple of open source products. The first was a relatively new AJAX framework called appcelerator. I was impressed with the product enough to want to try it out. On top of that I think we've got a short term project that might be a good fit and a way to get some experience developing an RIA application.

I've now downloaded the SDK and installed it. First of all, the dev kit recommends that you install it as root. As a former SA I'm not really comfortable installing something that's not an official package from my linux distribution as root. However, it was able to install it to a directory off my home directory with a few minor hiccups. The nice thing is that it looks like ruby (never used it before) is able to download/update packages on its own.

So now that it's installed I've headed over to the doc section of the site to go through the getting started guide. Here's one of the most frustrating parts that I've run across so far. In order to run the project creation app, you're required to have an Appcelerator Developer Network login. I had to wait for an email confirmation before I could even continue the getting started project. I understand that appcelerator is a for profit company and they want to be able to try and sell their support services to people using their product, but don't force a user to login to your developer network just to start creating an application. That's rediculous. That's almost like if someone sold me a set of colored pencils that I couldn't actually draw with until I called and activated them.

Still hopeful that this framework is at least most of what I hope it will be. More to come.

Apple Picking

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:45:00 +0000

After digging thruogh some of the pics from our apple picking trip on Sunday I figured I'd post a handful of my favorite pics...

Heroes - WTF!

noreply@blogger.com (Keros (again)) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:52:00 +0000

So the wife and I watched the first episode of the new Heroes season last night. If you intend on watching it and haven't yet, stop here!

After our viewing of the 2 hour season premier there were a few things that stuck out in my mind. The first was confusion. My wife and I both had a hard time remembering last season's finale which was quite a problem since there were no little reminder hints during the show. I spent more time then should be necessary trying to rummage through my mental archive of last season trying to remember key points about the characters. Needless to say it was a bit distracting.

On top of confusion, I pity anyone with a weak stomach that might have been eating during the show. There was way too much blood, guts, and violence. Just a quick FYI, I enjoy the occasional horror/action flick so violence doesn't really bother me that much. With that said, the first episode of Heroes was just too much. The scene with Syler picking Claire's brain was once such scene. The gore in this scene was just not needed. I actually went to check what the show was rated at one point.

The last thing that I noticed is that by the end of the show I didn't really care much about any of the characters. It could be that it's been so long since the last episode, but there isn't a single character I felt more then a little emotionaly attached to. If any one of them died it wouldn't phase me a bit.

At this point I just hope that the whole season is not like this or I just might have found some excuses to stop watching yet another show.