Lost!

This had me so dumbfounded, and my mouth was hanging open for so long, I almost drooled on myself - seriously. In what seems like a Rat Race for votes, you will see elected officials running for the buttons on each others desks, in order to vote their way. Someone got there first, just turn around, you may find more buttons! This isn’t tech news, it’s outrageous. Continue reading…

It’s no secret that I’m an OSS person. It’s also no secret that I get hundreds of recruiter emails a month. It was so bad, I created a seperate mailbox today just for recruiters - then this little bad boy showed up… Continue reading…

It’s 4:30 in the morning, in Germany. The house is eerily quiet. There is no snoring, the lights are on, the dogs are up and worried - ‘mommy’ isn’t home. This morning, at 2:45AM in a crowded room, I said goodbye to my wife of 4 years. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. My wife has officially deployed to Iraq, like many other soldiers, spouses, sons and daughters.

As I sit here, I try to remove myself from the situation and it’s not working. TV isn’t helping, even though I have a 1.3TB PVR for almost any show or music I want to listen to or watch. The web and news aren’t helping - nothing is interesting to me anymore. Tomorrow morning, I have to start my new life. For the next 15 months, I am pretty much a celibate bachelor with two dogs who I both love and hate, depending on the day…

I consider myself to be very independent, due to my military childhood - called a “brat” for those to the outside world. Tonight, I broke. Thoughts are not of “what if she dies…”, they’re more “what will I do without her”. Friends and family have been a great support - almost annoyingly. We have even gotten verbal support and thanks through odd means like our insurance company. When I removed my wife from our policy last night, the lady was very nice and thanked me for being married to someone that has served the country. Then, it was a little annoying. Now, it means something. Now, I feel guilty about not being in myself. I’ve been around the military for over 20 years, worked for the military in many ways, including Moral, Welfare and Recreation (MWR), and for the US Army Reserves, but being someone that knows the life, but without the uniform, I almost want to hide.

Unfortunately, tonight, I’ve developed the “I don’t care” attitude. Nothing is going to fast-forward the next 6-7 months until I get to see my wife again during R&R. And, when that time comes, nothing will help the next 8-10 months of waiting for her to return home for good. While gone, she will miss two birthday’s and two Christmases. During those periods, I have to remain at home, being the forever waiting [and happy] spouse the Military wants me to be.

While she’s gone, the Military will officially support her unit through the Family Readiness Group (FRG). For those, like myself, that have been around the block a time or two, this means the wives club for the unit. They’ll call, they’ll make sure I’m not depressed, they’ll annoy me whenever a spouse in the unit goes off the deep end. When she officially comes home, we will both attend separate classes to train us how to act around each other. Unofficially, my class will be on how not to annoy her and slowly bring her back into normal life. Her class, again unofficially, will be how not to get annoyed with me and slowly return to life.

Not much to look forward to on either side.

[Above was written earlier this morning.]

Now that I’m awake again, I’m numb, perhaps stoic. I can’t do much for very long before I lose interest. I cooked breakfast, reheated day old coffee and didn’t care. Watched a little TV and now I’ve moved on to the computer. I’m thinking about taking the dogs out later to let them run free, but that was always a special treat, as a family. I’ve got so many projects and things I want/need done, but I don’t feel like doing much at the moment.

It may be a few weeks before I feel like writing anything technical related again. I won’t keep posting my depressing feelings, so don’t worry.

I use to be one of those idiots that bragged about knowing how to code websites, more specifically, PHP… I even bragged during a one year period that I could make a web page do anything, including just about pick your nose for you. Ok, so I was an idiot, I admit it. Something has gone horribly wrong though - horribly. I’ve lost my PHP skillz due to ASP.NET - I kid you not.

For those that use PHP and haven’t touched Visual Studio, here’s a quick reason: Visual Studio is a Drag’n'Drop environment. Want Authentication? Drag the login box onto a page, customize it with properties and you’re done. No custom coding needed (unless you’re getting really fancy). Almost all the main features are “DnD” but you can custom write code to interact with those features.

Dreamweaver has similar functions with their CS3 release, but no where near what VS has.

Upon starting up a very small PHP project for my wife and her Unit (Army), I was setting up a MySQL table for users (authentication) and setup the field names. ID, Name, Email, etc. Variable types, no problem! ID = UID…um, where’s UID??? SHIT - MySQL, not MSSQL. They problems went downhill from there. I felt like an idiot, I felt like a beginner all over again. The panic set in - what have I done!? I hadn’t touched PHP/MySQL seriously in a year. A few small tweaks here and there with WordPress, but thats it. The rest has been almost non-stop .Net

I quickly did a Google for PHP based authentication and it started coming back. The first example was decent, but I didn’t need 6 files for an Authentication code block for my site - thats soooo late 90’s. Luckily, between the panic and looking at the auth code listed on a website, it started to come back, very slowly and appeared clunky. I even had to relearn how to navigate inside MyPHPAdmin, something I’d been using for the last 4 or so years (I’m guessing here).

Anyway, luckily, I’m able to chunky monkey this project back together. It’s coming back, but very slowly… Moral of the story, don’t stop using a language if you’re going to go back to it.

This morning, right around the time the US was in bed for the night, Sveasoft attempted to win back customers by spamming it’s registered user base with 4 messages that went out. The reason I say Spammed is because of the amount and the fact that my subscription ran out over a year ago. In all four email, the message is almost exactly the same, except for 5 letters. Continue reading…