Posts tagged website
Termites
Jan 22nd
I finished paramedic school several weeks back and have been enjoying the relative calm afforded by no longer going to classes / clinicals / ride times 7 days a week.
I’ve almost finished filling out the 700 page 18 pound packet that the EMS authority of California has decided that is vitally important for every paramedic of the state to know how to fill out.
Gwyn is very pregnant and ready to pop. Any second now… wait… now! Seriously, I believe this is week 39. There is just not that much room left in there.
I also haven’t been updating a lot, because I’ve been catching up on other computer stuff that I’ve had to put off for the last few years because of school.
For one, this site design is worn. So it’s up for an overhaul, but I’m moving to ASP.NET with SQL Server 2005 as the back end.
One thing I’ve learned is that my first impression of the new Visual Studio 2005 is relatively positive. It’s overall IDE integration with remote SQL and IIS servers is snappy and it’s got some great built-in coding tools to make development easier.
One big con is that VS2k5 automatically installs a local copy of SQL 2005 Express Edition and VS is setup by default to use it. Which is great for new developers wanting to quickly develop database applications, but getting it to run off of a remote SQL server is like extracting a blood clot from the left anterior descending coronary artery with a wire from the femoral artery…
Well, bad analogy, it’s just a pain in the arse.
But it’s up and running now and I’m converting all of my ASP functions over to ASP.NET functions.
There is a lot of stuff that is broken on the current site too. Like the super duper file indexer that I use for photos, music and files. It’s mainly how I’ve had to reorganize my directory structure and it breaks the indexer. I think for the new site I’ll revisit how this is handled but for now, it’s mostly broken and outdated data.
I’ve also registered a web site for our soon to be child and I’ll try to have something up soon with all sorts of cute and cuddly and snugable pictures. I may throw in some charts and graphs and polynomial equations as well, just for the fun of it.
So while I’ve been filling out paperwork on my days off, I’ve also been building a new wooden fireplace mantle for my grandmother. Turns out her old one had been eaten hollow by termites awhile back. So she gets the termites terminated. One thing I’ve come to realize is that these “small” home projects never stay small.
When I pulled down the mantle (which was mostly hollowed out) the sheet rock behind it was damaged as well (probably due to earlier water damage as well as termites). The sheet rock was damaged almost up to the ceiling. Of course when you remove the sheet rock you see the damaged support studs behind it.
So after gutting out a roughly 8 foot by 4 foot section of wall, we replaced the 2×4 studs and re-drywalled and re-mudded. Yesterday I finally got started on the mantle and got the base of it done. Hopefully tomorrow I can do the cap and crown molding for it and stain the whole thing. I’ve never done this before so I’m pretty much making it up as I go along.
Nirvana really is overrated.
Sep 7th
We have moved again. About 20 yards to the south, no less. It’s a bigger place, which we needed (at least that’s what Gwyn says). But it was an annoying move. Just far enough away to make it really inconvenient.
I got my EMT-IV cert finally sometime in June, I believe, and I finally started my paramedic classes. Every Monday and Wednesday from 8:30AM to 4:30PM, which make for two very long days. I’ve got clinicals every semester (3 in all), but this first semester is observation only. Unfortunately it’s 138 hours of observation outside of class. Top all of that on top of work and time is becoming a precious commodity.
I’ve had two computers also die in this time period. Roughly about 2 weeks apart. The first was my main one, and the second one was my server. My server’s motherboard finally decided to up and die. It was an i850 Rambus board, which I really liked. A lot of people had some inbred hatred of Rambus, but I really liked that board. Unfortunately no one makes RDRAM boards anymore and it is not pretty impossible to find one online. So I decided it would be a cheaper option to buy an Intel i865 chipset motherboard and a gig of DDR memory.
I’ve also built a Home Theater PC to run my home entertainment setup. It’s a Shuttle Box with Dolby Digital out and a Hauppage PVR250 card. It’s all running on Windows Media Center 2004 (for the moment at least) and it seems to be working pretty well. I’ve got it to access my music and photo collection from my server on the network, so it’s kinda neat being able to play my music collection through my receiver and speakers.
I’ve done some minor work to the website as well over the last 3 or 4 days. Mainly, I had to redo a lot of my media code. The media directory on my server, that holds 99% of my images, files and music was initially a 2 level deep directory tree and was hard coded as such. But it has grown so much over the last year that I’ve had to make it many more levels deep just to keep it organized. So I had to update my code to handle an infinite amount of subdirectories per directory (yay for recursion).
That necessitated a few cosmetic changes on the music, images and files page.
I also put a comptuers page back up that has most of my hardware listed since a lot of it has changed.
The live stats page is working again (it’s actually been broken for roughly a year now), as well.
The only website thing still not functional is the cam page. I tried getting a steaming video solution working using windows media controls, but I’m having problems getting it to work in Firefox. Netscape and IE both work fine, but for some reason, Firefox implements Windows Media 6.4 controls by default and it’s causing me problems. Once I get that figured out (who knows when that will be, I’ll put it online).
Anywho, it’s late and I’ve got class tomorrow.
Latest Update
Feb 17th
Anywho… I know what going through your mind right now. What’s been going on with me lately and why haven’t I updated my site since Christmas?
Well, I’ve started going to school again. This first semester is to get Tennessee EMT certified, which (surprisingly), is at a higher level than the National Registry EMT certification that I currently hold. Well, the main difference is the IV level of certification. California and the National Registry don’t require it, but Tennessee does.
So anyway, in class we get to practice sticking IV’s in each other and I did my first successful one the other day. It was fun.
The first semester also covers the pre-reqs for Paramedic school such as Anatomy and Physiology that begins in August.
My site was down for the last week because my server was borked. Apparently, there is a known bug in Windows Server 2003 where you promote a server to a Domain Controller and then demote it again; it screws all kind of ASP.NET and IIS permissions and accounts. Which is what happened to poor, dear ole’ Frankie. Yes, I named by server Frankie.
So I had to reformat and reinstall all kinds of crap, but that was O.K. cause SMTP was screwed up too and wouldn’t relay any email messages. So in short, the format was long overdue.
The server is now sitting on my cable modem as well. It’ll probably be slower (since the pipe is 128kb upload MAX and normally gets about half that), and it’ll probably cause all kinds of problems cause it’s not on a static IP address, but what the hey… I’d hate for anything to be convenient.
Finally… one last middle finger to the state of California! In the 5 years we were in California, we paid (approximately) an additional $20000 in taxes when April rolled around each year.
Well, now we’re in Tennessee and we’re getting about $4000 back! Coincidence?! Probably. But I’ll blame it on California and their sucky tax laws and 6 billion dollar state deficit.
Catch-up
Nov 1st
If you visited my site over the last few weeks, you might have noticed it was a big white blank page. You see, a few weeks ago, I accidentally overwrote the index.asp file. And of course, I had no backup of my site. God likes to play these sneaky little pranks on me to see how I’ll react.
Normally it wouldn’t be bad to lose just one page, but you see, in my infinite wisdom, my whole site is driven off of that one file, so essentially I lost the whole site.
BUT! (and here is the irony)… if it were any other way, I wouldn’t have been able to rebuild it so quickly.
My index.asp file was roughly 5k of HTML layout with a few backend calls to my html_lib.asp file, which is roughly 170k of logic. So, all I had to do was hit the google cache of my site, grab the HTML and rebuild index.asp. All in all, it took 15 minutes to get the site up and running again.
My server has yet another home. It’s on a fractional T1 line now with a static address, so hopefully this one will be a little more permanent with faster load times.
Apparently my man steak, cdawg, has hopped the large pond to our east and has become much physically closer to the country of France, which is never a good thing. But I guess it’s for a lady. People do many strange things for ladies… like come in close proximity to France.
Next, warped has setup a new site, www.swanksigns.org dedicated to the art of mocking public works. Good luck with that.
Well… it’s super late now. I could ramble on some more, but if my rants made any less sense, beer tastes yellow fish pond.
Bonjour!
Sep 25th
MAD PROPZ to my home skillet J Duggin, (if he had a website I’d link to it here) for hosting my boxes and stuff now. I also like to refer to him as jdawg, so now everyone else can, too.
My bro (who had been previously hosting the box on his demonically possessed cable modem) is in the process of moving to a new flat so I had to find a new home for my server.
The move went surprisingly quick and easy, since jdawg already had a router / firewall / NAT box setup, I simply had to plug in my server and setup a few port redirections. His router supports VPN tunnels, too, so hopefully we’ll be able to setup a VPN connection to my server so I can administer it without so much hassle for the previously mentioned jdawg.
And thank you Charter Cable Communications for hardly ever changing your DHCP IP addresses.
Next, for various lengthy reasons that I won’t go into here, I’m going back to school. The short of it is to help me get a fire medic job. I’ll be going to Paramedic school from Jan of 04 to Nov of 05.
Of course, that means I’ll need to find a job in the meantime, I suppose…
Or sell meth…
Or my body…
Gwyn is also going back to school starting in Oct. (so soon!) to start work towards her Master’s of Education degree. That’s right… she will be the MASTER OF ALL EDUCATION. It’s a lofty title, but I think she’s up to it.
Looks like warped just got back from France. I MOCK THE FRENCH!
WHEREFORE ART THOU?
Jul 21st
Well, it’s official. I’m back.
There are many long and exciting stories to tell, but this first update will be short. Mainly because the only Internet access I have is at my brothers and my wife is waiting for me to leave so we can go eat dinner.
But the new website is done. I’m living in TN. I’m unemployed. I’ll fill in the gaps later.
Check out the new site features and let me know what is broken. I only tested on IE, so if you’re on another browser… well, I commend you for not giving into the borg, but chances are the page will be broken. The page might load a little slow, too, since my brother has graciously let me host off of his cable line.
I’ll update again before I leave for a very long trip on Friday.
Dec 10th
WOOHOO! Someone signed up for my site notification email thingamajig. In case you haven’t noticed, you, too, can sign up for this wonderful invention!
Basically, so you don’t have to check back for site updates everyday or so you NEVER miss another of my EXTREMELY IMPORTANT updates, just put your email address in on the left hand side of the page and you’ll be notified whenever I update the main site. It’s as easy as that. And I promise, I won’t sell your email address to any porn site whatsoever… well, I’m pretty sure I won’t anyway. Trust me!
You’ll feel better, you’re parents and children will thank you, there will be peace on earth, goodwill towards man, dogs and cats will sleep together and cancer will be cured. Honest!
My web server has been under a little hard drive space crunch over the last few weeks, but I hope to remedy that soon with an additional 40GB drive.
Hoping to have a little LAN party action this weekend at Todd’s. Nothing like killing a few Nazis on a Sunday afternoon.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
Nov 8th
What’s been going on all this time? As you can see the website has changed a little. We’ve got some new features like:
- Upgraded webcam and webcam shot history (view the last 24 shots)
- An alphabetical list of every MP3 that I own as well as general MP3 stats. This is a directory driven list so it is extremely easy to keep up to date. You can also view which song I’m currently listening to.
- An image viewer / archiver. Since I’ve gotten my digital camera, this is an easy way for me to transfer pictures I want other people to see. Also directory driven and easy to maintain.
- Site Update Notification. Let’s face it. You are just as lazy as I am. So now you can never lose another night’s sleep wondering if you missed my site being updated or not. Just put in your email address and you automagically get an email whenever I update.
- The DVD database has had a huge overhaul. Lots more information and pics of each DVD.
- Definitely the biggest addition has been the forums. Written by yours truely from the ground up. I basially took all of the features of vBulletin and ikonboard and mimicked them in ASP. I’ve also integrated them with the rants so you can easily comment on them. So go register and start posting! There may be a few bugs… err… “features”, so if you find any, be sure and let me know.
Other than that, life is pretty good and it’s good to be back online.
Aug 23rd
After I broke everything real good last time, I had to take a few weeks off cause Max Payne came in. 
Finally figured out how to return a handle to a recordset in ASP from a generic function so I’m slowly redoing the database connectivity code on the site. But, what I’m spending most of my time on is “The Bell Forums” ™. They are progressing well (prolly 40-50% done) and will provide a place for everyone to post messages and chat.
Also on the To-Do list:
1) Find a decent free mail client (been thinking of giving the close / extended fam @bradleybell.com email addresses as I’ve gotten a few requests.
2) Since I’ve gotten my digital camera, I’ve gotten a butt-load of new pictures I’d like to post. I’m going to try and write some auto-image-database-driven-picture-viewer-thingy so all I have to do is dump the pictures I want on the website and the scripts take care of the rest.
3) Get rid of this web site design. I’m sick of it already.
I hope to launch the new forums with the new web site design. w00t!!
Dec 20th
Has anyone else heard about that less than intelligent British company that claims it has a patent on the hyperlink? Not only are they trying to enforce it, but they are going after Internet Service Providers?!?!
Touched up a lot of pages today and fixed several bugs. All of the pages should be fully working except for DVD comments and programming. Finally setup my mail server so if you want to shoot me an email, just fire it off to b r a d at b r a d l e y b e l l . c o m or use the contact page form that I finished up tonight.
Also got Web Trends up and running so I can see the insanely high amounts of traffic this site gets.
