Brian's World

Upcoming Graduation

Life has been moderately busy for me. I am slowly adjusting to the 8-5 job, maybe this week I will start taking a little time off or something. There is certainly lots to get done, and just not enough hours in the day to do it in.

I spent some time playing around with Adobe AIR today. Overall I’m not as impressed as I wanted to be. I was hoping for something very similiar to Dashcode (I have no clue why), and maybe Adobe AIR can do that… I probably just need a good IDE or something, dashcode is a pretty good IDE for widget making on OS X once you learn the tricks.

Facebook might be open sourcing a bunch of their stuff, in what looks like an attempt to throw some weight against the Open Social alliance. Kudos to the first people who figure out how to integrate the two of them. I am one person, and would really enjoying having one social graph and one common social scene online. Right now facebook does a good job with everything on their site, but it would be naive of me to bank on facebook being the best site for the rest of my life. Who knows, maybe LinkedIn will be my preferred network at some point.

No real updates at work. I am an expert at sitting in my chair. I did some pasting with ASP.net today, and I was glad to see it picked up where ASP left off. I’m not sure the extent to which I’ll be able to use it, but anywhere I can pick up added functionality would be nice. Working in a smaller company is very different from last year at MM. I enjoyed getting lost on my way to the bathroom, or having a cafeteria to go get decent food at. I would say I was much busier at MM, but not doing such technical tasks… overall I’m not sure if I can say which one is better yet, they both are different.

I do apologize if my typing skills have been off with this blog. I’m on my linux box, where the monitor is to the left of my head. Not very comfortable, but a nice change from staring straight ahead all day. Sometimes I print things out just to look at a different surface. I know, I know, I’m killing trees. At least I use the other side for note taking and stuff.

I spent a ton of time battling with my home network over the past few days. I was trying to install World of Warcraft on my laptop (Wine will come later) and the download speeds were terrible. Something like 50Kb/s to get a 3.5 GB file. I played with QoS on my DD-WRT WRT54G and got a little improvement, but nowhere near what I wanted. I ended up turning off the P2P functionality of the Blizzard Downloader, and then it soared. I’m not sure if Comcast disliked my bittorrent traffic, or my port triggering wasn’t working right. Whats wierd is the fact it would go very fast for a few seconds with P2P enabled, and then cripple… like someone had caught on to what I was doing. Who knows, I downloaded it by now. You can track my character here. I am aware I need to “respec” or do something like that, but I play wierd.

Kevin, Katie, and the rest of the SHHS Class of 2008 are graduating soon and I need to get them gifts. I think Katie’s gift is all set, but my brother is a more challenging person to shop for. He has plenty of socks, iTunes Gift cards, and food so I am not sure what to get him. Something for sure.. Katie actually bought 2 somethings. 1 was a little plant in an egg (at least that was what it looked like), and the other was some type of “bling” item. It might go around your neck, but it looked like it could be used to tow a boat or something as well. Those gang members really know how to go multi-purpose. If you do have any gift ideas, email them to me… my brother is capable of reading english and surfing the net, so he might read your public comments below.

I am going to go brush my teeth now. They are sore.

Good night moon.