New Laptop

Now that I have had it for a while, I guess I should blog about it. I finally bought a Macbook. It is a 13″ white one. I love it. Probably one of the best things I have bought in a long time. I was actually surprised on how quickly I was able to pick up on the little differences OSX has with XP/Vista. Don’t get me wrong. I still like working with Vista a lot. I even loaded it on my Mac with bootcamp. But there is only a 120 gig hard drive on this laptop. So I didn’t want to lose space with 2 operating systems. Anyways, I love my laptop. Now I’m just trying to find a new camcorder that I can use with Final Cut Express.

Wii

For fathers day, Crystal and Kylie got me something I would have never of guessed they would get me. I got a wii. Something that is very hard to find right now as most of you may know. It is a blast to play. Crystal and I have been playing Mario Party 8 for the past couple of nights. We are trying to unlock all the mini games, and to do that, you have to play the board game. On Tuesday, Pam, Keith, Chris and Nicole came over and we played bowling. That was a lot of fun. Kylie really got into it also.

So I have been trying to find some games to play with the Wii, aside from Mario Party 8 and Super Mario Galaxy I just bought, and I found out about Wii Fit. Aparently, this game is also hard to come by. Every place online and locally are completely sold out. And when they get some in, they sell out in like 5 minutes. So I have been trying since Monday to buy one. I found a website that will actually email you when retailers get more to sell. So while this is going on, a guy at work (who I thought was a friend) said that he bout an extra one to sell online. I told him that I have been looking for one for a couple of days and that I would but his. The Wii Fit’s retail cost is $89.99. He wanted $160.00 for it. I seriously thought that he was joking with me. I said that I would give him $100 for it. But he would not budge. So fuck him. So today I kept searching for a Wii Fit that I could buy at retail cost. Come on, peope can be greedy. Buying a product that is hard to get, and selling it to desperate people willing to shell out more that the original cost of the item, just so they could have one. To me, that is really retarded. It just makes me mad that someone I thought was a friend would do that. Anyways, I finally got one today from Target and they will deliver it next week. AND I DIDN’T HAVE TO PAY MORE THAN RETAIL COST. Sorry, I will get off my soap box now. Until next time.

Happy Birthday

Well today is my birthday. I am now 31 years old, and yet , I don’t feel it. Last saturday I got a tattoo. It was a tattoo my brother Zac had on his arm. When he passed, I knew that it was something that I wanted to do to remember him. Now that I have it, I can’t seem to put into words how I feel. I am glad that I got it. Was kind of nervous having something that low on my arm, but I am really happy about getting it. I didn’t know if I would put his name or something like that on it. I think that he would not have liked that type of memorial tattoo on someone. I know what it means to me and it will always remind me of him. My brother that I miss so much. Just as a side note, was on youtube looking for the video for Radioheads “Exit Music” and found this guy that did a cover of their song. He mashed up a prelude by Chopin, Op. 28, no. 4 with the song. Enjoy.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-PRpqj7N4[/youtube]

I am old.

If being 30 wasn’t enough to make you start to feel old, I bought my first shares of stock today. For anyone who does not know, I live in Fort Worth. Little did I know that we are sitting on one of the nation’s largest natural gas fields. We have had wells set up all over the neighborhood and they can be annoying. As a homeowner that does not have mineral rights, I get no benefit with the gas companies drilling for gas. So I decided to try my hand in the stock market and buy some stock from a gas company. If I can’t get money from them directly, I will try indirectly………. or something like that.

Arduino

I started getting into microcontroller programming. I found a product called Arduino. I ended up buying it from a website called Adafruit Industries. The development environment is written in Java, but you write code in C and upload via USB to the ATmega168 microcontroller. I also purchased the LAN Module and am working on getting it to work with the following example. No such luck. So I decided to go to my friendly neighborhood Radio Shack and pick up some “supplies”. I found some multi-colored LED’s, a 7-segment LED Digital Display, a Potentiometer, and some other misc items. My first project was to create a counter that would count from 0 to 9 Continue reading “Arduino”

Never Update

I have not had any time to update this site. I have been really busy the past few months with our ADP implementation at work. I will be glad when it is all over and I can get on with the next chapter in my life at work. I have also wanted to change this site. Maybe change the look/feel. Don’t know what I want to do yet. I have been playing around with the new SDK for the google phone. I can code in Java so I thought I would take a stab at it to see how it really looks. Not to hard to write code for it. I have been starting to use Eclipse to code seeing as BEA has started to use their environment to develop in instead of their own. Just as I started to get use to it, they go and change it on me. Maybe I will post some of the code for the google phone I have been working on here when I find the time to do it. later.

Java

This past weekend I went Barnes and Noble to use a gift certificate I have had for a while. I ended up buying “Murach’s Java SE 6” book. I know. A real page turner. Anyways, I was trying to set up my computer to be able to wrote some code and for my “Hello World” application, it would compile but not run. I was getting

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: TestApp

After some searching I found the problem. I am using TextPad to write my code and I needed to include the classpath variable at runtime for the app to work. In TextPad, click on Configure, Preferences. The click on Tools in the tree view and select Run Java Application. There is a box called “Parameters:” Inside the box is $BaseName. Edit this value and type in

-classpath . $BaseName

This should resolve your problem. When I get some more time, I will explain why you have to do this.

Update

Been busy at work. We are moving our HR/Payroll systems over to ADP and have a go live date of 1/1/2008. So all of my time at work has been devoted to supporting this. Looks like I will be going to Jacksonville, FL for some training. I will not be doing the same kind of work that I am doing today. I think (hope) that it will be more java development. We will see. Crystal and I are trying to decide on where to go for our 5 year anniversary. It looks like we will be going to Las Vegas as of right now, but it may change.