Hot damn.

Its about time to update my blog again. I figured now would be about as good a time as any.
I've been using excite a looong time for one of my email accounts. Of course I have the others : hotmail, yahoo, gmail, my ISP, ECU...the list is big. I seem to prefer excite as my "main" address for ordering online.
Anyways, I think I found an interesting glitch on "my" Excite main page regarding current temperature. It was 117 degrees today in Greenville and I got the screen shot to prove it, so it must be true. Ha! Now thats technology at it's best.

Search engines

So, its been a while since I posted.
Summer is just about "over"; school is starting real soon.

Anyways, it hit me tonight... I think I will search for myself on Google. Its been a while. I never get an exact match. But now that is over. Thanks to ECU, I'm part of the "index". I even checked Yahoo. Yup, I'm there too. I don't know if I should be afraid or not.

Homework

Ok.
This is for an assignment for one of my summer classes. I am supposed to find 3 blogs and post them in my blog.

I'm an on again and off again blogger, so I don't typically read many blogs. So here are my three:

1. crave.cnet.com - this is a relatively new blog from c|net about all kinds of technology that will never be available in real life and when it does, I could never afford it. Cool stuff.

2. www.gizmodo.com - another technology blog featuring "bleeding edge" stuff. I know these folks were on the map before crave.

3. www.teslamotors.com/blogs.php - If you haven't heard of the Tesla Roadster, shame on you! It's electric, its designed by and built from Lotus parts, and it would put my ol' 5.0 to shame. It's definitely not cheap. They are raising the price from $92k to $98,000. Ouch. I just wonder how a/c works in an all electric vehicle when the heat index is like 105. Hmmm...

On the road.

Well, I finally got to ride on public roads last night again. I rode to do a computer job and drop off some rented movies and Wii games. The majority of my riding had been around my neighborhood. According to the owners manual the motor should not exceed 5,500 rpm for the first 500 miles. The odometer is showing 25 miles now. Actually I'm sure that all the low speed, stop and go riding is doing good to break the motor in right. I had the urge to take some pictures, so I decided to take one under the worst conditions I could take one; at night in our garage lit by a single 4o watt bulb. Luckily the camera did a good job of helping me out.

loads of new stuff

Ok, today was the second week of my new job at ECU. Still feels weird just walking in and not punch a time-clock (my first job like that in history), not having to wear a tie, and not having a cell phone signal on the floor of my building! :(

Becky got a new fancy Canon camera. I think it and all the accessories she bought cost more than my last total computer upgrade. The final new thing is my new motorcycle. I would of posted a picture, but theres only 2 readily available right now. The myspace pic and another where my chinstrap is undone by Becky's thoughtless mother. I had to spray the inside of the thing with febreze just I could put it on, since she has to smoke so many f'ing cigarettes and smoked one just before she tried to put it on and stunk it up. Enough rant.

I would of been totally fine on getting something used, but the SV650 i bought is about the same price of a used one I would have wanted. Unfortunately right when we were getting ready to leave the bike dealership, Evan touched the tailpipe if a bike that was recently parked next to mine. The poor kid had to learn the hard way and is just about traumatized by it. I think he'll get over it real soon. It was Saturday when it happened and his hand is healed about halfway.

It was funny though, when I came home from work today, Evan pulls me over to the door to the garage, opens it and says "look daddy, I got it for you", pointing at my bike in the corner. What else is there to say but thanks buddy.

Finally!!

Monday would have to be the best day for me of 2007. I got the call from ECU HR and they offered me the job I interviewed for; the thing that really blew me away was the starting pay is a BIG jump in pay. Needless to say, I accepted the job offer. Then when I got home from work, the Wii that we ordered from Amazon was delivered. A Wii and a new state job with a lot better pay. Now thats what I'm talkin' about!

Job Prospects

I've purposely delayed posting this sooner since this is basically a public blog. I've applied for roughly 20 different technology jobs at ECU over the past 2 or so years with no luck. I actually did have one onterview about a year ago that I thought I did well at, then a few weeks later I got the thanks, but no thanks letter. Then last week I recieved a call to come in for an interview for a medical storeroom assistant manager position I just applied for the hell of it. The description of this job is basically what I do now but "start" pay is about 3k more a year. So, last thursday was my interview at 4 o' clock. I made up some excuse and told my boss that I had to leave early that day when HR called me tuesday. I go to the interview and of course they ask me a bunch of questions and write down my answers. I managed managed to answer almost 4 pages of questions, all of which I answered fairly thoroughly. These were questions about inventory, shipping, and that kind of stuff; like I said, what I do now. After they were done with interview, they told me they would review other application and let HR know their decision. Standard procedure at ECU according to what Becky says. I felt I did very well at this interview, but in the back of my mind as I was leaving I of course had the "yeah, whatever" thought; I'll be waiting for my no thank you letter.

So, here is where it gets interesting. Of course all this applying for jobs has been done on the "down low". Then yesterday, my boss says "I got a call from Tony at ECU. You applied for some job there?" Oh shit. I been found out. Then he says "I wish you let me know, so I would of been prepared for that call". Then I think, this might go OK...

Then my boss ask's if I mind while he calls this guy back; I say ok and he calls and talks to the guy for like 15 minutes and basically sounded like he wanted me to work for ECU.

Afterwards, I told him thanks for the vote of confidence and I wasn't expecting him to say more than yes, I have worked here for 6 years.

My boss even asked me today how long until I hear from ECU?

Damn, I hope he's not trying to get rid of me now!

Schools out!

I took my last final exam tonight. I finally finished RedHat over the weekend. I did not so good on a bunch of the labs and test, but on the "hands on skills based" final, I got a 95. I got an A on the final and I wound up with a B in the class. Go figure. I'm seriously considering trying to get Linux+ certification now. That course was that intense.
On another note, the Mustang is getting worked on again. My clutch started to give out last month. It was getting bad when I couldn't keep up with a V6 mustang. Plus, the smell of burning clutch disk is not all that pleasant. I bought a clutch for a 93 cobra to put in it. Heavy duty, but without the "stiff" clutch pedal - which sucks in Greenville traffic. I hope dude calls back soon to tell me it's ready...

Wiped out

Monday was not a good day for my "windows" machine. I had been noticing that is was acting kinda flaky and ran the system file checker utility and still had no improvement. Then I tried rebooting and my computer would just blue screen and say some registry components were missing. Of course my system is more complicated than your typical off the shelf computer like you'd get from Dell or Best Buy. For improved disk performance, I have 3 80GB SATA 7200 rpm Western Digitals in a RAID 0 Stripe (10,000 rpm WD raptors will never be in my budget). No fault tolerance, aint I smart? All I care about is my Half Life 2 load times, windows boots mega quick too. Lucky for me I do back up regularly, just the really important files. I estimate I had around 20 gigs of music and mp3s and other junk that I didn't bother backing up. Oh well, I figured my computer needed some cleaning up. Now I dropped it down to just 2 drives in a RAID 0 setup and did a clean XP install. The other 80 gig will be used to hold somewhat important stuff. I only noticed a marginal speed difference between using 2 drives vs. 3 drives.
I have data all over the place actually. With 5 hard drives inside my computer, why wouldn't I? Of course all the time windows wouldn't start, my Linux drive filled the gap nicely.

I know u gonna like this, come on now!

This made it to the top of reddit today.

I could watch this over and over again!

I'm in RHEL(L)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (hell) that is.

Quick update, school is back in session and I am a full time student. I'm only taking 5 classes. Lucky for me, one of them is Exercise aka gym, so in effect, I'm taking 4 actual classes. One of them just happens to be a Red Hat class. Nice, I was never a fan of the Red Hat distro. At any rate, my desk is mega-geeked out with 2 computers parked around it. I managed to snag the mother-in-law's fairly new Dell and cram a "old" 40 gig drive in and install RHEL and use as a dedicated computer for this class. Much better than the 2 old gateway computers setting in the closet. At any rate, this is cutting into my homework time. GTG

Important news for you today...

My phone rang this morning on the dresser while we were all sitting in the living room watching cartoons with Evan and checking our email and stuff. Since I didn't answer, I heard the Motorola "missed call beep" a short time later. I had a new voice mail. I was kind of concerned. Who was calling at 9:45 on a Sunday morning? I did have an appointment this afternoon to replace a faulty wireless router for a client; was he calling to cancel? This is where everything goes down hill real quick. It was a pre-recorded message telling me some b.s. website to visit for the latest stock picks that are expected to have up to 750% growth. Great! Now I am getting spam recordings on my cell phone. Now I am fully expecting messages to save on my meds and increase my manhood. At least our phone plan has free incoming calls. Damn!

It's baaack!

My car that is! The guy working on my car calls me last night and tells me my car is ready and also that he has some good news. "Turns out I owe you some money"... what?!
He was able to fix the problem with the old transmission and didn't need to replace the whole thing and luckily for him, the new tranny hadn't even shipped yet; I had already paid him for a new tranny. Turns out the problem was what I was thinking, a bearing had gone out. He replace the bearing and that cured the noise. So last night, I got my car and some money back.

The very first blog of 2007!

...that is written by me.
There go the holidays. After what seems like ages, its back to work tomorrow. It was fun while it lasted. I'm expecting a call any day now from the guy working on my car to tell me its done. Both Becky and I will be happy to get my car back. She has stated quite a few times that being a one vehicle family sucks and I wholeheartedly agree. At least I know that I have her blessing on getting a motorcycle since she got me motorcycle boots and a leather jacket for Christmas. As far as bike choices, I'd prefer something newer with fuel injection, since I've never had a vehicle with a carburetor. Given my budget, I've pretty much narrowed my first choice to the Yamaha R6. The earlier years weren't fuel injected, but as long as it starts right up, thats fine by me :)