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2.27.2005
Quick, come see the house while it's still clean. It's rapidly becoming not-clean!

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2.25.2005
Hmm. The most excitement I've had lately is troubleshooting NICs under Linux. Amy has been *really* happy about that, I must say. For some reason Tulip doesn't want to autonegotiate with our router, even though the card itself seems to autonegotiate fine before the driver loads.

I did get myself a new lens for my birthday. I'll have to try it out a bit this weekend.

Blah. I'm glad it's Friday.

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2.15.2005
Last weekend was spent in the UP. Other than the drive up Wednesday night, a good time was had by all. The dogs really loved it - they were outside quite a bit, and between that and all the people, they got pretty worn out.

I took a whole bunch of pictures; hopefully I'll actually do something to get them posted here.

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2.02.2005
I normally don't write much about work here, but...

One of our FileNet programs accepts images and index files, does some processing and commits them to the system. It does not, however, do any type of cleanup on these files. We had been running a VB app to accomplish this, over network shares, but this was a bit slow. We wrote a shell script to do this more quickly, but there are still some files on another machine that need to be cleaned up. We decided the easiest way to do this would be to modify the existing VB app to do the following:

1) get a list of folders in a directory
2) for each folder, see if a .confirm file exists in another directory
3) if that file exists, delete the folder and another associated file
4) if all of the folders in the directory are deleted, delete the directory

Simple stuff. The shell script does pretty much the same stuff, and took roughly a half hour to do from scratch. The VB app already exists, and basically just needed to be stripped down. Simple, right?

When we pushed the team that created the VB app to modify it for us, they told us it would take roughly 50 hours. Yes, not 5 hours, not 50 minutes, 50 hours. It shouldn't have taken that long to write from scratch, much less to make a few modifications.

I've never touched VB in my life. I installed VB, figured out what the existing program did, and got it working in roughly 5 hours. This is with absolutely no prior knowledge of VB syntax. It probably would have taken under an hour if I knew what I was doing from the start. And it isn't even my job to program.

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The Simpsons Archive

Vital stats:
DOB 2/16/79. I'm a web developer at the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. I like lots of old music, including The Who. I spend a lot of time working with computers. And my favorite TV show (when I actually decide to watch TV, that is), obviously, is The Simpsons.

Education:
In May 2002 I officially graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a BS in computer science. In 1997 (man that seems like a long time ago) I graduated from Washington Park HS. Yes, I know, that site isn't very impressive, and no, I haven't touched it for several years.

WFS Logo

WFS:
One of the best experiences I have ever had was on a trip called Western Field Studies. This is a 33 day adventure throughout the western United States. Students travel on a school bus to national parks, monuments, forests, and places of historical interest and camp out (in tents or under the stars). I was a part of trip 25, which took place in the summer of 1996. A first for WFS was we took along a laptop computer and kept up a web site. That link will take you to the 1996 site, where there is a link to the current site.