Ramblings

Welcome to East Texas …

Just checked in on the weather for today. The projected high temp is 105° with a heat index of at least 115°. Gotta love it, or something. This makes the second day in a row that we’ll hit 100+°, but it is August and I only expect it to get worse.

I figured I should give this whole blog thing a whirl. I’ve been thinking about implementing one on my domain, but right now as the urge hits, my server (Frodo) is offline. Apparently we’ve had some network problems at the house and just talking over the phone hasn’t been sufficient to solve them. I hope to make a trip down to LP this weekend to get things back in a working order, but …

I’m looking for an apartment. I think I have narrowed the search down to one place here in town, but I need to get in touch with them again and see when the earliest I can move in is. If I can move in sometime this weekend or early next week, I won’t bother getting Frodo set back up at the house as my father has offered to split the cost of a broadband connection in my new place if I move the server with me. Hey, I can’t pass that deal up, plus I really would like having Frodo at my disposal again.

I looked at almost every apartment complex in town last Saturday with a friend from campus who happens to be working in IT this summer. I got a few strange looks when I’d walk in and ask about one bedroom apartments … Jeff was there with me. Every time; you’d think people would at least ask some questions before trying to judge me. I quickly would move the conversation onto something like, “Only one person …” or “Just me …”. They would quickly try covering up by moving onto the stuff like pets and other more normal questions.

After looking at somewhere around ten complexes I realized, there is a huge spectrum of size to cost differences in this town. I could find nice places at around $350 for 700 square feet, then move down the street and find a place not any better (maybe even less enticing) for around $450 for 500 square feet. It must be the location, nothing else makes sense. So, I’ve settled on one of the cheaper ones and plan to follow up tomorrow as I’ve already missed the office hours for today. Don’t they realize people work until five?

Ok, off that rant. Something that has been consuming massive amounts of my time lately has been my job. I recently got hired into a full-time job at LeTourneau University doing the same thing that I was hired part-time for … Web Programmer/Analyst. I really don’t know what the Analyst part is supposed to mean, but whatever, it looks more impressive. We’ve been working on rolling out a new web site for the last three months or so. That time has included all the layout and programming as well as learning and programming for a new CMS called OpenCMS. We really exceeded our expectations for how quickly we got things up and running. We had several major delays that caused us to loose very valuable time.

Anyways, the new site went up on Friday evening, but not without major headaches. I spent sixteen hours at work on Friday trying to iron out some of the problems encountered. Eight of those hours were technically overtime, but I haven’t submitted them yet. Kinda want to talk to the boss before putting that and the other tweleve hours overtime down. Ya, you read that right, I put in twenty hours of overtime this last weekend. Man I was tired by Monday, but it was worth it to see the site up and running mostly stable.

As a reward for hitting our target (mandated) date, we are taking off most of the afternoon tomorrow and doing a bit of goofing off. We plan to go get lunch in Tyler and hit some bookstore there that has cheap books. I’d never heard of this place until it was suggested as a possible place to go. Yes, we’re real nerds. I’ll write about that tommorrow … hopefully.