Unintelligible nonsense
Archive for August 2004
I just came across an old blog that I had written and dropped entries into for a while. All the data was just sitting there in a table that I was about to delete until I realized what it was. So, the short version of this story is that I have copied those old posts into WordPress (this blogging software) for posterity’s sake (check back in Aug 2003).
It’s most definately that time of the year again. That time when old friends begin returning and freshman arrive. Today (actually in about 30 minutes) I have to go play tech support for the registration line over in Longview Hall. This makes the 5th or 6th time that I’ve done this (IT provides this for each registration period) so I have a reasonable idea of what’s expected of me during that time. Usually it requires me to stay awake. I like to take one of the afternoon time slots so that all the bugs in the system are worked out before I show up.
I haven’t met many of the new freshmen yet. I hung around until about 9 last night, but they were all off doing their orientation thing until well after I left. Hopefully I can meet them tonight. We are holding our floor meeting (for returning students) tonight so that we can talk about our near-term plans for the freshmen before we have our mandatory floor meeting with everyone. We have to have some idea of what we plan to do before we get moving too quickly.
Well, I have a few things to do before I head over to LH, so I’m out of here for now …
This little planet is a star grazer. According to the article, it only orbits it’s star at 13 million kilometers. Compare that to Mercury’s orbit (the planet closest to our star) of about 58 million kilometers. Forget star gazing, this is star grazing.
It feels like it has been weeks since I took the time to say anything substantial here. In reality it’s only been a few days, a week at the extreme. So much has happened in such a short time recently that it’s difficult to make myself sit down and actually spend time recording my thoughts.
School is starting back up. People are returning to campus and settling in. Some friends are here, some are coming, and others still will never be back as a student. It’s upsetting to think that I may very well have seen the last of some of my closest friends. Thankfully I have other friends, many of whom are feeling the same loss, to ease the pain.
I have a list of about 15 other blogs that I check almost daily. Now, that doesn’t mean that all 15 have something new every day for me to read, but I like to check and make sure. Many of them are close friends that occasionally blog, while some are more distant acquaintances. Some people write large chunks only once in a while, and some people do more like I do and just leave little snippets of thought as they bubble up in the brain. It’s nice to read those and really see what some of those people think. Like myself, many of them tend to keep their feelings mostly to themselves, but release them in this medium.
This last weekend I went home for the first time since Christmas (I think). One of my high school friends (that sounds so bad, like they are not still a friend) got married on Saturday. Kelly Cummings and I met in Junior High School (Lomax Junior High, 8th grade) and got along really well. She was, and is, really smart … much more than myself. We had several classes together and even went to the same church. My parents and her parents became quick friends and still are to this day (not like it’s been a long time). This weekend she married David, another friend from high school. David and I had a few classes together and got along ok, but we were never what I would call close friends. It was rare for me to have close friends outside of church and JROTC at the time, and David was not in either one. The wedding was very nice, the bride beautiful, and the groom wrenching tears from every mother in the room. Let’s just say that David had a hard time just saying his part with his voice cracking, while Kelly (incredibly enough) was the strong one.
After the wedding they held the usual reception. We threw flower petals in place of rice or bird seed or whatever. After the bride and groom took off (in a stretched limo I might add) we headed to the house to change real quick. After getting a bit more comfortable (different shoes) we headed to the next wedding function (a little party). The party was in Conroe, about 45 minutes north of town, and was by invitation only. Still, almost half the people who attended the wedding were there (I’d say around 40). We spent the remainder of the evening there having dinner, talking to friends, socializing with friends of the family, and all the other usual stuff. It was good to see everyone, including Kellie Alvarado (used to be Raney) that I ran into on Sunday at church.
Work has been busy the last few weeks. I finally have reached that point here at LeTourneau where I have been around long enough to have my own over-large list of projects that I have to keep tabs on all the time. Almost all my work in the last 6-8 months has been ecommerce related. We’ve rolled out Trad Student Accounts (normal students), Non-Trad Student Accounts (adult students), Donations (give us your money), and Non-Trad Web Registration (take our classes and give us your money). I’m currently working on Traditional Web Registration (for the normal students) and once that’s done, the list of ecommerce projects comes to an end (at least for now). I was just informed (maybe 30 minutes ago) by my supervisor that there may be some ‘changes’ coming down the pipe from the Student Accounts office. It doesn’t sound like some of the others involved in the project are very happy about it and that worries me. Only big changes happen like this. Thankfully we have some time before this was due out, but big changes this far into the process always suck, they are such a waste of time.
In more upbeat news, I logged into Gmail last night just before heading to bed and realized that I had an invitation I could pass out. It’s been a while since that happened last. When I got to work this morning, Daniel said that he too had an invitation available. That sounds to me like it may have been fairly widespread (maybe quite a few new users). I asked around the office to see if anyone wanted it, but almost everyone has one. The people who don’t have one, don’t really seem to care right now (I used to be one of those). So, I while in the course of talking to Dwight about some radio club stuff, I offered him the invitation. He didn’t know much about Gmail, but after a quick ‘I really like it’ comment from me, he accepted the invitation. Now I’m just waiting to see what username he picks!
That’s more than enough for today …
You know, I’m not a Microsoft fan, but some of these errors are flat out stupid: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1286066,00.html
They found some very interesting results when trying to solder in space.
People complain when our troops are around, but when it’s stated that we are going to move a bunch of them around some still complain. It seems the Germans are concerned what affect removing many of our troops will do to their economy. I think overall, from what I’ve read, that this is a good idea. It’s about time to really reconsider all our major permanent and semi-permanent bases across the globe. Like the article says, many of the placements are just hang-overs from WWII and the Cold War.
Again, it’s been a week since I posted last and I apologize for that deficiency. A lot has happened since that last scream for help. Sometime shortly after posting the edit on the 11th, my cable connection died. I was messing with my router remotely when it happened, so I just assumed I broke something that could be fixed when I got home that evening. Man was I ever wrong. I got home, reset all my hardware (not the computers), and give it another whirl. The first thing I noticed was that my router picked up a new IP address and the second was that there was only one DNS server listed where there is normally two.
It took me a second to realize that the new IP address that was assigned to me was a 10.0.X address. In other words, it was well within the private network range of addresses. It all suddenly made sense, they had cut me off. After some quick poking around I realized that all outgoing DNS requests (for stuff like http) were getting resolved to the same internal IP address. Just to show you how messed up their system is, I know the desired outcome was to redirect me to a page telling me that my service had been discontinued ‘automatically’. However, their http server (IIS I think) was not configured to ignore the hostname that was requested. As a result, the page would not load.
After looking up the IP address that everything was being redirected to, I typed it in myself. Ya, just a simple ‘you account has been disabled due to non-payment’ page. I was current on my bill, I didn’t owe them anything. Well, a very long story somewhat short is that I spent the next day on the phone. I dealt with about four people at Longview Cable and Cablelynx before I got things all fixed. Thanks goodness I finally was connected to someone who knew what was going on.
In other news, the craziness has subsided some around these parts. I got one of the major projects out the door and working (the one I was freaking out about the errors last time) by the end of last week and I got the second one for University Advancement up and running yesterday. The one for Advancement was actually rather simple, but I needed the time to work on it which I didn’t get until yesterday.
Now it’s just back to Traditional Web Registration, a large enough project on it’s own.
I must apologize for not posting recently. I have been trying to get something up here at least once a day, however, the last two days have been living hell to say the least.
Yesterday we were supposed to publish the NonTraditional Web Registration system. I had a small part in that, as I do all the ecommerce stuff and we were taking money online for this project. I thought I had all the bugs in the system worked out, but apparently I didn’t. We had anticipated pushing it ‘live’ first thing in the morning, and we did. However, it promptly broke. After fumbling around with the code and fixing several bugs in my code and in the rest of the system, things smoothed out. Of course it was almost 4PM before all those bugs were squashed completely.
Today I was hoping, and needing, to get to work on a project for Advancement that is due out on the 12th, ya that’s only about a day away now. Things went well overall, we were still getting a few complaints from people who had forgotten their passwords and were not recieving the email that is generated when they ask for it. I still think those people just forgot what email account they signed up with or their ISP is catching it for some reason. Anyways, things were mostly smooth. That is they were until someone reported that their payment didn’t get applied to their account. It’s a long story about how we discovered that, so I will skip that part.
I panicked when I got that little bit of news! I thought I had every safeguard in place to make sure I was notified if something like that happened, and I wasn’t notified by any of my code. Fortunantly we were able to quickly determine that there were correct based on some reporting from our processor (bank stuff) and a lack of activity in our logs or their account. No big deal here, we can simply fix the slip up since we know the student id number.
Since we had the one problem, I thought it would be smart to go back and check to make sure nothing else like that happened in the recent past that we didn’t catch (monthly reporting would have caught this error, but it happened on the 9th so we would have had to wait almost the whole month). I got a list from our processor of every transaction that has every occurred from our website. That was easy. I then pulled up a list of transactions from my log (everything should be logged). That was easy. What took a little while was comparing the two lists. Once the comparison was finished, I found that there were two other transactions that didn’t show up in my log (indicating that something went horribly wrong). I’ve tracked down one of those two people and have fixed their account accordingly, but were having to follow up with the bank to see if we can id the second one.
AHHH!!! It’s a horrible day to be alive.
(Edit 08/11/2004): I forgot to mention here yesterday that I added a few items to the data stream that gets submitted to our processor so that this cannot happen again.