They just came and got the TV for repair. Took three guys, one of which said something about this being the heaviest TV he's had to deal with. I warned 'em.

Looking at the invoice, the tube's going to cost $1632.89 and the transport to the repair shop is $370. Damn right, extended warranty.

Of course, I just have to kind of hang out and wait for them to fix it now. According to the transport guy, they don't have the tube yet, so God only knows how long this is going to go on. I may have to move one of the other TVs downstairs for a while.

Okay, so they were supposed to be here between 11:00a and noon to get the TV, and I've been here since 11:30a waiting, but they've changed to 1:30p - 2:30p because their first appointment of the day (scheduled before me, around 10:30a or so, I'd wager) "is really hard to find." Oh, and they've reserved the right to amend that new window, too.

This is their last ditch attempt to make me give up on my TV ever being fixed, isn't it?

The TV repair folks just called. They'll be at my place between 11 and 12 today to pick up the TV. I'm stoked! It's been a long time coming. I hope they're bringing lots of guys; that TV is heavy.

There's lots of stuff going on lately, though no individual thing more important or cool than any other. Just random stuff.

Went to see Hostage, starring Bruce Willis. I thought it was pretty good. A little formulaic, but fun all the same, and entertaining, which is why I pay the money to see a movie anyway. It was out of focus just enough that it bugged me and made me feel like my glasses were weak, but I told the theater folk and they didn't do anything about it. It makes me want to get a job as a projectionist just to show them what "focus" means. This is the second movie I've sat through out of focus recently (Sahara was the other) and it's not just me who notices.

Noticed that my local Albertson's supermarket carries Bawls, which pretty much made my week. I didn't succumb to ordering it online because the shipping kills you off (drinks are heavy). But I could never find it around here. Went into the store looking for something to eat late-night and happened to walk by the drink case where I saw my Happy Beverage. Mmmmmmm. Love it. They even have sugar free now, for those on diets. I haven't tried that yet. I may have to check it out and see.

Went out to dinner with Jenn's family last night for her dad's birthday. We ate at Marie Callender's. Now, Jenn and I are trying to eat better (and, lately, much less, since the fat content of our bodies has sort of escaped our personal comprehension) so eating at a place where everything is loaded in cheese sauce is probably not the most conducive to losing weight. We ended up finding some shrimp-laden pasta that we each only ate half of and will finish the rest for dinner. I guess if you gotta eat a bowl of lard, it's best not to eat it all at one sitting.

After we left there, Jenn's mom gave us a nice Easter basket full of chocolate bars. I appreciate the intent, but exactly what we didn't need for Jenn's self-proclaimed lack of willpower was a big bowl full of chocolate. Not sure what I'm going to do about that yet.

Since I haven't sprung for the hard dance pad yet, we went out and bought one of those plastic mats that people put in offices to roll their chairs around on so we can set our soft dance pad on it and maybe get a little better response from it. I've been playing a little more (gotta get your exercise) and steps that I know I got don't get counted because the mat slides around. I'm hoping this will help me out.

I worked from home for a while today because my Sunsetter awning was being delivered. That came in a 19-foot-long, one-foot-diameter tube. One tube. It barely fits in the garage. That's going to be awkward to set up.

While I was home, I decided to call a plumber to fix this toilet I've got downstairs. You flush it, and it continues to trickle for several minutes after it finishes filling. I stared at it for probably an hour and was about ready to tear it apart when I decided just to call someone. Ended up calling Bob's Reedville Plumbing - a same-day service outfit.

The guy showed up and about three seconds later says, "Oh, it's siphoning." Siphoning? Yeah, there's this tube thing that has to end somewhere above the water line in the back of the tank or it'll continue running. Mine ended below the water line, so water was being siphoned out of the back of the tank into the drain.

I would never have figured that out.

The fix? Move the tube up a quarter inch.

Expensive lesson, though - cost me $121.50 (that's with 10% off) to learn it. The plumber felt bad charging me because he didn't do much. But it's fixed now. Plus, again, I'd never have figured that out.

If you need a plumber in the Hillsboro, OR area - check out Bob's Reedville Plumbing. Fast and friendly service, there within a couple of hours of your call, and they guarantee they'll fix any problem in the same day.

Scott Hanselman works with me on random crap at work, and over the course of time I've gotten to know a little more about how he works and stuff he says all the time, and I have to call BS on him every once in a while, so to speak. We all have our catch phrases or whatever, I just find there's a whole dialect forming solely based on Hanselisms. We'll call this "Hanselingo" - The Language of the Hanselman.

Hanselminutes: A unit of time in a continuum unique to Scott. Started when I asked him if I could get a feature enhancement on a bit of code he was working on. "Sure, gimme 10 minutes," he said. Two weeks later, I'm still waiting the 10 minutes. (Yes, it did eventually get done.) That was "10 Hanselminutes."

Thanks For Your Patience: This is a classic phrase that you'll usually get in a reasonably patronizing tone when you're being slow to pick something up... or Scott perceives you're being slow to pick it up. A "nice" way of turning the situation around and not only making you feel stupid but guilty for eating up time as well.

Cakemail or cmail: An email sent with a non sequitur answer. Derives from a random phrase that one might interject into a conversation ("Hey, Scott, what exactly is this method doing?" "I like cake!"). Typically the result of the fact he's got 10 things to do and time enough for five of them.

"I'm not sayin'..., I'm just sayin'...: An easy way out when you're telling someone something they don't want to hear. "You know, this could really be improved if you held to any sort of quality standards whatsoever." "What?!" "I'm not sayin'... I'm just sayin'..." Usually accompanied by hand gestures: the "I'm not sayin'" gets the hands raised in the air, like a small, defensive "hands up" maneuver; the "I'm just sayin'" gets the hands pushed forward, palms up, like an offering.

Scott's the man, but I just gotta give him crap. It makes my world go 'round. :)

The weekend was pretty good (of course, it's Tuesday and I'm just now getting to write about it... tells you how the week is going so far).

Saturday we went out with Stu and Tiff to the local fun center and played laser tag, some video games, and my personal favorite - skee-ball.

Sunday was the last hockey game of the season, so it was nice to see the Winter Hawks pull that one off. 36 home games per season, and I'm hockeyed out. I'll be ready to go for next season, but for now... I'm valuing the free time I'm suddenly provided.

I've been playing some more Katamari Damacy and I'm really getting into it. I was going to order the soundtrack because it's really crazy (yet addictive) Japanese pop sort of music, but it's like $30 everywhere. Thanks, but it's not worth $30 for the novelty. Instead, I found a guy who's got it for download and picked it up there. Love it. I'm listening right now.

I'm still working on my pMachine to dasBlog conversion utility. I'm trying to make it reasonably general-purpose, but I'm not sure how successful that will be. When I'm done, I'll probably stick it up here for "use at your own risk" usage. I was trying to make the code all nice and documented and everything... but for a utility I'm only using once, I may not go that far.

So Jenn and I got home late last night after hanging out with some friends. We're tired and trying to sleep.

5:19a Sunday morning, we get this phone call. It doesn't seem to appear on the caller ID, so I pick it up. It's 5:19a - it's gotta be life or death, right?

Travis: Hello?
Caller: Hi, is Jennifer there?
T: Who can I tell her is calling?
Caller: This is Raymund.
T: Can I tell her what this is about? Come on, man, it's 5:19 in the morning.
Raymund: It's about a child of ours.

I handed the phone to Jenn, but by the time I got it to her, he had hung up.

That shit weirded me out. I mean, that's the kind of phone call you get when the guilty serial murderer's brother knows who the next target is and wants them to wake up and get out of the house.

I got up, checked all the rooms, and found that the caller ID on one of the other phones picked it up:

Raymond Rosales. 541-212-6379.

I looked it up online, and while I can't seem to find an address for it, it's an Ontario, OR, based number. Sprint's the carrier. I couldn't find anything else.

Anyway, if anything happens to us, call Raymund. That was some fishy shit. I've had like three hours of sleep and my adrenaline's got me up now. I'm gonna have to watch a movie and chill out, then maybe take a nap later today.

While cruising through my morning news, I've found...

Engadget reports on PyMusique, a program that allows you to download music from iTunes without the DRM being attached. Turns out iTunes itself is what creates the DRM when you buy from the iTunes Music Store. This program buys from the iTunes music store (you still have to pay) but doesn't add the DRM. I'm going to have to check this out.

Raymond Chen talks about some interesting trivia regarding Windows XP service pack build numbers. If your Windows XP version is Version 5.1 (Build 2600.xpsp2.040919-1003 : Service Pack 1), are you running service pack 2 (as indicated by "xpsp2") or service pack 1? (Turns out it's service pack 1; the why is the interesting part.)

Google's opened code.google.com, a site chock-full of Google-related code and API information. Wanna develop against Google? That seems to be the place. Seems to be all C++ and Python at the moment, but the plan is that more will be released later. I may have to check this out.

Check the photos in this article out. Scroll down to find the cottages that Pixar has instead of cubes. Hook me up.

I went home and, after giving Roomba a thorough cleaning, did some testing.

So it was acting up around the virtual wall units. I had some placed around the bedroom so the Roomba wouldn't go under the bed and destroy the crap we have down there, but what ended up happening was that Roomba would spin in circles and clean the same four square feet over and over. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was up.

After reading some of the FAQs on the iRobot site, I started gathering that the virtual walls not only put out a beam forward (as the virtual wall) but also a beam around the wall unit itself, presumably so the Roomba doesn't run into the unit and knock it over or change its position.

On the bottom of the virtual wall unit is a diagram that sort of illustrates this:



You can see in the diagram a small dotted halo surrounding the virtual wall unit as it projects the beam. I had interpreted this halo as a circle to highlight the virtual wall unit. Not the case - it actually outlines the wall unit's beam pattern.

As it turns out, this diagram is correct, just not to any sort of scale. The correct diagram would look more like this:



Notice the halo extends to the far reaches of space. This is more accurate. In fact, if I cover the little broadcast point on the top of the virtual wall unit (to stop the halo), Roomba behaves as normal again.

That's why you see the virtual wall in the diagram parked behind a physical wall and broadcasting outward - so Roomba doesn't pick up on the protective halo of the virtual wall unit.

Why was I afflicted? I had changed the way the virtual walls in the room were laid out from previous times Roomba had run. Before I had blocked the virtual walls with a pillow so Roomba wouldn't hit them, which, at the same time, meant I unknowingly had blocked the virtual wall's protective halo so I never saw the behavior. This time I had not blocked the virtual walls with a pillow, and Roomba went nuts. Too much infrared in a small space.

So I'm back to status quo on that front. Virtual wall placement now becomes a more strategic task, but I should be okay.

I've had my Roomba for about a month now and I love it. Thing is, it's starting to act up a bit I'm not sure if it's just dirty or if it's actually malfunctioning.

Roomba has these "virtual wall" units that shoot out a beam of infrared light and when Roomba detects that light, it won't cross through it. The virtual wall transmitter seems to shoot the beam a little wide, like plus or minus 15 degrees from center. Starting last night, Roomba seems to be picking up on this IR more on the order of plus or minus 45 degrees from center, which is really hosing things as far as its ability to clean. Use a virtual wall and Roomba goes nuts.

I'm hoping it's just in need of a cleaning. I downloaded some troubleshooting tips for cleaning the thing and I'll try that out tonight. If it doesn't work, I guess I'll be contacting customer service.

I must have a RoboMower RL1000. It is a moral imperative.

As much as some folks might disagree, there is a difference between just developing software and developing software that will be used by other software developers to create new and interesting products. This includes the people who write business tier and data access tier functionality in an n-tier architecture.

I get in arguments about this kind of thing with folks. They believe I'm expecting perfection, which is something impossible to provide. That's incorrect; I expect excellence. Understanding the difference between excellence and perfection is important, just as it is important to understand what it is to write code and what it is to write code for people who will use it to write code.

What's the difference? While I could (and generally do) argue that there shouldn't be any difference, here's what I've found:

People who write software do error checking. People who write software for people who right software will not only provide meaningful error messages as a result of that error checking but will also add trace and debug statements so someone using it can figure out where precisely the error is happening and how to fix it.

People who write software have documentation. People who write software for people who write software provide API documentation, task-based documentation (HOWTO), examples, remarks, and helpful tips. An undocumented API is almost as useful as a nonexistant API.

People who write software only look at taxonomy and naming in relation to the application. People who write software for people who write software use clear, concise naming for identifiers and filenames that makes sense to people outside the scope of the application and makes use of the API intuitive; and they organize code in structures (namespaces, files, etc.) that make sense beyond just an individual application.

People who write software focus on what needs to be done now. People who write software for people who write software also focus on what will be done in the future. (Which is another way of saying: People who write software extend code. People who write software for people for people who write software make extensible code.)

In short:

People who write software make code that works. People who write software for people who write software make code that is usable.

A lot of random thoughts coming through here.

Flip-flops are quite possibly the worst footwear ever designed. Ever. I don't care how hot the girl is, if she's wearing flip-flops, she's disqualified. Flip-flops with jeans is the worst. If you're not on the beach, walking to the beach, or coming home from the beach, you should not be wearing flip-flops. Period.

I really don't understand how the Winter Hawks, who have been the picture of mediocrity all season long, can kick the ass of the best team in our division one night, then turn around and lose horribly to the worst team in the division. Except for the folks that sit next to us and the occasional fight, I don't feel like I've gotten my money's worth this season.

Speaking of the people who sit next to us... there are two 50/50 raffles at each home game (for those unaware, a "50/50 raffle" is where they sell a bunch of raffle tickets and the winner takes home half of the total money collected; thus, the more people who buy tickets, the larger the prize is) supporting the players' education fund. The people next to us, Tim and Barb, each buy a ticket for each raffle every game - that's $4 per game. At 36 home games, you're looking at $144 every season just for raffle tickets. I can't tell you how many seasons we've gone where they don't win a dime. Luck changed for them this weekend, though, where they won two nights in a row. I guess I can't give them shit for being losers anymore now, can I?

Spent Friday night watching the Hawks win, then Saturday Jenn and I ran around doing errands, visiting parents, etc.

Saturday night Stuart and Tiffany came over and we played "Dirty Minds" and "Apples To Apples." "Dirty Minds" was fun but went altogether too quickly. Like, to the point where we wondered if we were somehow playing it wrong. Most times you wouldn't even get a second turn. "Apples To Apples" is a blast, though, and I could see how it would be even better with more people (with only four of us, games went reasonably quickly, but were still great fun).

Sunday I spent most of the day cleaning my car, which desperately needed it. I washed it, waxed it (two coats), vacuumed, put Rain-X on the windshield, washed the inside windows, wiped the seats down with leather protectant, and dusted. Yes, it took most of the day.

Sunday evening we watched the Hawks snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in an amazing 3 - 1 loss. The guy behind me decided that he wanted to do one of those really high-pitched, shrill whistles at every good play. Normally I wouldn't be too mad, but we are right in front of the glass, so not only does it hit me from behind, but bounces off the glass and hits me from in front, making it doubly loud. I asked the guy nicely to stop. Yeah, that worked really well.

This morning coming in I cut this lady off who decided to tailgate me for a mile and then switch lanes and pace me in my blind spot for another mile. I turned on my signal and switched lanes. She had to slam on the brakes, of course, then zoomed up on my other side and attempted to cuss me out. Unfortunately for her, I don't read lips. Sorry, bitch. Can't help you. I let the tailgating go... but don't pace me in my blind spot. I hate that.

I still believe that Roomba is the bomb. Roomba has vacuumed our house since it showed up, and it definitely does a way better job than I do. Plus, the novelty factor is huge. I love it, the cat loves it (and chases it around the house). Awesome.

Turns out they have something called the "RoboMower" that looks a lot like Roomba for your lawn. I watched the video on it and it looks really cool. Wired News has an article, too. I may have to look at these.

I've got some cool ideas for things I want to do on my website, but it looks like in order for me to do them with the skillz I have (reads: not PHP), I need to change my blog software.

This would be the third time I've done so, moving from Greymatter to pMachine, and this time to dasBlog.

My only blocking factor is that there's no pMachine to dasBlog conversion utility, so I'm going to have to write one. Just what I needed - something else to take up my spare time.

I just got a call from the TV repair facility and they've finally been authorized to replace the tube in my television. Of course, they aren't coming to pick it up until the 29th of this month... but at least they're finally going to be fixing it.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's dim, but it's there now.

I sent a letter to the TV repair company and National Electronics Warranty (NEW) because it has been so long since I heard about who's fixing my TV or what's happening there. I sent that letter on Thursday of last week, March 4. The TV repair company responded and said they'd continue pinging NEW for approval on the repair, but NEW wasn't responsive.

It's almost a week later and I still haven't heard from NEW, so I called them. According to them, there was some sort of communication breakdown between them and the TV repair company where NEW was waiting for additional information from the TV repair folks, but the TV repair people were waiting for authorization from NEW. No one was talking to anyone.

While I was on hold, the guy at NEW called the TV repair people and got things straightened out. Now they want an additional three to five business days to go through approval. Because it hasn't already been through that?

Anyway, now they're going to figure out whether to replace the tube or just get me a new TV altogether.

This crap irritates me. Someone should be on top of this stuff. Unbelieveable. I guess we'll see what happens next week when their time is up.

With our new dishwasher in the house, we no longer have the problem where our cups and glasses get "etched" because of crappy wash cycle, so we decided to get some new glasses.

I love huge glasses. Like, pint or larger is perfect. We found a set of pub glasses at Linens 'N Things that are 20 oz. glasses. Love it. We threw 'em in the new dishwasher, washed 'em, and they look spectacular.

Got one out to use it for the first time last night. We have one of those refrigerators that has the water in the door. I wanted a glass of water. Pub glasses to the rescue!

Turns out, maybe these glasses are a little too big. Here's a diagram (not to scale) of what I'm talking about.



No matter how I twist or turn that thing, I can't get it in the door far enough to hit the button to get the water out. I actually have to reach my finger in there to depress the button.

I suppose that's a small price to pay, but I won't say I'm not a little peeved. I didn't consider having to buy glasses based on the size of the opening in the refrigerator door. Bah!

I've noticed that there are some songs that are just catchy, but lately I've noticed a couple of songs that have particular parts that are catchy. I mean, while I like the songs as a whole, there are specific verses or lines that stick with me.

"I rock a lawsuit when I'm going to court, a white suit when I'm getting divorced, a black suit at the funeral home and my birthday suit when I'm home alone." - Good Charlotte, "I Just Wanna Live"

"What part of our history's reinvented and under rug swept? What part of your memory is selective and tends to forget?" - Alanis Morissette, "Hands Clean"

Something about the delivery of those particular lines in those particular songs makes the song itself better; like it's a mini "perfect song" within a song. I'm not sure what it is, but I dig it.