home comments edit

I bought my first house this year and it sorta drained the funds a bit. We’ve recovered (financially speaking) for the most part, but I’ve still got stuff like the “no interest/no payments” thing on our washer and dryer hanging over me and that has to be paid… we’re not quite back to where we were.

And then I did my taxes.

I’ve had to pay for the last three years. I mean, just bend me over. This year, I’m getting a refund. A refund. Enough to pay off that washer and dryer and maybe get a new dishwasher because the one we have sucks donkey.

A refund, I tell you! I’m stoked.

General Ramblings comments edit

Remember my request for a suicide pill last Friday? How we spent a day and a half (all of Friday and first half of Monday) coming up with a new schedule?

Yesterday at 9:30a we got to do it all again, this time in some attempt to move the project structure around to some nefarious end I have yet to fully grasp, all by 3:00p.

Well, I didn’t make that deadline (I made a SWAG at it by 5:00p and that was the end of my patience with it), because it involved - once again - re-assessing all of the requirements (there are six different requirements documents we have to look at and triage through), this time looking at different things than before due to the structure upheaval. I’m anticipating not making several other deadlines on that schedule, too, because of the lack of time allocated to developing it.

I expressed some discomfort at the process and was told “that’s what it’s like working in a product organization.” I was offended by that for two reasons: First, it implies I’ve never “worked in a product organization,” which is blatantly incorrect and further implies a lack of respect for my expertise. Second, I should dearly hope that not every product organization goes through this many reschedules on a project.

Anyway, I’m bitter today, and have been since yesterday. I barely got any sleep, I’m so pissed off. Hopefully that will pass by, I dunno, Sunday. So that I can “bitter-up” for work bright and early Monday morning.

I do know that I’m tired of trying to go the “extra mile.” I come in at 7:00a and leave at 6:00p, even if it’s not “crunch time,” helping others solve their problems and working toward a more holistic solution for problems rather than just slapping a bunch of haphazard code together. Everyone else punches in at 9 and leaves at 5. I’m thinking 7 - 3 sounds mighty fine right about now.

coderush, vs comments edit

DXCore, the core engine behind CodeRush for Visual Studio .NET, has been released to the public as a free download.

This is a great thing for anyone interested in extending the Visual Studio environment. DXCore is everything that the Visual Studio extensibility team should have implemented to begin with. It’s easy to make Visual Studio add-ins, it’s easy to create graphic assistance within the Visual Studio editor, it’s easy to do great things to enhance your productivity.

Plus, that’s what my CR_Documentor add-in is based on, and you all want that, right?

Go get your free copy of DXCore!

(And once you fall in love with that, get CodeRush and Refactor! - you’ll never look back.)

media, music comments edit

I got JHymn set up and running to perform almost exactly the same action as my M4P Backup script. The difference is that my backup script created the unlocked M4A file in the same folder as the original M4P, then copied both the M4A and M4P into the backup location; the configuration of JHymn that I’m using just creates the M4A in the backup location - it doesn’t back up the M4P, nor does it place a copy of the M4A alongside the original M4P. Other configurations of JHymn can do things like replace the original M4P with the decoded M4A… but I didn’t want to go that route.

Anyway, here’s my JHymn configuration. I’ve upgraded to iTunes 4.7.1 and everything works fine. Click the screen shots to get a larger view.

[Main JHymn screen - click to
enlarge

[JHymn preferences - click to
enlarge

media, music comments edit

It looks as though JHymn is the only supported version of hymn left, at least, according to the hymn forums.

JHymn has a lot more flexibility than hymn did, but doesn’t seem to have a command line interface, which makes it difficult to integrate into a script. That said, it does have functionality to back up your protected music to a new location once it’s scrubbed of DRM, so it sort of does what my M4P Backup script did anyway.

I’ll have to get this thing running, then I’ll share my settings with the rest of you.