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Well, today was good. Finished a presentation in English so I’m off the hook for Tuesday. Nothing major going on. Cruising home and within a mile of being home I look down at my tach and BLINK a yellow light clicks on. Yes the CEL was my Valentine’s day present. Turned out it was another P0420 code - CAT under performing. Thankfully I was smogged last year so in June I should be home free. Since I installed my big bore turbo inlet I periodically am visited by this CEL. Good news on an entrepreneurial front. I found out that a niche I thought might exist is looking more and more likely to be a great business opportunity. I will keep you posted of my progress on that and my other projects as we venture along.

Today was my last final. My schedule worked out really nicely such that I had one final yesterday and my last one today. That signifies the half way point for the quarter. It’s hard to believe it’s already half over. I haven’t gotten any more progress done on my projects. I did however help a friend from school plan out a custom server that we will be building in the next week. That should be a fun project. Steve is still looking very glum. I fear that he was over watered when I got him. His pot doesn’t have a hole in the bottom and so he might have root issues. I’m not quite sure what to do with him. I’ll have to look around online and see what the procedure is for drying out his roots. I am quite enjoying my progress on my room automation page though thus far. I can safely say it has made me far more lazy and I enjoy it very much :). I’m having a hard time deciding where to go next with this project. The current interface is simple, but is hard to expand being static. As for my RealAge changes in my life I can safely say I definitely am feeling some changes. I thought the first day was going to be all placebo, but today I’m still getting that same boost in energy. I feel more awake all day and I get tired at a normal time. I haven’t felt this normal or regular in a long time. I’m working on my speeding. I found that not speeding when I had to be somewhere in a time crunch made me more stressed. Therefore I have set some ground rules for myself. I will only speed when absolutely necessary, but I will no speed over 80MPH. I don’t use it as a past time anymore. I have dropped down on how aggressive I am, changing into open lanes to speed by a few people is a no no. I can say with absolute certainty that it is helping my gas mileage if nothing else. All the sites that talk about it saving you a few MPG are right on the money. I’m definitely going to make an effort tomorrow morning to get something accomplished in terms of one of my projects. I have to figure out the best interface for the myRoom project. Speaking of which, I setup the Amarok XUL Firefox Remote plugin this weekend. Awesome plugin. It lets you control Amarok on another machine from any machine that has Firefox installed. You can search your music, add things to the playlist, and control the player. The last piece for me is creating a web version of this so that I can do these things from my iPhone and not just from my desktop. This coupled with an IR blaster that will switch on/off my receiver as well as change it’s input to whichever computer I’m playing audio from will be a huge step forward on this project. I came across a likely candidate for my IR blaster, although I fear it is out of my budget at the moment. I’m shooting for Monday to go to the hiring fair at Starbucks. I’ll have to pick up an application tomorrow on my way to school. If I can get hired there I will be able to move forward with that IR blaster. Well that’s all for now.

Ok, I’ll come clean first…on occasion I do watch Opera. Ok, there I said it. Laugh, sneer. Anyway, I saw Dr. Oz on her show again recently. I had seen him on the show a year ago when his book “You the Owner’s Manual” first came out. I had snatched the book up interested in this new and innovative approach to viewing the body. At the time I was 19 and his program was geared towards 20+. I took his age test and left it at that. Well, having seen him a second time I was compelled to take the test again now that I’m old enough to get valid result. According to my test results my body is 7 years older than I am based on calendar age. Seeing that and being just 20 about to be 21 I nearly fell out of my chair. How on earth could my body be that much older than me? My results tell the story: I don’t eat well balanced meals, I speed (but we already knew that from Friday), I don’t exercise, unemployment stress, I’m underweight, and I don’t take any vitamins. On the pro side, I eat a varied diet, I drive a mid sized car, and I drink juice once a day. After reflecting upon this new information I have decided to make some changes and see what happens. According to RealAge.com where the quiz is you can start to see/feel the effects of these life changes in as few as 3 months. I decided to start with the small things: flossing daily, mulit-vitamins, and driving no more than 5MPH over the speed limit (Ha, hahahaha). I’m going to actually give this an honest shot. So, starting tomorrow morning we will see what happens.

As for project updates, I didn’t make any progress today. I did go for a short bike ride for whatever that’s worth.

I got a little done with regard to my iPhone Insteon interface. I have both my lamp and my fan working quite well. I can see in my head how I would like the interface to turn out, but there is still much work to be done. Ideally I will figure out a way to tie in Amarok controls so that I can control my music remotely as well. This will come at a later date. Tomorrow I will continue working on my interface a little bit, I have to study for my Math mid-term which is on Monday. I’m both excited and scared, but mostly anxious to get it over with. Enjoy these first two versions of the interface. I know its not much now, but I’m excited about it’s potential. Stay tuned.

Well, I have exaughsted Craigslist, Monster, and any other job finding tools I could get my hands on. I think I’m going to settle on interviewing for a Barista position at Starbucks. I was trying to avoid returning, but I feel that after reasoning it all out it will fit my schedule the best. I loved working there before, and the only reason I left was because my previous job was booming. Sadly they moved their base of operations to Colorado to cut costs. Hopefully having worked at Starbucks before will give me an edge over the other applicants. I remember almost all of the drinks, plus having my discount again would mean I could have hot chocolate more often :). They have hiring fairs once a week now it sounds like. I will have to wait for a week from Monday because the time coincides with my Math class. Normally I’d just skip the class, but this Monday is midterms so that doesn’t seem like a great idea. I’m hoping I’ll get this one. It would really cheer me up. The ticket last night was a big blow, and not being able to buy new toys and experiment with programs has slowly eaten away at me. I used to be a very happy person, and yet for the last year or so that happieness has been drying up. Perhaps going back to my roots of Barista-dum will re-ignite that happieness within me.

On another good note Israel helped me with my PHP script not turning on my lights last night. The culprit turned out to be permissions based as I had expected. It turned out I forgot to add rights for the www-data user to the /dev/ttyS0 serial port device. That is working perfectly now and today I hope to write a small iPhone interface to control both my fan and my lamp. I’ll post screen shots of my progress later today.

So, my brain download idea seemed to have taken quite a load off of me. I was feeling great through my last class of the day. The little bit of work I thought I’d have to do was done already. Dinner plans were set with the family. Great, now it’s time to cruise home. Naturally I take the tollroad because Friday night traffic on the 5 is a nightmare. Pass through the toll station heading south. Over the hill and BAM!! Red and blue lights. Yep, ticket number two. It would appear my carefree nature after my brain download had made me a bit too carefree. I continued home at a perfect 65MPH and began to reflect on the loss of precious income. I suppose this is just lifes’ way of saying you don’t got it all figured out yet. I’m estimating my ticket to be in the $150-160 range. Tack on another $100 for traffic school so I don’t get raped on my insurance next year, and say bye bye to my server upgrade. I think I’m gonna have to step up this job search and possibly lower my standards :(. Ideally, I’d want a computer based job. In this case I might have to settle for simply a desk job. Oh well, I can always code at home. To express my depression have a look at Steve…I kinda feel like him. To cheer myself and those of you who feel depressed (either for me or because you have had a similar experience) having read this, I’ve included a music video of KT Tunstall - Suddenly I See. Lets hear about your bad endings to great days.

I decided to try something new today. For some unknown reason to me I was cursed/blessed with the ability to keep a million ideas, problems, and thoughts floating around my head at any given time. So, I plan to on occasion download this mess into my blog in an attempt to clear my mind. I’ll consider this my first blog experiment. So, here it goes.

First off, to all those who wore yellow today in support of the PirateBay, job well done (Yay, for me).

Next, I inherited a plant from an old co-worker today. It is in a sad state of affair having not been tended to for several weeks. I have decided to name him Steve in honor of ‘Over the Hedge’. So, big thanks to Mr. Dustin Ditto!! I will post pictures of Steve and keep you updated on his status.

Secondly, my thoughts on an artcle I read earlier today regarding RSS feeds. The article brought to my attention the pros and cons of RSS feeds. First, the pros: they make it easy to stay up to date on many different subjects and sites in one location. Prior to RSS email lists were the primary means of staying up to date on web site updates. One problem many sites could run into down the road should RSS take off for all users would be ad revenue. Currently, people using RSS feeds are those that are unlikely to click on an ad. Should all users switch to RSS feeds, sites that are uterly dependent on ad revenue to exist would be unable to sustain themselves. This could cause many free sites to rely more heavily on donations and/or switch to paid sites. It appears that a technology to improve life could actually disrupt a delicate balance that exists between ads and site owners.

Well that should help me clear out a bit from my head. I won’t be thinking completely clearly until after midterms next week.

On to my job search status. I have my resume out to a few places. I haven’t received any feedback as of yet. A few weeks ago I had an interview at an Irvine based company called Arbitech. I had a second interview and haven’t heard from them since. I take thy to mean ‘No’. I find it impersonal and unprofessional that so many businesses don’t call you to at least thank you for your time. Especially after having a second interview. I find that more and more companies are doing this. You’d think that with all of our methods of communication people could let you know something as simple as, “Thank you for your time but, the position has been filled.” Oh well. Maybe something else will come up.

On to a project update. Last night I was trying desperatley to get a PHP script to run a shell script. I have yet to accomplish this. My goal is to create a page that I can use to control the lights in my room using my Insteon devices. I had a system like this running at my friends house a few weeks ago. You can check it out at www.ilopez.com. I’ll get that working in time. Probably a permissions issue.

Well, that’s all for now. I’ll post again later tonight if I have any breakthroughs on my project fronts.

While I’m waiting for our peer editing session to end in English I thought I should do something productive. So, I have decided to write a bit about what I’m working on right now in terms of one of my projects. The project I’ll discuss first is my invoice manager. I decided to take on this project because I was unable to find something that did everything I needed. My goals for this project are have a simple program that takes in work units and will compose invoices based on those work units and transmit those to the appropriate parties. I plan on having PHP generate PDFs of the invoices and store them in a mySQL database for future reference. It will keep track of unpaid invoices and alert you after a specified amount of time. To make this system even more useful to me I’m going to create an iPhone interface for it. My cherry on top for this project will be a PHP script to take in voice notes recorded on my cell phone for playback on my computer for later dictating. I find that taking down a voice note after a job is much easier than trying to write everything down. I started this project a few weeks ago and it’s coming along nicely. I’ll post some screenshots of what it looks like thus far later today.

Update: Here is a screenshot of the home page. Let me know what you think…

Ok, ok. I know that’s a corny title, but I finally have my own site. I had been contemplating recently whether I should do this. I guess having read this far you know I decided to create my own blog. I’m not entirely sure what my intention was in creating this site. I suppose it’s my way of having a little corner of the internet to myself. I have many projects planned for the next year. I hope that this can be my place to share my triumphs and failures. Here’s to a great 2008!!!