techSanctuary

I got my applications in. I hope one of them gets picked up. Any of them would be fun to do.

Wow. I REALLY haven't made a post in a long time. Since my last post about getting a Wii, I've had some things happen.

Around December/January, I heard from some sources that my local Target was getting another shipment. In fact, employees were openly telling people that Sunday morning they would have a bunch. I, as well as many others, waited in the cold only to be told that no Wiis were in the shipment. We were even told that none were SUPPOSED to be in the shipment. Err, WTF?!

Through a reliable source, I discovered that my local Target was getting 42 Wiis for launch day. A few people had lined up the night before, but nothing like for the PS3 launch. Feeling a little smug about knowing the number of Wiis, I was confident that showing up around an hour before opening would score me a Wii. Apparently, many people had a similar idea.

They started handing out tickets at around 7:12am. Looking at the line I knew I was cutting it close. As they got to my part of the line they informed us that they were out. Crap, I was number 44 when there were only 42 Wiis.

I've moved the site to the new Drupal 5.0 beta 1 release. This gives me a good platform for some new modules I have in the pipe-line.

It is pretty easy to get profiles as nodes in Drupal. The trick is in the combination of the workflow, CCK, actions and possibly the views modules. First, use CCK to create a profile node type. Add what ever fields you want. This is the easy part. Now, setup your workflow. In my case I created two states; 'moderation' and 'accepted'. I needed my profiles to be moderated. Authors can only only progress from 'creation' to 'moderation'. An admin role can progress the node to 'accepted'. Attach your new workflow to your profile node type.

To my surprise, I was accepted for the Google SoC program! I'll be working for the Drupal project to develop a gradebook module. You can see my name, in all it's glory, on the Drupal site!

Microchip provides pretty decent datasheets for all their parts. The datasheet for the 18F2550/4550 provides good starting information for getting USB working on this chip. However, it doesn't really cover the software side very well. They do provide application notes with sample code.

I started playing around with Google Calendar tonight. I just have to say WOW! At first it had trouble loading, no doubt from heavy server load due to interest. Once loaded I was presented with a slick, if empty, calendar. Since I use Mozilla Calendar in Mozilla Thunderbird, I wondered if I could upload my Ical file. Sure enough, Google thought of that. After a couple of clicks, Google was showing me my calendar. Everything looked great, except for one reoccuring appointment. While it should have been 4 hours one night a week, Google was showing it spread across two nights. After fixing the date/times of the event, google asked me if the change should apply to all the events in the series. Why yes, please do.

After doing the turkey thing with Norah's parents, we decided to visit Sedona, the Grand Canyon, and Hover Dam. I had never seen them before. It started out as a joke when I teased we'd be close enough to Vegas to elope. Neither of us backed down from the joke. After talking on the way to the Gran Canyon, we decided to do it. Now at this point we'd been engaged for over a year and planning a wedding for September, so not really a big surprise I guess. Since it was so last minute we couldn't have friends/family present, but did call a few people that might be upset without getting a warning. One of our friends we called works for the Humboldt United carrier. To our surprise, he hopped a flight 5 minutes later and met us in Vegas! Luckily for us he was there to act as both best-man and maid-of-honor.