Jared’s Blog

Alright so I’ve pissed most of the day away doing who the hell knows what. As usual most of it has been spent in front of my computer. I figured I’d make a list of things I need to do.

1. Migrate old blog and music reviews to new site.
2. Migrate rest of the old site over.
3. Fill albums database
4. Do some reviews for Decoy
5. Buy dice for D&D
6. Play Neverwinter Nights
7. Find some way to get “coding experience”

Now a bit of explanation. 1 and 2 are obvious. All of the old site needs to be brought over.

3 is something I’m working on. I set up a MySQL database in which I intend to store a listing of all my music videos. It will serve as a nice listing here as well as help me keep track of shit.

Decoy sent me 12 albums almost 2 weeks ago. I have yet to review 10 of them. They were nice, now I need to do my job.

Now that I know I’m stuck in Virginia all summer, I know I can start seriously start “hacking” with my buddies. That’s what number 5 refers to. Yes we play D&D and I’m not ashamed to admit that. Anyway, since my old set of dice is half lost and buried in a box right now, I figured I’ll just find some new ones. If you know of a good place online to buy a “pound o dice” post a link in the comments.

6 goes along with 5. Neverwinter Nights is a great game I picked up a while back. I got stuck on the normal campaign. I can’t go any further in the story, so I’ve kinda lost interested. I hate starting over so I’ve been putting off playing. I’m gonna start a new character soon though and I intend to play it.

And finally, I’ve heard back from both my interviews. Neither of them took me. Fishbowl said they’d be interested in me later if I get some more coding experience. So I need to join some open source project or get some personal projects going. Last summer I was thinking about learning C++ so we’ll see if I get to it this summer.

I’m sure everyone has those times where bad things just seem to happen. It’s starting to feel like one of those times for me. The other day I find out that if I want this temp summer job here, I’ve got until Friday to make a decision. It wouldn’t be so bad if the 2 places I’ve interviewed with would’ve gotten back to me. So today I was trying to contact people without any luck. I emailed one guy on a whim after I couldn’t get to him through the phone and he just emailed me back. I got rejected. This was the place I really wanted to be at too. So 1 down, 1 to go. I plan on getting up early tomorrow to see if I can get ahold of the other place. Who knows, maybe they’ll give me some good news. That would certainly turn things around.

Last night I headed up to the casino and lost $40. The dealer was coming up with 21s left and right and that didn’t include the blackjacks. I’ll refuse to play against him if I ever see him again. Some might say its stupid, but you take any edge you can get against a casino; even if that means being supersitious.

Anyway, there has been a few other minor things that suck, but none worth writing here about. I can’t get too down. I’m sure things will get better. Life has its ups and downs and you have to just keep on going. You have to realize no matter how bad it gets, things will get better some time.

All of the links on the navigation bar should work now. I’m still moving content over from my other site. It requires a lot of refomatting for the new layout, but for the most part, its copy and paste.

I’m also in the process of creating databases of all the music videos and all the albums I have. That will be a ton of data entry and hunting around. Slowly but surely, I will be putting things up.

On Tuesday last week I went down to Minneapolis for a job interview with Fishbowl Solutions. It went ok, but some of their interview questions totally threw me off. The worst one was “So, 2.6 GPA, huh? What’s the story behind that one?” And then he just stares at me. I was speechless. Finally the other guy who was there rephrased the question and I was able to give some kind of an answer. The owner (and main interviewer) is really sarcastic, so I never really knew if he was serious or joking around. Overall, I think the interview went well and they said they’d get back to me within a couple weeks.

I also heard that Kingland Systems will be getting back to me at the beginning of this week. With any luck, I’ll be packing my things up and heading south in the next couple weeks.

Well, if you’re reading this, then you’ve stumbled upon (or intentionally accessed) my new website. Welcome! I’ve spent the past couple weeks working hard on the layout and getting things moved over to Movable Type. Quite a jump from the old html pages I had before.

I’m gonna do the cliche thing and say this is a work in progess. Over the next few days I’ll be working on putting together the rest of the page. Right now the About Me section is up and the Poetry section is in progess. Lots more work needs to be done with the movable type templates and I still need to figure out how to work the old content of my site back in. So keep checking back for more!

Alright, I’m pretty much guarenteeing this will be the last post at this address. Due to me losing my hosting and domain because of graduation, this site will be moving. My tentative plan is to host it myself. Mediacom upped our speeds and I now get 2.6 down and 240 up. Anyway, back to changes. The site will now be hosted by myself right here at home. As of right now the new address will be http://jrmehle.homelinux.net. If you go there now, you won’t find much. The best part about this change is that I now have full control over the server which means PHP, MySQL, Movable Type, etc. will all be a part of the new site. Now if you have no idea what I just said, don’t worry. Just know that it’ll make the site better and easier for me to run. WIth that said, I’m going to close out my final post at this address. Goodbye.

This site will be coming to a close soon. As of Sunday, I will no longer be a student of St. John’s University. Along with my departure will go my web space. I have to give SJU props for the free hosting. It’s a shame I couldn’t have used it more. I don’t know exactly what when the site will be going down, but I do know I don’t have a replacement lined up yet. There’s been talk of buying rackspace with Burns and a few other people. I may find a cheap place to get hosting. Who knows! Which ever direction I head will certainly bring PHP and a new layout. Uncertainty seems to be a theme in my life this week. Right now I don’t know where I’ll be at the end of the week. The job interview in Rochester at Kingland went well. Rick tells me the people who interviewed me liked me. They’re supposed to let me know late this week or early next week. Fishbowl still hasn’t gotten back to me about an interview. I sure hope that happens before I move home (or take the job in Rochester) because a 1 hour drive sounds WAY better than a 3 hour drive.

As with most college students, the last week is finals week. It’s no different here and thats another source of uncertainty. I gave my senior research presentation today. Good thing was it went well. I did go a little fast which meant I ended up about 5 minutes short. I was surprised to not get grilled by the department professors afterward. Usually they like to ask all kinds of tough questions to see if you really know your shit. Either I covered everything really well or the profs didn’t know much about open source software.

Admidst all this uncertainty, is one rock. VIDEO GAMES! I know this one is a little old, but I picked up Neverwinter Nights (the Gold Edition even!) last weekend in Rochester. I had been “demoing” the game with a pirated copy about a week beforehand. I decided it was good enough to buy, so I made the investment. Damn is that game addicting. I can play a good 4-5 hours straight and not get bored. It’s hella long, so it’ll keep me occupied for quite a while. I’ve been pretty much playing the single player because I tried the online play and it was sort of dumb. While it was cool to have other people to play with, the play is pretty disjointed. You can have players scattered all over the place in the same game. It also saves characters on your machine, so that leaves things open to hacking/training. I think I’ll probably stick to the single play until I beat it. Then there’s a whole other expanation to play and all the user/developer modules. Needless to say, its enough to keep me busy for awhile and being that I don’t know when I’ll get the internet back, I can play this wherever I am.

Along with the game, I picked up The Bled’s “Pass the Flask.” GOOD CD! It rocks hard. I wasn’t too big of a fan after the first listen a couple months ago, but after seeing their live show, I became a fan. My buddy Sean would be glad to hear that. On an unrelated note, I found out that Epic formerly of Crazytown is dead. Apparently he was able to record an album with another band called Pre(Thing before he died. I’ve not heard good things about the band, so I’ll be staying away from their CD. I also found out that Crazytown broke up. Not a big loss, but they had their moments.