Kaplooey Blog!

Where Does the Time go?

2010-08-09T19:13:28.367-04:00

I know, I know. This poor, neglected blog. But it's been such a crazy awful intense time.

The overriding event was the death of my mother, on May 30th, of breast cancer. She went peacefully, with my dad and my aunt (her sister) by her side. The weeks leading up to that were fraught with emotion (she said fraught!), and there was barely time and energy to deal with the necessities, let alone this poor blog.

Also, the host went through a platform migration, that somehow didn't take, and last week I finally took the time to create a support ticket. So obviously it's fixed now.

On the plus side, first communion went off without a hitch. However, same weekend, was also the youngest's first ever ice skating competition, and she was in two events. Saturday morning and Sunday morning. Luckily, first communion was at the 11 am service, and we were done with the Sunday event in time to come home and change. But still, it was a crazy weekend, and my mother was clearly on the decline and missed out on it all, but she saw the videos.

Then, we had two funeral services to plan and attend: one for northern virginia, and one for southern virginia, where we also set up a new family cemetery. So there was lots of organizing amid the grief. Then, the kids were out of school, and husband's work load increased dramatically due to contract awards, and he's been in denver at least half the time since July 1, so I've been doing some single parenting of the monste-erm, girls. At the same time, work re-orged (new word), so I'm not in charge of people any more, just technology, which actually was a relief.

I have a ton of book write-ups to get back to, some grief related pieces in my head that need to get out, some coding stuff to discuss, a new hobby/interest to talk about, possibly some weightloss and knitting news, and... Well, you get the picture. But hey, it's mid-August in DC, and it's hazy, hot, and humid, so at least some things never change.

Update

2010-03-10T09:17:30.1109275-05:00

I’ve been more on twitter (@kaplooeymom) than here. Sorry.

I now lead a staff (I have staff!) of 8 developers migrating a legacy client server application to the web. It’s due at the end of September. So there’s usually not much time at work to think of things to write, let alone write them decently. Although I’d like to.

At home, Julia’s in first grade, and Cailin’s in second grade. Julia ice skates, Cailin plays softball and has swimming lessons. Life is very busy.

Cailin’s first communion is coming up; the very same weekend Julia will be in her first ice skating competition. Oh goody.

We enjoyed the blizzards of 2010, although I still say there wasn’t enough snow.

Time to read work email. I hope to have more soon.

Book Review: Twilight

2010-01-20T09:13:45.1806977-05:00

Yeah, I know, I’m behind a bit in reading trends.

On Sunday, I was able to drop the kids off at my mothers for a coupla hours. Hubby was sick, so this was the first break I had all weekend. Not enough time to see a movie. And we’re not in a place where I could just go shopping.

So I hit CVS, and they had Twilight. I had read the first coupla pages, then decided to buy it. Then I went to Jerry’s Subs and had a meal and a book.

The writing was good enough, but the characters were what kept me reading. A clutzy high school girl. An unbelievably good looking guy. Enough sarcasm to make the characters seem real.

I finished the book on Monday. And of course, read the New Moon teaser, and immediately wanted to get the rest of the books. It was all I could do not to jump on Amazon and order the rest – see above for the shopping avoidance idea.

So, now I see what all the fuss is about. If the other books are as well written as this one, Stephanie Meyer will have earned all her money.

Book Link: Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1)

Notes from the New PC

2010-01-17T10:19:51.6897478-05:00

Writing this on my new PC, which was my main christmas present. IE 8 won't register for the text editor, so this is being entered in pure HTML.

Windows 7 64 bit is mostly nice. 16 GB of RAM helps (no, that's not a typo). I haven't taxed the system yet, but last nite I had three instances of Visual Studio 2008, a coupla tabs of IE 8, Outlook, Word, and itunes going, and there was no noticeable performance hit. I will be teh codez goddess this year! Also, my new das keyboard is excellent. I wish I could afford one for work, especially the new silent ones they have now, but I barely could justify a hundred dollar keyboard for home, let alone work.

In other, brief news, I'm taking ice skating lessons - yes, at age 42.5, and too many pounds, I'm doing it. Haven't fallen yet. Girls are fine. Dog is fine. Hubby is fine.

I know you've heard this before, but I want to become a regular blogger again, so hopefully this will be one of my successfull new years goals. I have a physical in February, so the weight loss is currently successfull. Knitting, well, I've been distracted by my new toy, but I've done some.

If you keep up with such things, I'm on twitter as kaplooeymom.

Emerging From Under the Pile

2009-10-26T15:50:16.7370344-04:00

Pile of what you may ask?

Work, Kids, Knitting, Laundry, Housework (avoidance), etc.; it all piles up somehow. Oh yeah, there’s a marriage in there somewhere, as well.

Also, my home PC is dying, and I can’t order a new one until Nov 25. It randomly reboots. I’ve cleaned up the hard drive, and it’s basically an email monitor at this point. Even browsing can be an issue.

Good Things right now:

Julia’s skating progress
Cailin’s reading progress
Knitting on Kepler, Cailin’s green dress

PITA Things right now:

Home PC obviously
Laundry
Lack of ability/will power to maintain good eating habits for more than 24-48 hours.

We’re coming up to NanoWrimo, and yet again, I’ll be biting off more than I can chew and attempting a novel.

So one of my fall goals is to write here at least weekly. We shall see.

Okay, not so smooth

2009-09-08T11:07:46.996-04:00

Yes, I neglected a few details. And I'm only just now getting around to fixing it.

Smooth Upgrade

2009-07-30T09:05:15.579626-04:00

Okay, so while I was happy with my account at Drundo, they did away with the account level I was on, but grandfather’d me in at my original level. All was hunky dory.

Last week, I get the message that they’ve ‘upgraded’ all the legacy accounts to the new equivalent. Higher price, without my permission, and while some parts were upgraded, others were downgraded.

So after consulting with the House Finance Manager (husband), I went looking for a new hosting company and plan.

I settled on webhost4life, and last night, began what I thought was going to be a tortuous session, and loss of email for days. Boy, was I surprised.

I grabbed the files from the old server, bought a new domain, then went and ordered the advanced package, with my new domain. Smooth enough. They up sold turbocharged – more disk space for a piddling amount which was fine – and soon I had a brand spanking new website. Time to migrate kaplooey. The only issue there was that I had to ask the helpdesk to fix the email on the kaplooey domain. within 30 minutes of the ticket, I had kaplooey email back up and running on the new server, transparent to outlook.

While migrating this blog, I upgraded to dasBlog 2.3. Smooth there as well, since this is not using a database.

So, I have a new web host, more space and features, for less than what I was originally paying before, even before my upgrade.

Part of the deal with webhost4life was 5 sql databases (It was a time limited offer, so good luck if you go after it. So I’ll be working more on my personal applications. Trying to fit it all into 1 was annoying.

Also, just to let you know, I’ve been on Twitter (as @kaplooeymom) more than here lately, cause it’s easier to do one-liners than blog entries.

Permissions Test

2009-07-29T23:12:59.005-04:00

Did I get it right?

Yes, I did! BTW, on Windows Server 2008, Network Service needs read/write permissions on your asp.net website - at least here on the new host. More about that later.

Disney World Quick Blurb

2009-06-30T21:05:27.959125-04:00

We had an amazing but exhausting time. We stayed at the Polynesian Resort, ate on the Disney Dining Plan, had three character meals, park hopper passes for 7 days, and arrived home utterly spent. Of course, I got sick, but that seems to be par for the course these days.

Here, have a pic. Cell phone snap of the girls with Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother.

Sunday Stuff

2009-05-31T09:48:02.625375-04:00

Hey, I like alliteration.

Anyhoo, my pc is still not hooked up. I need a different usb cable to hook it up to the wireless receiver thingy. It’s prolly a good thing. The only machine hooked up to the internet right now is MyPrecious, and I can’t really waste time playing games or surfing on it.

I’m getting much more done, but I need my main pc up and running soon. Got the 5.5 yr old’s room cleaned out, and the laundry organized. Getting bunches of knitting done. Not finishing much, but working on works in progress.

Coupla birthday parties to take girls to today, then somehow force The Husband to celebrate his own birthday. He didn’t come from a big birthday celebrating family like I did, so it’s a bit like pulling teeth.

As soon as I get my main PC back up, I’ll start again with the technical posts. I wanna blog about the book app I’m building and do some writing about having a career when you weren’t looking for one.

Live from MyPrecious

2009-05-28T14:33:57.5260239-04:00

Blogging using Live Writer, from MyPrecious – I think I’ll change the machine name tonite to reflect that.

Essential Software (links will be added later):

Avast home free – with web and p2p only. I don’t use any other stuff.
Visual Studio 2008 Express editions Web, C#, VB, MSDN Xpress, SQL 2008 Xpress.
Notepad++
PageFour
Firefox
XMarks set up in both Firefox and IE. I keep different bookmarks in each browser, and each browser is set up with their respective xmarks account.

I will be purchasing a cordless mouse. I’m not the touchpad kind of person. I seem to be typing this okay, so we’ll see how long term use when I have to do documentation or coding on site really works. But right now, this is cool.

My Birthday Present

2009-05-28T10:22:10.7522394-04:00

It’s gonna be called ‘my precious’ – I just know it.

Loading all the essentials I’ll need for a mini/net book. And I’m interested more in the BOOK part, rather than the NET part. At least for now. I may or may not get a wireless plan for it. We shall have to see. But the opportunity to work on docs and code (with VS Express) wherever I am is the important part.

And it’s my favorite color. It matches my car, actually.