When Animals Attack! on Fox

Two animal and house related stories today, one more crazy than the other.

This weekend I walked out the side door and headed towards the car, but something on the front lawn caught my attention. I glanced over and saw at least ten live wild turkeys on the lawn! I just stopped and stared, but apparently this was enough to scare them. They all flew off, but one couldn't quite get enough altitude ("Pull up! Pull up!") and crashed right-on into the neighbor's house! The turkey managed to fly away without hitting the ground, which is quite an impressive feat. I'd never seen wild turkeys before!

The other story is less exciting. Before I went to bed last night, the carbon monoxide detector on the 2nd floor started chirping like it had a low battery. I was pissed because I had just replaced the battery. I stomped up there and examined the detector when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I looked into the guest bedroom and saw something large flying around in there. As best I could tell, it was a bat! We had left the window open in there, and though it had a screen on it, the screen was bent severely, and the bat must have flown in to eat some of the bugs that had followed the light. So what did I do? Well, bats are scary! So I just shut the door and decided to deal with the bat later. This morning I went in there armed with a tennis raquet and work gloves, but he had left.

Oh, and the septic guys finished their work by leveling out the lawn as best they could and topping it all with loam. Only loam doesn't include seed (something that my broker neglected to inform me of). So I have to hit Lowes and get some grassseed and a spreader in addition to all the other stuff we need.

House Update; or, Shenanigans with Technology

Busy week! On Tuesday, the Verizon FiOS tech came (6 hours late) to install fiber optic Internet access. My father-in-law-to-be, Dave, volunteered to stay and wait for him so I didn't have to miss work. Nice. When I get home, the Internet is on, and man is it fast (and very low latency)!

Annie doesn't work Wednesdays, so we had scheduled the guys from National Floors Direct to come then to install the hardwood floors upstairs and carpet on the stairs. (Side note about NFD: the sales guy was nice and knowledgeable. However, he significantly lowered his price twice when we said it was too much; 20% the first time, then 19% the second time for a total drop of almost 35%! Price discrimination indeed!) I returned home to awesome hardwood floors! I was and still am pretty excited about them.

Then things started to go downhill in one fell swoop. The DirecTV guy came on Friday (again with Dave waiting for him) and refused to install the second coaxial cable for the 2-tuner DVR, saying an electrician would have to do it. While this raised some red flags for me, I was at work and didn't want to deal with it, so I told Dave to just let him do it.

I get home and the TV is working great. So I fire up my laptop to blog about it... and I have no Internet access! Since the FiOS uses the coaxial cables already in the house, I figured out that the DirecTV tech must have disconnected one of the coax cables going to the router (this was mostly confirmed by a tech support call with Verizon). Also, we discovered that about half the channels on the DVR have significant interruptions/static.

DirecTV gets bonus points for the call I had with a tech named Jeremy. He had me do a few troubleshooting steps without effect, then went ahead and ordered me a new DVR box. He asked me to check the cables behind the box, and I explained to him that the tech hadn't installed the second line. Jeremy literally laughed, then said, "You ordered a 2-tuner DVR from us with full installation; why would you need an electrician to install it?" Jeremy set up a service call for the next day, Sunday, from 12-4. Wow! A service call on a Sunday; how cool is that?

So right now I'm waiting for them to show. Jeremy said he couldn't diagnose the FiOS problem (obviously), but that the tech coming out today will take a look. If they fix the bad signal and the FiOS, my faith will be restored.

Update: James, the DirecTV tech, just left. He was able to install the second line (though not without first telling me he wasn't allowed to, and then calling his dispatch to find out he was) and get rid of the fuzz. He did his best to help with the Verizon problem, but was unable to help. The cabling in this house seems very strange. I hope the Verizon guy on Monday can help.

New Hardwood Floors!

I promised pictures, and here they are!



Click the image to see more from Flickr!

Halo 3 Is Driving Me Insane

Here is a brief history of me and Halo:

• Halo 1 is released for the XBox. At the time, I thought the XBox was a piece of crap and loved the GameCube.
• I play Halo 1 for the first time. I tell everyone who will listen that the game is way overrated and a piece of crap, citing the lack on online MP (no XBL at the time) and repetitive level design.
• I win an XBox in a raffle.
  
• I go and buy Halo 1 and a second controller, because, hey, everyone's doing it, and I play it a lot.
  
• My fraternity hosts regular 16-player 4-TV Halo fests. I participate (in the words of Boon from Animal House: "It's a fraternity party. I'm in the fraternity. I have to go.") but tell everyone how bad the game is.
• In one game, I have no fewer than four successful flag captures in the Warthog, at least one from each spot. I realize that the beauty of Halo lies in one place: the Warthog.
• I play lots of Halo 1, still telling people it sucks.
• I camp out for Halo 2 on November 9th, 2004, then stay up all night playing.
• I beat Halo 2 on Heroic on November 21st.
  
• I buy XBL on November 22nd because I can't stand missing Halo 2 MP.
• I proceed to play almost 1200 games of Halo 2 online.
• The Halo 3 ARG, Iris, slowly drives me insane.

As hard as I try to not be a goofy fanboy, I can't; I'm making plans to camp out for Halo 3, I'm reading everything I can about it, and I'm generally pumped as all hell.

Take a Deep Breath

It's times like this I force myself to remember what Justin wisely said: "Exceptions should be exceptions, not expections."

Pictures

We've been doing a lot of work on the house. You can follow with pictures on my Flickr site.

We had the hardwood (laminate) floors on the 2nd floor and carpet on the stairs installed yesterday. Damn they look and feel good! I'll post some pics of that soon.

I uninstalled the built-in broken microwave last night. Man that was hard! This site helped me a fair bit though. The key was finding the "hidden" latch under the vent grill. I put "hidden" in quotes because it was so big and obvious yet I missed it for like 30 minutes.

House Stuff

As you may know, I bought a house. We moved in on Friday, which was like the hottest day of the year in Massachusetts. The mover in charge of paperwork sweat so much that it was dripping off of him onto the papers, and the receipt he handed me was soaked. Yuck.

I plan to journal the work we're doing here. I have plenty of pictures; stay tuned for some hot updates.

Yes?

My buddy Eric made a submission to WorseThanFailure and was featured today! Check it out.

Holy Crap I'm Buying a House

The sellers got their act together, so we're buying a house. We close on Tuesday. Which is great, except that we had planned to not get the house, so we were only maybe 50% packed. The easy part.

So as soon as I returned from my company outing, the first things I packed were the 360 and my DVDs. That way I can't slack as easily. How much I want to play Forza 2!!

This post was written immediately after sealing the extra bedding box and immediately before checking the cabinets in the closet.

Query Analyzer, How Do I Hate Thee?

Microsoft's Query Analyzer is the tool MS provides as the main SQL Server development environment. Are they kidding? Besides the fact that it is broken, it lacks one of the best features ever made for IDEs: intellisense. How the hell is this not included? It could also have background compilation like VB.NET (checking for errors automatically). Adding these things are obvious wins.

What I'd really like to see is some sort of auto-formatting preferences. Everyone prefers their SQL formatted a little differently. I like capital keywords and short lines. Some like less indenting, lowercase keywords. Line breaks, spacing, capitalization of keywords, all these things have no impact on the actual parsing and execution of SQL code. The ideal SQL IDE would be able to store individual preferences for these things and apply them for each user. That way, I wouldn't spend 10 minutes reformatting SQL my coworker wrote or just struggle through it. This isn't really that hard; why they haven't done it is beyond me.

The Mighty Casey Strikes Out

My softball team had its first playoff game last night. Every team makes the playoffs, and we were the 7th seed out of 8, so that gives you an idea of how good (or bad) we are. Still we have lots of fun.

We were getting crushed, something like 12-3, in the 4th or 5th inning. I had been up once before with a bloop single the other way. I noticed their pitcher was changing his location based on where the batter was standing. So I tried to fake him out a little, standing in one location then moving as he delivered. That backfired when on a 3-2 pitch, I was standing about 6 inches back from the plate. I stepped in as the pitch came, but it appeared outside. It only looked outside because I was standing back, and as I watched the ball fall right on the outside of the strike mat.

I struck out looking in slow-pitch softball! And to make matters worse, it ended up being the last at bat of the season for me! I'm so disgusted with myself.

Seriously, No House For Me

The town board of health did not meet; they didn't have quorum. So they meet tomorrow... if they say yes, then the sellers have like 2 days to get all their paperwork to the bank. If they don't make it, then we don't close.

We had to talk to our landlord because we might have to stay in the apartment, obviously. Ironically enough, he had already rented it. While we waited to hear back from him, we had about four hours of sheer terror, thinking we might have to move to a new apartment. Thankfully, our landlord, the coolest landlord ever, said we could stay, but only if we signed a 1-year lease (we'd been renting at-will). So possibly no new house for me until next summer.

Force Fixing

I talked earlier about using enums for things like datarows returned from the database. Well, as you might have guessed, if I change what I return from the DB, my app will break. I've had many arguments about this sort of behavior and whether it's better to hard code the metadata from the DB or soft code it (meaning use reflection or other tools to determine what has been returned and handle it accordingly). I had a fairly long debate with Eric about it.

Obviously, as with every design situation, think of what you're doing first! Don't blindly follow a pattern. My coworker Joseph just transformed 500+ lines of code to 12 using reflection and soft coding. Was this a good move? Yes, because the code is still readable and manageable. I don't have the code here, but basically he checks the data's name, then finds the textbox with the same name, and puts the data in the box. Even in his iteration, there is some hard coding.

The point I'm getting to is that the main point people mention as a con to hard coding is actually a plus in many cases; being forced to fix the hard-coded stuff when you change what it's coded to. Before you say "WTF Ed!" let me say this; I'm not advocating highly-coupled design. However, I am advocating coupling your data controller classes/code tightly to your database. That way, if you (or someone else) changes your database, your code will fail, and you are forced to fix it.

America, Know Thyself

I was reading this article in the NYTimes about the possibly extinction of the trees used to make ash baseball bats when I came across this interesting tidbit:

Still, the emerald ash borer, or Agrilus planipennis Fairmaire, is the most immediate threat. Discovered in the United States near Detroit in 2002, the beetles, which are shiny green, will destroy a tree in two to three years. The larvae tunnel inside the trees, cutting off water and food.

Wait wait... a new insect species was discovered in Detroit in 2002? It seems a little crazy that in a super-advanced nation such as ours, we still don't know all the species in our own borders.

I'm Never Going to Own a House

The sellers of the house I am attempting to buy met with the town board of health last night to discuss and potentially grant the necessary variance for doing the required septic work. Basically, the town was going to say "Yes" or "No". This meeting was last night, and it's now the morning after and I haven't heard anything. A little courtesy would be nice.

Enumerations, How I Love Thee

I love enums. I use them all the time. Jared on Giant Robots got me thinking more about them. Let me list the ways I love them:

• I use enums for column ids for a grid control. I get to say "grid.col(cols.thisOne)" instead of "grid.col(2)". Easier to read, easier to change, and it forces me to fix them on refactoring (more on this in a later article).
• When I have a stored procedure return more than one table, I will use an enum to index the tables in the dataset. Again, I get to do "ds.tables(products.sold)" instead of "ds.tables(1)".
• A more esoteric thing I like to do is when using datatables, I'll use an enum with "tostring" to reference the datarow. So I'd have something like "row(taskData.client.tostring)" ("taskData.client.tostring" evals to "client") instead of "row(5)". Again, this is more readable, and it forces fixing.

When I make an enum, I know exactly how it's going to behave. It's kind of like a super constant in that respect.

I'll talk about force-fixing in my next post.

Visual Studio Crash Log

This will a perpetual feature. I will log every time Visual Studio crashes on me and what I was doing when it did.

• July 2nd, 10:15AM: Building a solution.
• July 2nd, 2:55PM: Getting the latest from source control.
• July 3rd, 12:24PM: Building a solution.
• July 5th, 4:31PM: Building a solution.
• July 9th, 11:43AM: Building a solution.
• July 9th, 2:42PM: Getting the latest from source control.
• July 10th, 10:31AM: Rebuilding a solution.

More Home News

So our house closing got delayed... again! This time, the sellers need to get a variance from the town board of health to do septic work so close to the well. This time we even got in a big fight with the sellers; they didn't want to pay the fees they are legally required to pay. Oops. We'll move in eventually. Maybe.

Rest In Peace

I never really understood the words "rest in peace". It's almost a cliche phrase these days. I used it in a blog post over on IFOD a while ago. It's just something you say to someone who has died. More importantly, it's something you say to others who share your grief.

Recent events have caused me to think more about what "rest in peace" really means. For Jon to rest in peace, it would mean two things: 1) he'd have to be happy with his life, and 2) he'd have to be happy with how everyone else is doing. I'm certain he'd be happy with how his life was; he always was living 110% and having a great time. But he'd also have to be happy with how his family and friends continue to live.

So there's a large part of "rest in peace" that relies on us, living our lives as Jon would've approved or wanted. I've found myself thinking more and more about Jon in everyday situations. Not that I'm trying to be just like Jon (because, as anyone who knows me knows, that's impossible), but who knows.

(As always, I'm just rambling here. Nothing I post is meant to be preachy unless I say so.)

Left to right: Jon, Ed (me), Adam

Survival

Most of my friends knew Jon Snyder. Those who didn't know him learned of his passing by way of Annie or others. It's been a terrible time for all of us. There are no words to describe what Jon meant to most of us. Even people who crossed paths with Jon only briefly are profoundly affected by his death. I'm not going to try to relate how much we all hurt, and I'm not trying to write a tribute here.

It's been a two weeks since we in Boston got news of his death, and one week since his funeral. I am in better shape than I was last week; I can get stuff done at work, and I played in a softball game this week. I've done some cleaning and took out the trash. All things that I normally do.

And yet I still feel Jon's absence. I feel like I'm sleepwalking. Like it's all a bad dream. I seem to have a constant headache too. Katy said something that Bill mentioned at the funeral: "Jon's not gone; we just can't touch him anymore." I think that's what I feel when I say I can feel his absence. It's like a blind person; when you remove one sense, your others become heightened. Because I can't touch Jon, I can feel him more.

Here are some links:

Facebook group "Rest in Peace Jonathan Snyder"
Phil's well-written blog post
Kansas City Star Article
Obituary