Polar plunge ’05

Today, I proved how stupid I can be at times…


I convinced myself and my roommate to go do the Polar Plunge in Muskego, WI. It benefited Special Olympics of Wisconsin. The turnout was pretty impressive. We ended up getting caught up with a group from Matty’s Bar & Grill. They ended up raising over $10,000 for the event, which is pretty impressive. Heh, we even got to be part of the video that they were making for the bar…


So who knows… I might just do this again, next year. Also, if you’re looking for a good reuben sandwich around Muskego, go to Matty’s. It’s a fun bar and has good food… not to mention hot girls 😉


Update: Pictures available here and here.

A new setup for my home machine

I placed an order for a new computer today. I spent a little more than I wanted, but what the hell… it provides me with some room for upgrades in the future.

I went with AMD for the first time. More specifically, I picked up an AMD 64 3500+ chip, at the recommendation of Jure. A side effect is that I subscribed to his blog 🙂

I only was able to go with 1gb of RAM, which sucks, but I’ll be able to improve on that in the future. The board has a 4gb limit for RAM. Specifically, this is the setup I chose to go with:

Motherboard: MSI K8T Neo2-FIR
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3500+
RAM: 1GB (2x512mb) Corsair DDR400 (PC3200) – Model: TWINX1024-3200XLPRO
HDD: Western Digital SATA 250GB w/ 8mb buffer – Model: WD2500JD

I ordered everything but the hdd from Monarch Computer Systems. I also included some rounded cables, for the hell of it. I got the hdd from Newegg.com. If Newegg offered a nice package deal like Monarch did, I would have gone with them for everything. It seems as though

Buying a new computer….

I have decided that I will upgrade my home machine. It is currently a 1ghz PIII w/ 512mb ram. I find this lagging. I am looking for a fairly new processor around the 3ghz range. I would like to have 1.5- 2gb of ram. I would also like support for a SATA drive.

My current dilemma is whether I should go AMD 64 or Intel… Intel is a little cheaper, but AMD 64 would allow me to experiment w/ 64bit development. If I could get a board that supports dual processors, then all the better…

My ideal price range for all of this would be around $500 or so… I don’t know if I can do that w/ the RAM requirement, but that is the price range I’m shooting for.

Does anyone have any recommendations about this?

I’m a panelist!

One down… one to go.  I just got verification that mkeonline.com accepted me as a threeview.  A threeview is one of three panelists that critic a specific restaurant’s food.  The fourth person who goes to the restaurant is a writer for the magazine.  Having dinner with three random unknown people should be fun


Now I just need to be accpeted as a model for the magazine and everything would be peachy… 🙂

Can I be a model and a panelist for food reviews?

I decided to sign up for a couple things tonight. I went to a local website and played around with their site. I stumbled across the option to model for the magazine and figured… what the hell… I could do that. So, I sent an application to do so. We’ll see how it goes…

After signing up to be a model, I decided that I should also sign up to be a panelist for the dining section. So after another email, the waiting game begins. I’ve been talking with someone who has done the panelist position before. She said that it’s a pretty cool situation… plus the free food is always nice. Time will tell if I have what it takes, though.

A shift towards language oriented programming?

If you’re curious about how the act of programming might change, go read Wesner’s post on coding graphically rather than texturally.  He has some good links to backup his claims.  I personally think that this would be a welcomed change to the programming world, but I do believe that text editing will not go away anytime soon.  Personally, I don’t use the designer view because it doesn’t give me enough flexibility and control.  Perhaps this will change with Whidbey or other IDEs…


btw, I had to challenge myself to post this and the previous post, today.  I”m not quite sure why, but I have been sort of at a loss lately for posting.  I guess a day passes without posting, and all of a sudden half a month passes.  After two people commented on my lack of posting, though, I decided I’d throw this down.


Btw, the company I work for is looking for a software tester with automated testing experience.  If you or anyone you know would be interested, drop me a line and I’ll make sure it gets funneled to the correct people.

Dream about a plane

I had a very strange dream about a plane towards the end of December. Specifically, it was the morning of December 31st. I don’t know why it took me so long to post this, but below is the excerpt of what I wrote right after waking up. The dream is pretty weird and involves different points of view.




I had a dream this morning…. it involved me as both an actor and the camera point of view.


It starts with a movie producer attempting to rent/lease a grassy field. The field had what looked to be a flat bulldozed path around the perimeter. There was a local (looked like he was from Deliverance) who owned the field. The local was reluctant to sell/rent the field, but the movie producer then offered him $5m in cash. The point behind the movie producer wanting the field is that it was apparently haunted.


All of a sudden, the time and place changed, and I was in a bedroom with a girl that must have been my sister. [Note, she doesn’t look like my sister.] We are pretty young, I’m guessing around 8-12 years old. Anyway, we were both in our own beds, but were up talking. All of a sudden, we heard a loud noise of a plane flying overhead.


Time flips again, and this is where I became the camera point of view. I witnessed a (rather large) flight attendant try to open the rear exit door. This is while the plane is still in mid air, btw… She screwed up the yellow slide and ended up falling out of the plane. Her body wrapped around the edge of a rear engine…. it wasn’t long, and her body split, causing her legs to go into the engine intake. It was pretty gruesome, but that seemed to be the last straw for the plane. It was headed down.


Time flips back again, and I was back at the house. This time, I was older and my sister was too. She grabbed her camera and headed outside for a picture of the plane. Apparently she wanted to take a picture of it as it passed over a church.


This is sort of weird… while I was dreaming this, I thought that I had had this dream before… Though in my other dream, a father figure drove off to where the plane was coming down. This was so that he could help with the rescue.


Strange though, but I was remembering this while still dreaming the current dream.


Anyway, back to the dream details. So now the time flipped again, and I was an overhead camera looking over the field. Apparently that is where the plane was going to come down. There was a collection of off-road trucks to assist. This is where the plane sort of left the picture, though… instead I focused on the trucks and how they were trying to see who could drive/park on the steepest grade.


Sort of a strange ending, but there you go..

FxCop task for NAnt

Hey all… I have been recovering from a recent illness, so I figured I could be somewhat productive while watching tv… I figured that with my recent use of FxCop, it would be nice to have an NAnt task for FxCop.

I read some earlier posts that described some ideas for how to go about this, but it didn’t seem like anyone was actually doing anything. So, rather than re-writing the fxcop project structure, I chose to just wrap the exe. Also, I think this will help with compatibility down the road…

So, if you use FxCop and NAnt, it might be worth giving this task a try.

p.s. There is room for improvement. I was running low on battery power w/ my laptop, so I just pushed the working version to cvs. It would be nice to log a readable error code from FxCop, when it fails.

Owner’s mentality

I was reading my aggregated feeds the other day, when what do I come across?  A post by Paul Murphy that quoted one of my posts… I have to admit that it was a little weird coming across something like that.  Generally, I have always gone into this blogging thing as though no one reads my ramblings… Apparently there are some listeners, though.  I honestly have no clue who reads this, and I think I’m better off not knowing. 

Anyway, so it was pretty cool to read Paul’s take on what I had written.  I think he meant to call me a closet owner, rather than a closest owner, but maybe I’m mistaken.  How he summed up what I was trying to say, was pretty close to what I’ve been thinking.  I’ve always felt in one way or another that I’m not really cut out for the regimented daily routine.  I’m not saying that I can’t work for 12+ hours a day (length of time doesn’t really matter), but I wouldn’t be doing that on an assembly line.  I can definitely see pouring my heart and soul into something that I truly believe in.  At the same time, each day that passes is another that I’m not completely owning my environment.

I have sort of been lying low with the idea of becoming self dependent, with the hopes that I will come up with an idea that I know will work.  As I read more, though, it seems as though there are different ways to go about that.  Rather than trying to come up with a specific nitch or product, I like Paul’s recommendation with coming up with a direction.  I’m not a big fan of using the term goal – I think that they limit you to some degree. 

I do like the points Paul brought up relating to owners mentality:

  • Owners’ mentality says, "I can get someone else to do it for me."
  • Owners’ mentality says, "I can find a better way."
  • Owners’ mentality says, "I’m right even when I’m wrong, because I KNOW so. (flat-earthers were ‘right’ in their day)"
  • Owners’ mentality says, "I can do whatever I put my mind to because I can."
  • Owners’ mentality says, "I can. I can. I can. I can."
  • Owners’ mentality says, "It’s my fault when things go wrong, even when someone else did it for me."
  • Owners’ mentality says, "No matter what, I will not fail. When I don’t succeed, I will try again."
  • Owners’ mentality says, "Teamwork is a bunch of people doing what I say."

So, I’m going to spend some time and find out how I can change the world.  I do think there are things that need to be changed, and apparently it is possible for one person to make a difference.

I want to thank Paul for offering any mentoring about this subject.  I’m sure I’ll take advantage of that as the need arises, or if I find myself in a slump.

As a side note, I think that it’s pretty cool to be communicating across blogs like this.  It’s sort of like loosely coupled forum topics/posts 🙂

Btw, feel free to call my Jim, James, or any derivative of the name 🙂  I usually go by Jim, but sometimes it’s different for certain situations/people…

I know French…

Or at least I did in a dream that I had last night.  It was a pretty realistic dream, and I can definitely remember the latter part of it.  It involved me at a coffee bar of sorts.  At the point I can remember, I was talking to a waitress (I think) and got her number.  I had planned to go out with her within the next couple days.  Instead of leaving, I started talking to another girl.  This girl ended up being the roommate of the one that I first talked to.  This one spoke in French to me, however.  She was a French exchange person (not sure if she was a student or not).  So, I setup a date with her to – this time it involved a dinner that she was going to make for me.  Before I left the coffee bar, the first girl came up to me and said something like “If you continue to see [insert roommates name here], I will begin to hate you.” 


Very strange dream, but I guess it encompasses what is going on in my life.  Another part that I can remember is walking down a street that reminded me a combination of Brady & Water.  The catch is that it was similar to a side street near Brady, where there is a little deli/market, that I used to run down. It also reminded me of the part of Water street where Trocadero (sp?) is located…


Other than that, I was in Green Bay for the night.  I stopped up to visit some friends for the holidays, since I’ll be celebrating the winter solstice in Michigan this year. 


If you’re visiting Green Bay and looking for the best place to get the best [butter] burgers, or in my case their sea burger, head over to Kroll’s East or West locations.  I’ve gotten the same thing from that restaurant for as long as I can remember… Sea burger on a soft bun (no onions), cheese curds, bowl of chicken dumpling soup, and a chocolate malt….. mmmm…. so good.