Entries for the 'Personal' Category

My grandma died at 4:30 AM this morning. It wasn't unexpected, but it is still leaves me feeling sad. I got a call from my father this morning letting me know that it happened. I talked with my mom afterwards, and she seemed quite upbeat.

Grandma Petra had a stroke a while back, and my mom has been taken care of her (Petra is my mom's mother). My mom was really sad that her mom was in such condition. I think we all feel a sense of relief that she's not suffering anymore.

I did get to talk to Abuelita last week on the phone. That was the first time since her stroke that she sounded lucid. I knew that was going to be the last time I would be talking to her.

I did not want to hold this in, and talking about it here gives me a sense of closure. I hope that Abuelita finds Braulio, her husband, soon on the other side.

One good thing that I got as her legacy is a warm feeling towards blonds. She was naturally blond, so that's where I get that. ;) It took me a long time to figure that out. Thanks Abulelita!

My employer's, The Generations Network (TGN), headquarters are in a very nice location. We are surrounded by mountains on 3 sides. I took some pictures with my new T-Mobile Shadow. The camera in this baby is much better than any of the other phones I've ever had. Almost better than the digital camera that we own too!

I put the pictures on their own page, so that they don't bog down the blog. Click on the title, then select the link that says "Next Page."

My workstation is finally back to "normal." I ended up having to get a new motherboard and cpu. This was frustrating because I had to change from AMD to Intel. All of the PC part stores have closed in my area. PC Computer and CompUSA were the biggest ones out here. Makes me wish we had a Fry's over here.

I didn't want to wait a week and a half to have something else mailed to me, so I went to a local reputable computer builder. I went to PC Laptops. They hooked me up with an Asus  P5QL-EM mobo, and an Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 (2.53 GHz) cpu.

Total damage to my wallet was $383.56.

The most aggravating thing was that in the end, it was a flaky DIMM that caused all of the trouble. So now, I have a perfectly good AMD cpu and MSI mobo sitting on my office.

I now have an Acronis True Image with all of my stuff installed. So when this happens again, and you can bet that it will happen again, will get me going in about an hour.

Well, I got the hard drive yesterday. I got home from my day job and found it on my chair. Wife put it there before I got home.

So, I unpack the critter and install it in my rig. I turn it on... no POST message show on the screen. WTF?!? So I spent my evening plugging in components on the motherboard. I took a break to watch Ghost Hunters, then back to tinkering.

No luck so far. My next step is to unscrew the motherboard, and see if there is something shorting it. I did notice that I got some electrical shocks when I turned my rig on. Not all the time though.

If this fails, I'll have to spring for a new mobo. Not what I wanted. Oh well!

Well, I had another hard drive die again. It's always the system hard drive, where the OS is installed. The boot disk sector and the partition tables are corrupted. I tried all of my recovery tools, but that drive is toast.

I took lunch time today to go drive through the local stores. There was nothing for under $119 on the shelves. All I need is a lousy 150 gig hard drive! So, I finally order the hard drive online at Office Depot. Total came to $54.41 for a 250 gig hard drive. Free shipping, wheee!

So, I'm basically dead in the water until I get this delivered, and install the OS. So what should I use this time? Vista 64bit, Vista 32bit, or XP 32bit? I'll like to go Vista 64bit, but I haven't checked if all my essential tools work with it.

My last living grandma just had a stroke. Her right side is paralyzed, and she's having a hard time talking. She is 87, and we don't know if she's going to make it. My mom flew down to Puerto Rico to be with her. I haven't been back there since we moved to the Western US back in 1982.

I last saw her about about a couple years ago, when she came up to visit my parents in New Mexico. I make a habit of calling her about once a month. I didn't get to call her this month before this happened. She's the first family member that I feel close to that has been in harm's way like this. I wish I could fly down to Puerto Rico and be with her in case she doesn't make it. I don't have any extra money, so I'm stuck here in Utah. The hardest thing to take is knowning that I'm one of her favorite grandkids and that I probably won't be there for her.

Life is not bad most of the time, but at times like this, it surely sucks!

I have chosen September 6, 2008 as the current tentative date to release PainlessSVN 1.0. The actual hands-on work is less than a month to complete, but life has a way to interfere with my plans.

I had to take into consideration my slow recovery from cataract (eye) surgery. I still get pretty tired by the time I get to work though. My eye doctor doesn't want to get me a new prescription until at least 3 weeks after the surgery. I'm on my second post-surgery week. I'm finally down to only one medication (from 5). I'm still getting some really fierce headaches every day. That's the number 1 reason why, I'm not coding more at home, after work.

I've also taken into account family obligations. Thankfully, I'm not doing any moonlighting, so I have more free time. My wife got a job closer to home, so I'm carpooling with her. My parents will be visiting us this week. They haven't seen my family since I got married almost 8 years ago.

I've been getting myself ready to code at home, by working to fix small bugs and usability in the free utilities. I've only been able to concentrate for about 25 to 30 minutes at a time, in between headaches.

I wanted to put out a public date, so that I will push myself to get this thing out the door.

I'm sorry that I have been silent for a while. I have been prepping for my eye surgery for a while, and finally had it this Tuesday.  I had a cataract removed from my right eye. Recovery had been made more difficult than usual, because I had scar tissue from a long lasting Iritis.

I have been putting 4 different kinds of eye drops, four times a day as part of my post-op treatment. I have to wait 5 minutes between each drop. All of the pain medication that I'm taking has made me woozy. Also, my right eye now sees better than my left eye, and my eyeglasses need the lens changed. It makes looking at any screen a chore.

I'm finally all moved into my new home office, so at least that's taken care of.

I know that a lot of you have been anxiously waiting for PainlessSVN to finally come out. I'll finish what's left, once my eyeglass prescription is fixed. It's sort of disturbing to look at the screen with my old prescription, and very hard to get much done.

The first couple months of 2008 have been quite miserable for me physically. I was having bad headaches and/or migraines every day. It got so bad that I ended up taking up to 6 Excedrin Migraine pills a day. I kept going to the local InstaCare (a non-emergency medical service), but the doctors there did not know what was wrong. Thankfully, one of the doctors gave me Ambien, so that I could at least get some sleep.

Now that I wasn't totally exhausted, I was able to formulate a plan to help me get to the bottom of the headaches. I first removed foods as the culprit, by eating only beef jerky, Gatorade, and water for about a week. I then started looking at stuff like tooth paste, deodorant, shampoo, and hair gel. I went without these for a day.

I first introduced tooth paste. Nothing happened. I introduced my deodorant, and nothing again. Then I introduced the last shampoo, and BLAMO!, nasty headache. I was using both Garnier Fructis with moisturizer and Neutragena T-Gel with scalp treatment. I only tried the Nutragena one, but that was enough to convince me to try Johnson's Baby Shampoo. No headache with the baby stuff. I then tried the hair gel, and BLAMO! again. So I switched to a pomade from Fantastic Sams that only has beeswax, honey, and raspberry. No headache. Whew, relief at last!

Apparently, I've become more sensitive to chemicals than I was before. These two things didn't give me headaches before. Looks like I'm becoming allergic to the modern world. Oh well, now that I'm somewhat back to normal, I can get back to working on the products on this website.

Well, I'm sorry to say that I've been sick with food allergies and reactions to smog. This has been a nasty one-two punch. I haven't been able to concentrate on finishing the last 10% needed to get PainlessSVN out the door.

I have a constant headache, that occasionally spikes into migraines. I'm totally exhausted when I get home from my day job. This means that I've been using the weekends to catch up on my sleep. I started taking some pancreatic enzyme replacement pills to help with the food allergies, but there are a few things that really make me sick, even with the enzymes. Some specific products with wheat have made me really sick this week. My twin daughter made some Valentine's sugar cookies. I tried one from each of their batch. Bad move! I had a very nasty migraine and nausea today. So bad that I had to leave work, and sleep in a darkened room.

Oh well, just wanted to let people know why there wasn't any movement with PainlessSVN or any of the other utilities.