BunkBlog

Just a couple quick and dirty animations. I’ll try to get something better later…

In case anyone else likes the show a little bit. 🙂

It looks like my idiot neighbor with the insanely barking dogs has moved out. There’s a fella wandering around the house taking photos, which is usually a good sign that they’ll be renting it or selling it soon. Of course, the moron taking the photos parked his Mustang partway into my driveway. It would be a darned shame if I accidentally scraped his bumper off when I back out of the driveway. A true shame.

My birthday is tomorrow, so if you’re looking for a present, this would be a good choice. C’mon!

Anyone else remember a short-lived television show named Stingray from the late 80s? Black 1967 Corvette Stingray, with chrome trim on the sides to make it look more like a shark than it does naturally… Oh, yeah.

This is your weekend update, with your anchor… Oh, never mind.

We’ll be gone this weekend, doing the “drive to the airport” thing which only people in the middle of nowhere Texas associate with a two-day ordeal of roads and hotels. The end result is that I won’t be online until Sunday afternoon. It’s shocking, I know – Gary away from the computer for over 24 hours; however will I survive?

I’m told I’m not supposed to eat Cool Ranch Doritoes and drink Mountain Dew all month while they’re gone. Sure, right. 🙂

I am a member of 1 clique of size 6

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I’ve recently been accosted by some certification companies, and it got me to thinking of the future. IT security is a growth industry, with (according to ISC2) has 12 jobs for each qualified applicant. Combine that with a TS clearance with SBI, it seems that CISSP certification might be a good idea. Just thinking of positioning myself for future opportunities, not planning to move again anytime soon (egad, not again!).

So, anyone know the inside scoop on security jobs? Is the work shitty, are the hours crazy, is it a good deal or not? I’m looking at an average salary over *twice* what I make now, and that’s something I have a hard time ignoring. Taking care of my family is important, and it seems like the job might be interesting, if or when I get there someday.

Now that I’ve settled into a decent WordPress and LJ combined posting system, there’s one more item to address. Those of you reading this via Livejournal, would you prefer to have the separate LJ commenting system as it is now, or would you prefer to jump into the main comment setup on my site (as demonstrated by the link at the end of each dual-posted item)? I’m flexible, but I know some of you are hidebound and anal. 🙂

I’m attempting to use the LJ-Synch plugin again. Let’s see if it’s working now.

What this means to you: adding the feed to your friends list should no longer be necessary, as I’ll be able to synch new posts between my site and . Kind of neato keen.

After I backup the Movable Type database to a flat text file, I’m going to nuke the MT database off the server, as well as the 20 megs of archived HTML. One big benefit of WordPress over MT: No redundant files. Every time I update the blog, MT rebuilds something that takes somewhere between 30 seconds and 10 minutes, depending on what it interacts with. The HTML that gets served up is prebuilt for the viewers, so that saves an SQL hit, but it incurs a lot more PHP time for each rebuild, so I think the space and time savings with WP will be better overall. We’ll see. Since I’m backing everything up, if I get a wild hair and want to go back to MT, I can. If I can get the LJ plugin to work in WP, I may not even look at switching away from the Open Source WordPress anyhow. Open Source is my friend.

Further adventures in culinary achievement…

One more experiment down, Hasselback Potatoes last night. They turned out ok, but not really worth the time it took to make them. This is actually about the same as the Orange Marsala Hens, which were quite yummy, but not appreciably better than the $5 whole roasted chicken from the local grocery store.

On the up side, the raspberry cheesecake brownies are fantastic, and a big hit at work today.

I’ve been making recipes from a magazine I’ve recently subscribed to. Last night, meatball subs with homemade (baked!) meatballs. They were quite yummy and about 18 pounds per sandwich. Tonight, we had steak grillades on pepperjack noodles. Tomorrow, orange marsala hens.

I’m very happy with my cooking this week. 🙂

I know all my readers (that is to say, both of you) are waiting anxiously to find out what happened since my last school post.

You’ll be happy to hear that my final final was graded finally. Somehow, a percentage grade of 86% for the class (96 on the final, thank you very much) ended up giving me an A in the class. I didn’t think college classes had curves. If you write your curriculum correctly, there is no need to have curves. Take an instructional systems design class and get things straight.

Anyway, that keeps my GPA where it was when the semester started: 3.666 – I have the GPA of the beast. If I get at least a B in my summer class (I’ve never gotten below a B in any UMUC class), I’ll be on the Dean’s List in the fall. Isn’t that exciting? Nah, not to me either. That BS in the spring of 2005, though…

In the last two days, approximately seven million flies have appeared on our dining room floor. They seem to have come out of nowhere to die in our house. I believe that it is all part of an insectoid suicide pact. I picture a tiny messianic figure and itty bitty barrels of koolaid.

As I mentioned earlier today, the instructor in Romania posted my grade. This evening, the instructor in the Dominican Republic posted my grade (only a B this time).

I took three tests in one week, the first on Monday, the others Wednesday and Thursday. Which one is not posted? The one from Monday, which is the only one that didn’t get sent to another country to be graded. Amazing.

I took three classes last semester, all online. One of the teachers is in Washington state, one in Romania, and the last in the Dominican Republic. The finals were all taken in one week, with the Washington one first and the Romanian one last. One test has been graded so far, and I’m sure you can guess which one it is. That’s right – Romania.

I shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of urgency from the Washington instructor – it was evident throughout the semester. I wrote about him previously. The test which had to travel the farthest and which was mailed latest is graded first. Go figure.

In good news, it was an A. 🙂

Holly has been taunted and harassed by the blue jays who are living in our pecan tree. They dive at her, and she thinks she can catch them. She has a very small brain.

I am taking three classes this semester, all online. Two of them have responsive and personable instructors. The third actually has a teaching team consisting of a professor and TA. You would think this would make it the most responsive of the lot. Nope.

Two days ago, the professor posted that our grades from the last assignment would be posted that night, as well as the solution. Still nothing.

I wish I could say I’m surprised, but it’s completely par for the course. It has taken 5-15 days to get a response to a question, the book is bizarrely useless, the online forums have only the vaguest relationship to the course objectives and none with the book, etc.

I fully expect the final to be written in ancient Greek and Aramaic, and consist entirely of electronic engineering problems (it’s not an engineering class) dealing with combinations of dilithium crystals and unobtanium produced under intense pressure in a low-gravity environment.

Please just let me get a passing grade so I get reimbursed for tuition. Horrible class.

My cow-orkers tend to say some absurd things that they think make sense. Here are a couple from this week.

“I’m ok with Word until you get into the advanced features. How do you delete a page break?” Um, yeah. That’s not really advanced so much as it is blatantly obvious. DELETE key ring a bell?

“I don’t run an antivirus because it would be a step backward for me. As a programmer, I know how things propagate and I’ve got a good router.” Sure you do. The magical kind of router that is not only a stateful packet sniffer but stops trojan horses and updates itself automatically to prevent file corruption on all computers attached to it. Fantastic technology.