So close yet so far

Well the basement finishing project is making good progress.  Crystal mudded and painted a bedroom, so today I got to do my first laminate flooring installation.  Seeing as I was going to be cutting a lot of laminate which are in pretty wide pieces and also all the trim i'll have to install later I decided it was time for a mitre saw upgrade. 

I sold my old mastercraft (in 1 day, props to kijiji), and picked up a bosch 4405 10" sliding compound mitre saw.  I have to say it's an excellent saw.  It actually feels like you're using a professional tool as opposed to just a cheap tool that just gets the job done.  It's accuracy and adjustment controls are far superior to any other mitre saw i've ever used.

The install went quite well.  It took me about 2 hours to put down the underlay and lay laminate in about 3/4 of the room.  Then I got to the doorway and closed and it took me about 3 hours to get done the last 1/4.  Luckily I won't have to do any more closets in the basement and only one more doorway, so the rest of the basement should go fairly smoothly once it's ready.

Getting Started:

Done the easy part:

All finished

Just have to trim the underlay off the edges and put on the trim and it'll be all done.

Well we got our new SCRUM area set up recently and just started our first full scale sprint.  It's been a long bit of organizing and planning leading up to it and i'm excited to get our first sprint under our belts.  We've already learned a number of things and I can't wait to see how things shape up 3 to 6 months down the road. 

To complicate things further, not only are we moving to the the SCRUM project management methodology, but we're also simultaneously moving to Test Driven Development.  Figured we might as well do it all at once and get all the discomfort out of the way at once.  It's a big change in thinking to write tests first, a lot of old habits to break.  I have no doubt that it'll be second nature in no time.

Well xmas is almost here.  It kind of snuck up this year.  A few weeks ago I was buying presents and thinking about how long i was gonna have to wait before I could give them to people.  Now it's only 2 weeks away, and with the way things have been going at work lately that time will fly by faster than ever. 

The only thing i'm looking forward to as much as xmas is the 22nd of december, because it's officially the first day that is actually longer than the one previous to it, and that's the direction I want to see.  Enough of this dark after work business. 

Well we're back from edmonton after a quick whirlwind trip and have a lot of new stuff to show for it.  We headed out in my dads truck with plans of bringing back more than a car could haul.  We thought about just having stuff shipped back, but it's not nearly as much fun to shop when you don't get to play with your new stuff right away...

We decided that seeing as this was our "honeymoon" trip that we should splurge on the hotel, so we stayed in the polynesian room at the fantasy land hotel.  It was pretty nice.  We got it during a sale which made it affordable, however if we were to go back i would say just get a normal room with a jacuzzi in it instead.  Here was the room, it was pretty cool, but the jacuzzi was the best part.

We arrived on tuesday around 4pm so after checking in to the hotel we just walked around the west ed mall a bit looking in various stores for a while.  Then we called up Crystal's cousin Krista and her bf Kris (Chris and Crystal, Kris and Christa, ironic isn't it?) to see if they wanted to go out for supper, Jeff and Jessie also came out to the Olive Garden with us, also known as the best pasta restaurant chain there is.  We had a nice supper, then went out for a quick drink with Krista and Kris at a place called "The Beer Hunter".  Then they had to go home to bed, but not before I pointed how lame they were for having to work in the morning.

Wednesday was the big shopping day.  We went on a mini shopping spree at Home Outfitters where we bought: a set of pots, a set of corningware (glass caserole dishes), a solid maple cutting board, and various other trinkets that I can't think of now.  Gift cards are awsome because you can pay for stuff without feeling like you're actually spending money.  It's like you paid for it with magic.

Then for the big finale, we hit up ikea.  We figured this would be the stop that made a truck necessary, and we were not disappointed.  We ended up coming up with a new kitchen "baker table / rack" thing, and a new queen size bed frame, as well as some other smaller items.  The stuff turned out great.

Seeing as i'm posting about new furniture, for a wedding gift I bought Crystal a nice leather coffee table for out basement to go with the new couch we bought early this year.  It's pretty awsome, the top of each half of it can come off and flip over, and on the opposide side is a serving tray.  Under each of these is also a storage compartment for stuff.  I like it a lot, and crystal likes that my 360 controllers and "garbage" can now sit in a storage compartment out of site.

Once back in saskatoon we went out and ordered up a new mattress for our bed, and one of the microwaves that goes over your stove.  I've been using the same tiny old crappy microwave ever since moving away for school, and it still works but it's small and ugly.  You can't even fit a bag of popcorn in it properly.  So now it will get passed on to my sister when she moves to the city next year.  I'm sure i'll have pics up after that installation project gets underway.

Well, it's game over for me.

It's been a long month making sure everything was all lined up and ready to go, and it was all worth it.  The wedding came together and everything went great, i'm pretty sure everybody there had a great time.  

Anybody who ever tells you single guys that getting married never hurt anybody, it's all lies, LIES. 

This is what happens when you try to run away from your bride to be.  I only made it to the front step before crystal took a golf club to my foot.  I'm pretty sure i heard something like "lets see how well you run now" as i was writhing on the floor in pain.  Needless to say, I was unable to escape on one foot and the marriage went ahead as planned.

 I got a lot more emotional than I was expecting, but make no mistake, real men cry, and anybody who says different is gay.

Apparently women love to laugh at men who cry.  However it's ok, because they also sleep with men who cry.  So if you're laughing at me about it right now, well, enjoy your alone time in the bathroom later.

We got some really good pictures done after the ceremony. 

You can see all the photos here. (note, these were pictures taken by us, not the photographer, those pics will be available later)

Our photographer was awsome, I highly recommend her.  She's very friendly and accomodating, and is just very easy to work with.  She's also cheaper than a lot of other photographers which doesn't hurt hehe. 

It's not very often i post just to yap about an app, but i've been saying for the last 4 or 5 years how much it pisses me off that I can't sort icons in my taskbar.  It's ridiculous and stupid that it's not a built in feature of windows. 

Well the time has finally come!  I'm even going to make a donation to the developer, and i never donate, but this is worth it.

BEHOLD!
http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm

I can't believe how behind the times some companies are.  Crystal and I were out shopping for wedding things today, we were in the lawson heights mall around lunch time so headed to the food court.  I'm on a diet so wanted something healthy, and then remembered that there's a Grandma Lee's in this mall.  We headed over, Crystal ordered a clubhouse wrap and I ordered a turkey breast sandwich.

This is when things started to go bad.  The lady asked crystal what type of cheese on her wrap, she said cheddar.  I assumed she would ask me next so I just said i'll have swiss please.  The lady replied "ok but that will be 60 cents extra"

OUTRAGEOUS!

I get up to the counter, ask for a diet coke that we will share, she rings up our total, (we ordered nothing but a wrap, sandwich, and one diet coke., and it doesn't come with anything extra on the side), $16.

LUDICROUS!

I hand her my debit card, and she says "just so you know, there is a 25 cent charge for debit".

SCANADLOUS!!!!!!

Who charges extra for debit!  That's the most ass backwards thing i've ever heard.  I know some companies have a minimum charge for debit, but to just blanket charge 25 cents.

Suffice to say, I will not be going back there again, ever. 

I run a lot of applications on my workstation at my job, often having 10-15 apps open at once (that are in the task bar).  There's also numerous apps running in the background.  Previously my workstation had 4gb of ram so I wasn't overly concerned about how much memory all of those apps were using.  None of them use much of the available cpu resources so it's not a concern.  Well now i've migrated from a workstation with 4gb of ram to a notebook with 1gb, however I still run most of the same apps, except now ram is an issue because I only have 1gb, and i'm running vista instead of XP now.

2 apps are particularly bad offenders, especially considering what they are really designed to do. 

iTunes
iTunes is some real garbage I have to say.  For a company which runs around bragging about how much more usable and stable their apps are, they sure churned out a real piece of sh#t that they called iTunes.  It's a pain to manage your music, it's slow, it hogs a lot of ram, and top it all off it throws in a healthy dose of crashes.  It's really quite ridiculous.  I think the biggest mistake apple has made with all their gadgets is tieing them all to itunes.  I'd probably own an appleTV right now if you didn't need iTunes to manage your media for it.  I currently do own an iPod nano, and every time I want to update the music on it I have to hook it up to my fiance's laptop, because I refuse to install iTunes on my machine. 

Just give me a simple app that plays mp3's!

Windows Live Messenger
Messenger used to be such a nice simple app, back in the day of 4.0 etc that shipped with XP.  Then apparently they decided to go after the teenage girl market and started bloating it with all kinds of stupid features like animated emoticons and small video things you could send, nudges, games, advertisements, and a huge list of unnecessary features that i'm sure i've left out.  Also once again it consumes a lot of ram for an app that I just want to send messages with to colleagues (our office communicates a lot over msn).  I really love gtalk, and I wish msn would stay clean and simple like gtalk is.  However i can't change my whole office over.

Just give me a simple messaging app!

I can't take any credit for finding these apps.  One of my friends at work did the detective work to track these down, and i'm glad he did because not only do they use less resources, they are just cleaner and friendlier to use.

Billy
Enter Billy, a nice little freeware app for playing mp3's.  Basically you point it to an mp3 directory and it just loads them up.  It doesn't waste time reading id3 tags so it's extremely fast. There aren't really any frills and bows here.  It's simple, it's clean, and it WORKS.  It sits in the system tray out of my way, if I hover over it's icon it lets me know what song it's playing, it includes a shuffle feature, you can make and save playlists, and best of all it consumes less than 2mb of ram while running.  It has really good hotkey configurability as well.  I was easily able to configure the media keys on the front of my dell laptop to control Billy.

In case you missed the links there, the url is http://www.sheepfriends.com/?page=billy

Miranda IM
Miranda IM is a nice clean instant messenger.  It's an open source project so there are no advertisements in the app at all.  In it's base installed form, it is very basic.  It offers the ability to install support for all of the most popular protocols.  I just didn't install anything but support for msn and jabber, although I have yet to bother using it for jabber because I just love gtalk so i have no desire to replace it.  It was really easy to set up my msn account and get my contact list downloaded.  Miranda was set up really nicely so that additional functionality can easily be added through plugins, and because Miranda is open source, there are a LOT of plugins.  I was easily able to install a couple plugins to add support for the standard msn emoticons and avatars.  It feels a lot like gtalk in it's simplicity, with a lot of similarities to the way icq used to work, in fact it uses some of icq's icons.  Best of all, after running for 2 days straight, it's only using about 2.5mb of ram. 

Once again that link is http://www.miranda-im.org/

These 2 apps are definitely worthy of a shout out, and I give 2 thumbs up to both of them.  They do what they're designed to do, and they do it well. 

I ran across these on youtube today, brings me back to my days in Kelsey when I first saw them, which would be about 8 years ago already.

If you haven't seen these before, check them out, i'm sure you'll enjoy them as well.

WTF is with all the women wearing ENORMOUS sunglasses.  Just because the skank icon of the world paris hilton wears them now everybody has to wear them?

Newsflash ladies, they look like ass, and unless you "need" to hide your entire face, you most undoubtedly look better without them.

So i watched the 3rd movie in two different movie series lately, and I have to say they were both not very good.  They were spider man 3 and shrek the 3rd.

Spider Man 3

Spiderman 3 was not all that great, although it was alright.  I found that some of the plot didn't really make much sense, (spoiler alert) like how did topher get spiderman like abilities, specifically web flinging abilities when the black shit got on him?  It didn't give spiderman any new abilities, it just made him aggresive, i would assume it would have done the same for topher.  The plot line with the sand guy and his daughter was so loose it was more like a thinly veiled excuse to introduce the character to the movie.  They never talked about what he really needed the money for besides to help cure his daughter, and at the end of the movie you still don't have any idea what happens to him/her.  Maybe they're planning to branch off a new series for him.  They could call it "Sandman" and metallica could play the music for anti piracy clip before the movie in theatres.  So overall you will probably want to watch spiderman 3 if you liked the first 2, but don't expect to much.

Shrek 3

This was a real let down.  I think the only reason they made a 3rd movie was for the merchandise cash grab that would go with it.  The story was really lame, and it had to hurt that they got beat to the punch by "Happily Never After".  It's kind of like in "Bring it On" (yes i actually watched it) when they see another school do their dance routine, and it's exactly the same as the one they were supposed to be doing, and then find out they got scammed by a choreographer who was just teaching a bunch of schools the same routine.  Well i think some writer did that.  How embarrasing.  At the end of the movie I was left thinking "was that really it?", and yes, that WAS it.  Unless you have small children who don't care about anything but seeing a cartoon, i would just skip this one.

Well this was easily the nicest weekend so far this spring/summer.  The weather was awsome and I had plenty of excuses to be outside.

Friday night turned in to a lazy movie night.  I tried to watch an HD rip of deja vu but Crystal's crappy dell couldn't handle the bitrate it was encoded at (i assume that was it anyway).  We ended up watching "the holiday" instead which was actually pretty decent for a chick flick. 

Saturday was a work day.  I had to dig a drainage trench through the back of my back-yard.  I won't go in to details of why because it would result in a long winded rant about the city retards planners.  So we dug a trench (Crystal helped a bit, just enough so i have to say "we" did it), and it is a fabulous trench by my standards.  Once the trench was done and the dirt all put in the back of the truck I figured we needed to get rid of the dirt/grass somewhere, but where?  I sure as hell wasn't going to pay for getting rid of it at the dump, it's dirt, dirt that i already paid to have put in my yard when i bought the house!  So I decided that a ditch was an appropriate location for it, so we drove out of the city about 5 minutes on a small grid road, backed in to the ditch and shoveled it out.  Good times. 

However, in the process of bracing up the side of my trench so that my neighbours dirt/clay couldn't fall in to it under the fence, I got a pretty sweet sliver, and by sweet i mean painful, and by sliver i mean spike.

So far, so good for saturday.  In the morning before the trench digging, we actually went to home depot and spend a bunch of my our money on shrubs that will eventually hide the aformentioned trench.  I'm not planting these until the city has inspected the trench though, so these will likely get planted next weekend.  Seems pretty lame that my long weekend plans are to plant shrubs...

After all this work I was ready for a break, so seeing as it was finally a calm day, I mixed myself up a nice long island iced tea, fired up a nice cigar, and lounged on the deck for about an hour.  Now this is what I call summer.

In the late afternoon I went and filled up the chevelle with gas and took it for a cruise.  I was pleasantly surprised that a fill was $70, which was a full $10 less than I was expecting.  I had to buy gas 3 times this weekend, fill the prelude, fill the chevelle, and i needed $20 in the old truck before i used it to haul some gravel on sunday, so all in all I dropped $130 on gas this weekend.  While i was on my way to the gas station I happened to notice a garage sale with a decent looking papasan chair on the driveway, so i pulled in to take a look.  The chair was in nice shape so I asked her how much, she wanted $35, but this is a garage sale, I don't pay that kind of money for things at garage sales.  I offered her $20, she took $25, and I was happy, considering I just spend $150 on one of these for my mom for xmas, $25 is a pretty damn good deal :P  So here's my new chair, or should I say buddy's new chair....

Sunday was pretty slow, I watered my trees and hammered in some fertilizer spikes for them, finished up some stuff on the deck, and finally finished up my electrical in the basement so it could get it's final inspection.  Finished up the weekend playing gears of war with some friends which was a good end to things.  I'm finally starting to get a little better which makes things a little more fun.

Figured if i'm gonna brag about being able to sew I might as well prove it.

Here's my handywork, check out the quality.

And here's where the magic happens...