NO MORE CAR PMT!!!

Well, I thought it would never happen... But, I have no more car pmt!!! FREEDOM!!! YAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!! :D

Quest for a new roomie...

Well, after some mad frantic cleaning (mostly on the part on Nikki who totally rocked cleaning things up) my "official" search for a roommate has begun. I say "official" because while I had adds out I just recently had my first real apartment visit. It went for the most part alright. I'm not sure if they'll wanna move in or not right now, the vibe was fairly... mellow I suppose.. But it was good. Best part, is the apartment was actually fairly presentable, thanks to Nikki!

Don't Google "How To Commit Murder" Before Killing

An anonymous reader alerts us to a murder trial in New Jersey in which Google and MSN searches were used against a woman accused of killing her husband. In the days before the murder, prosecutors say the defendant searched for "How To Commit Murder," "instant poisons," "undetectable poisons," "fatal digoxin doses," and gun laws in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Her husband was killed with a gun procured in Pennsylvania. The crime occurred in 2004; of course, people now know to be careful about their searches.

 

Wow... Thanks slashdot, you've made my whole evening... I can go to bed now...

Kaaa Booom!!!!

[0]eldavojohn writes "The BBC is [1]taking a look at how atomic physicists are developing cancer treatments. A step past radiotherapy, the CERN institute is publishing interesting results: 'Cancer cells were successfully targeted with anti-matter subatomic particles, causing intense biological damage leading to cell death.' [2]The press release from last year is finally sparking interest in the medical community."

Dude.. suddenly I want cancer... beam me up scottie!!!

Last bit o' MI gone...

Well, I've officially removed the last little bit o' MI from my stuff. My car was officially registered in NC today, so I have a brand new license plate, and since I was changing the plate I decided to go ahead and change my plate holder as well. So now all who drive behind me will know

Yee Be Warned - Dead men drink no Ale!!!

Hehehe, I love that plate holder, been meaning to get it on to my car for quite some time. I'm thinking about getting a front plate holder and possibly putting my MI plate on the front. But we'll see, I just spent $240 getting my car registered here so It'll have to be CHEAP! In other car news... I just got done making a $700 pmt on my car, so after I make my regular payment this month (next week) I'll officially have only one car payment left on this sucker. HOORAY!! $335/mo savings right there.

Also today, as part of my grand half day that I"m taking, I went to the Dr. for a general check up. It seems that for the time being, I'm not going to die, which I suppose is a good thing :) I did get some blood drawn, two vials in fact so for once I'll know how my cholesterol and such are. Well, I hope everyone else has had as much fun today as I have. Talk to you all later.

Open XML and reports...

Well, I figured I'd geek up my blog a little yet once again. I figure it's good to do every now and again.

So, our reporting system... No not reports as in "how many sales did we have", but the system that allows our customers to deliver final reports to referring physicians. As it turns out, our customers are super duper picky about these things my to my horror... In fact I've just spent the past week working on one of these darn things, and the work shall continue.

You see the problem is, currently we generate these reports by writing custom web pages (and for our faxing system write the same HTML to disk to be faxed by a 3rd party app). And for those of you who don't know, HTML isn't exactly the first format you would choose for publishing. In fact, I'd give it a dead last. It's insanely difficult to do the simple stuff, like get the darn system to page break correctly, automatically for reports that are stored in HTML.

So my idea? Actually, one I stole from my previous employer and improved upon. I'm currently working on a system which will allow our customers to create their very own custom reports inside of Microsoft Word (much better suited for this kind of stuff!). I will create a plugin for word which will add a new "ribbon" (if I've lost you, then you haven't seen Office '07) which will offer customers the ability to add any item to our system that makes sense for these reports.

Using this new docx template, the code I'm working on right now will extract the document file, look for our special tags which tell our system which items to fill into the report, then presto! Our customers get nice looking reports, and our programmers get none of the aggravation that goes into designing then redesigning several times over these darn things!

What makes this all work is the fact that the new word document format (extension docx) is really just a Zip file, inside of this zip file you find a bunch of XML (this is the x), image files that the doc might contain and whatever else. So the task of examining the doc and replacing our markers with good data is dead simple! In fact, I've even found a great Zip library that is licensed under GPL that does *exactly* what I need. If any one was looking for such a thing, you can find it at ICSharp Zip

So fun times playing with new stuff for me :D

The breakup...

Well, I had been seeing a nurse since October (as I've talked about before). That officially ended yesterday. So what happened? Not sure, but it was me... I kind of started pushing away from her. Why? I guess I can't say 100% sure, but it just wasn't working for me. I didn't quite feel connected to her. Perhaps it was the wrong time for me to be in a relationship. Perhaps there was just no chemistry. I don't know.

Honestly, over all I feel relived. To be perfectly honest, this one kind of needed to end soon, before Elizabeth and I ended up on bad terms (yes, I manage yet another breakup on decent terms). So we're going to be friends now rather than lovers, which is great, takes a lot of pressure off in terms of having to keep up with the expectations of a relationship.

Right now I"I'm taking a few days for my self. Just to chill a bit and such before I consider getting back in to the dating scene.

So what's next? Who knows... For sure there's a part of me that wants to find someone and settle down (there was even a part of me that wanted to go ahead and do that with Elizabeth even though things weren't working). But I can't do that. I've never been one to settle for anything less than what I want (call me selfish). So who knows right now. Frustratingly enough, I suppose I must grudgingly admit that in life, there are some things that really do just take time.

Apparently I'm an evil virus writer...

Ah yes... Today was a first... For some reason my AVG antivirus identified a very simple "Hello MPI" program I wrote back in college. For those of you who are not down with MPI (Message Passing Interface), it's a nifty library programmers can use to dedicate two computers to the same task and have them share their results. Neat stuff. But apparently, it's an evil spyware downloader according to AVG! LOL, apparently AV software developers have never place with Parallel processing :)