October 25, 2006 Finding out that you need to use firefox in order to use the web interface of the new backend system you will be supporting. The developers optimized it for firefox instead of IE. I think i am really starting to like this place more and more.
October 24, 2006 Well I am back down in North Carolina for one more week of training. The flight down was pretty uneventful and we got to actually spend the day wandering around downtown Charlotte. The city itself was pretty nice, not as big as say Chicago or Boston. But it’s bigger then Buffalo. I wish I had brought a camera with me for taking pictures, but you know what they say about hindsight. I can’t wait till next week. It’s my first vacation in in a long time. I am starting to put together a list in my head of things that I want to get accomplished that week. I have a bunch of smaller projects that I can knock out in a few hours that I want to get done. Plus I want to spend a lot of time with Amanda. She started her new rotation in Radiology(sp?) and gets done around noon. Plus next week it is her birthday, so mark the 30th down as a national holiday. Well time to get my crap together and meet the guys downstairs.
October 20, 2006 I haven’t been posting much lately. Alot of things have been happening, some bad and some good. First we are going to start with the good parts. Our department at work have been picked up as full time employees now and are going to be no longer transitional employees. I used to work for the former Adelphia Cable company. We had been bought out by Comcast and Time Warner Cable last year and when the sale went final all of the people my department were only transitional employees for up to 6 months. Well that changed and now I do not have to worry about finding a new job anymore. I am very grateful for this opportunity to work with a really awesome company. Because of now being a full time employee. I been in North Carolina for the past couple of days as part of a two week crash course in the new stuff we are going to be supporting at work. I got a shiny new work laptop out of the deal (fully loaded Dell Latitude D620) and a chance to meet some really awesome people down here on the Charlotte campus. My buddy Nick tied the knot recently with his awesome wife Ashley. They got married down in Vegas and we were able to watch the wedding through a webcast (how geeky is that?). On the other hand things have been not so great at home. We got hit with that mess of a storm last week which took out our power till Tuesday evening. We basically had to evac out to Amanda’s parents with all our critters. Plus we lost everything that was in the fridge and freezer. When I get back home we have to do a lot of grocery shopping, and transport all the animals back up to the apartment now that the power is back up online. In addition to that things are not going so well with my family right now and will practically be changed forever. I really don’t want to get into it too much, but things are not looking good. Amanda has been keeping things together on top of work/school and getting people the help they needed while trying to juggle everything else. I feel absolutely horrible that I am down here doing the work thing while she is back home cleaning up the mess. I really wish I could have been there to help out. This weekend is going to be busy with getting the fridge restocked, getting the animals back home, and trying to get the family thing straightened out. Then it is back down to NC for another week of training.
October 9, 2006 I was checking out my RSS feeds this morning and saw a blurb on Sector40 about a site called netcocktail. Basically what the site does it has a gallery of CSS based websites and shows what color swatches the site uses. One thing I noticed about most of the sites is that they all used no more then 3 to 4 colors for the entire thing. To me this is pretty interesting stuff and its amazing as to what can be accomplished with a simple color pallette. I been trying to learn webdesign/design in general more lately and have been struggling alot with colors and how to use them in design. Just by looking at some of these examples I can now get a better understanding of how color is being used for what elements.
October 2, 2006 Well last week I heard the best news in a long time. We found out that our department is saved and that we are no longer transitional employees and are now going to be full time perm. For the first time in 6 years I am now working with a stable company that has their shit together more then any other company I have worked with. Another neat thing is the scope of the work we will be doing is going to change. Seems like I am going to using more of my Linux skills then before plus I am going to need to know Oracle on top of all the cable stuff i know. This is some exciting times and feels like there has been a great weight lifted.
