Darthy.net

Archive for January, 2009

We have reached a milestone in Tom numbering. I forgot to mention this in my previous post but we reached Tom20. That’s right, I know so many Toms that I had to number them, and we’ve come to number 20. There are no less than 3 Toms at my new customer. I can tell you now already, I’m not naming my kid Tom ever … the world would not be able to handle it

And on a side note, R2V2 has done an excellent job on his first vacuum run. In the end I did put down some deliberate dirt and it was gone when I came home, hooray !

We have the iRoomba. He’s a curious little robot, going where no vacuum cleaner has gone before ! Henceforth he shall be known as R2V2 I’m going to give him a test run tomorrow, turn him on when I go to work and see how he does. I’d make the house dirty on purpose to make sure it’s a good test, but I’m afraid of dire consequences if Katrien sees

On Friday we met up with Ilse & Nick, it had been ages since I has last seen them. They came by to check out the house and then we went to dinner at Dimis here in Wetteren. Was great seeing them again, hopefully it won’t be another 2 years before we catch up. Ilse shocked me by telling me she actually has a computer at home now, even with internet. Miracles haven’t left this world yet I see

On Saturday I went to the guys for a LAN party. We mainly played Sins of a Solar Empire with the new patch. That game is really good but takes waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. We were still playing when it crashed at 3:30am. Poor Tom4 was exhausted the next day he actually let him self be pushed over in his kayak practice, I bet that hadn’t happened in quite a few years

Things at work are hectic, we have another demo coming up on Thursday. While I’m a big enthusiast of an Agile Programming approach I do think that a demo every 2 weeks is a bit much. It might show progress to the customer, but it also leads to bad (quick fixes) coding just to get the demo ready in time. A demo every 2 sprints or sprints of 3 weeks instead of 2 would be better in my opinion. But then again, I’m not calling the shots Other than that things are still great, nice team and interesting new technologies. The only thing we have to hope for is that I don’t fall asleep when driving the distance in the morning, why can’t cool projects be closer to home ?

To conclude, here’s R2V2

Since you’re seeing this page it means that I successfully upgraded to WordPress 2.7, yay ! Tried the automatic upgrade plugin and it worked like a charm, and from now on this functionality is in WordPress itself so it should be even less of a hassle now.

Second week at the new job is over, we had a demo on Friday of what we programmed in the past 2 weeks and it went rather good so I’m happy. As I feared, traffic is a bit worse than the week before but so far it didn’t take unmanageable proportions yet. Still in the morning it’s an hour and a half one way and that’s a bit too much in my opinion. Luckily the evening trip remains about 1 hour. We also moved to another office, we are now in the middle of the floor and it’s rather difficult to concentrate if you’re working on something hard since there is a lot of noise, I liked our old spot better

Other than that I didn’t do all that much this weekend. Went over to the guys for some PlayStation 3 and board game fun. We also watched a movie of which I forgot the title already, it was that good For the rest of the weekend I stayed home and did some chores (such as upgrading WordPress ).

Oh yeah an unfortunate thing happened to the USS Darthy Its front mist light is broken. I was driving home from work and it was rather dark, suddenly at around 120 km/h I saw an object in the lane I was driving, no idea what it was but it was rather big, there was no way to avoid it anymore so I hit it. Inspecting the car later I didn’t see any dents of scratches but didn’t notice the problem with the mist light since it is still whole but isn’t fixed to the rest of the car anymore. So I guess I have to go through the hassle of going to the garage and stuff. I guess I can be happy it wasn’t something more solid or heavier or I might not be typing this

We have the new TV ! Woohoo ! It took a while longer than expected though, so my recommendation is: do not use Splash Logistics for your packages, ever. I called them up several times asking when it would be delivered and they kept blowing me off (normally they have to deliver within 3 work days, it was already 12). In the end I called the shop where I bought the TV and they called Splash. 5 minutes later I got a phone call telling me they would deliver the TV the next day.

Well enough about the troubles, on to the perks ! It’s really awesome. I got it setup on Friday evening and immediately tried my new PlayStation 3 game: Motorstorm Pacific Drift. And oh boy is it great in all it’s high definition awesomeness. Colors are vibrant, blacks are black and no problems with motion like the big LCDs have. On Saturday Arwen & Kirsten brought the Blu-Ray of Ironman. It looked pretty sweet, I’ll definitely be getting everything on Blu-Ray now instead of DVD

Other than the TV, it was my first week at the new project. I have to say, it really does look interesting with all the new technologies we’re using. There’s LINQ to Entities, WCF, WPF, MVC and more (for all you .NET people out there, the rest can ignore the technobabble ). I’ll learn a lot no doubt. Traffic this first week wasn’t as bad as I feared. First day I drove through Temse since I figured I would have the least traffic there. Unfortunately they were still working on the bridge there so it took me 1 hour and 50 minutes one way The other days I drove through Antwerp which varies between 1 hour and 1 hour and a half in the morning and 1 hour or a bit less in the evening. However I have a feeling that I’ve had a bit of luck, maybe a lot of people are still on vacation or are not driving to work in the bad weather. Next week will tell me more I’m sure, let’s hope it stays the way it is. Again, wish me luck

Here’s a picture of the TV, isn’t she a beauty ? The picture sucks a bit but you get the idea

First and foremost, best wishes for 2009 to everyone ! I hope you all have a splendid year

Unfortunately my vacation is almost over, but it was a good one. I spent a lot of time just relaxing, playing on my PS3, leveling a bit in World of Warcraft (not as much as Katrien though ), catching up on some series, etc. The guys also came over for a LAN party which was fun (besides the fact that they made a complete mess of things :p ).

For Christmas I went to my dad’s since Katrien had to work the next day and she was going to bed early. The whole family was there so it was uber crowded. The first course was scampis with pineapple so that was pretty good. The main course was turkey but that wasn’t really my thing, but I had stuffed myself already with the scampis so no problem. I took 4 chocomouse desserts home with me, claiming they were also for Katrien … but she doesn’t like chocomouse, more for me ! *evil grin* (ok granted, I had sorta forgotten she didn’t, my bad )

After Christmas I had the magnificent idea to get ourselves a plastic Christmas tree … 75% discount ! So we’re all set for next year I was planning on putting it up for old year’s eve as well but it turned out to be too big a hassle for just the one evening.

Talking of old year’s eve, it was celebrated here now that Castle Jorn is complete. We were with 6 people in total; Els, Kristof, Chan, Dimitry and of course Katrien and I. Katrien had been trying out stuff to make for dinner that evening for like a month now, so she was well prepared. The only problem was, things were so yummy that by the time it was time for the main course everyone was stuffed. So we ended up playing a crazy dancing game on the Wii so everyone could work up an appetite for dessert. I’d post pictures but Els has threatened to kill me if I did … so sorry folks

On the 2nd of January we figured most people would still be visiting family, perfect time to visit the new big Ikea store here in Ghent. That plan can be summarized in 2 words: epic fail. It was so crowded it took us half an hour just to find a parking spot. And there were so many people in the store you could only move through at a pace a 100 year old would think is slow. We didn’t want to stand inline for ages at the register so we ended up not buying anything. Katrien looked at furniture to put our new TV in but … none of them was big enough (that got an evil grin from me though, but she wasn’t exactly thrilled ). The TV still isn’t here, darn Dutch transport companies who don’t work during almost the entire Christmas vacation !

Yesterday evening I went to Arwen’s to visit the guys. We were going to play a game of Descent (board game). We started playing at around 8 pm and ended at around 5 am. It was a fun game though, Jan was the Dungeon Master this time so I got to be a Hero … and needless to say, we emerged victorious ! It was pretty close though

Well that was my vacation, tomorrow I start working at a new customer. Curious how that’ll be, wish me luck