Agents of Empire

Seeing as it’s now mid May 2011 and my last update was made in October 2010, figure I should put something here. (continue reading…)

… for reals this time.

So just a quick update to say I’m still alive. I’ll post more when I get my new system in. I’ve been converted to Apple, so my next post will be from my new MacBook Pro.

So, I've been growing lax on my commitment to keep this site updated at least on a weekly basis.  Time is moving so very fast these days.  I've been waking up earlier and sleeping less, but the days seem to feel so much more shorter.  Part of it is that I've been so absorbed with this C/C++ class that I've been taking.  The other part of it has been the exercise … though I've been struggling to keep the motivation on the exercise.  I've resolved myself to not sit at the computer first thing in the morning.  I need to knock out the running and the exercise when I wake up.  There can be no exceptions anymore.

I had my first taste of the P90X exercise regimen this past Friday. I think I'm in love with a program and I'm very interested in picking up the DVDs … I still feel a little tight from the workout but I'm looking forward to doing more.  This Tuesday I'll be meeting up with my recruiter to work on my APFT.  I'm worried, but I have until May 18th to get myself into shape.  Right now I'm hoping to meet 50% … I'll be pushing it with my push-ups and sit-ups, but it's not that far from where I'm averaging now.  The running, on the other hand.  I'm having issues controlling my breathing which is leading to early fatigue.

Gaming has come almost to a complete halt. I seem to only play WoW on the weekends anymore – mostly because by the time I'm done with school, it's already 9PM and my wife is usually done with putting baby to sleep by then. Monday is my RPG night, but even that's been intermittent because my recruiter seems to like to schedule everything on Tuesday. Not that I'm really complaining … it's just interesting to note that I don't play as much as I used to.

I've gotten as low as 219 recently while my high is around 224.  I fluctuate five pounds, which I suppose is normal.  I find it discouraging at times when I realize that I've gained weight since I started exercising.  I've gone from 217 to 228, now I'm back down to 222-ish.  Enough of that.  I need to get some rest since I'm going to wake-up at 0800.  Here's a couple sites to keep myself focused on those things that I need to improve upon.

Breathing Tips

• http://www.essortment.com/lifestyle/properbreathing_sbnd.htm
• http://www.the-fitness-motivator.com/breathing-exercises-for-running.html

Exercise today didn’t go exactly as planned. I’m balking at the sprinting and I’m not exactly quite sure how to motivate myself. I had originally thought that game time should be considered, however, my gaming has been virtually eliminated and replaced by my tinkering with C++ coding. How exactly do I “moderate” this when it’s not just entertaining for me but it’s also for my current college course.

Mona and I did end up going to Tae Bo. Oddly enough, as I was working my shoulders last night, tonight’s Tae Bo class was all about the shoulders and the legs. Funny how that works. Last week Thursday I decided to do as many sit-ups as my body would allow, that Friday we do abdominal work … Tuesday I decide to do as many chin-ups as I can do, Wednesday was shoulder work. My muscles are planning a revolt … I can sense it.  All in all, it was a very nice 60 minute workout, regardless of the complaints being made by my shoulders.

So, I still need to figure out my motivation. If I can’t find the discipline now, I’ll be in for a rude awakening when I can’t quit. Tomorrow I need to do 10 push-ups / 10 sit-ups / 5 chin-ups — should be pull-ups, I know, but they’re causing me too much trouble … I really hope my shoulder’s don’t decide to go on strike on me. Friday, I’ll attempt to do the 5 reps of 4 minutes walking/2 minutes running for 30 minutes of activity … and then Saturday I’ll give the sprints an attempt … I just need to figure out where I can do them.

May 18th, 2010 is the new date set for my ship out to Basic Combat Training. My contract has been renegotiated and I will be moving on to my chosen career path. Words cannot describe the overwhelming sense of relief that washed over me when I left MEPS yesterday. Honestly, I wouldn't be happy with my life in the military if I were a cook. Not that it isn't an important career – however, cooking and computing are two vastly different skill sets. In one, I have nearly 30 years of practical experience … in the other I have practically no good experiences. No, cooking is not a demeaning job … but I was a cook once at McDonald's and found myself disgusted with life … the only good that came of it was that the pay was tremendously superior to my weekly allowance.

So now that I am going down this path, I will be changing my major in UAT to Network Security. Of course, after I finish this current course – C/C++ Programming I. This class is just so much fun – the geek in my has been writhing in so much ecstasy that it has been extremely difficult to conceal my dorkgasms. We're already into our third week and while I'm lagging a little behind on the reading, I'm enjoying every moment of this class … more so than the entire year, last year. Coding seems to complete my soul in such a way that DJing has definitely taken a back seat … yes, really.

I also ran across some of my mother's writings today. There are so many similarities in the manner through which we see the world – it's uncanny. I miss my mom … I really miss being able to talk to her about life in general and it breaks my heart to know that my daughter will never know the greatness of the character whom her name is derived from. I didn't get depressed … but I did feel the empty pang in my heart for awhile …

My daughter is walking now … has been for over a week. It's crazy how these skills just seem to sprout overnight. She still isn't talking but she does understand distinctions in verbal intonation as well as reacting to a few simple commands (Hello, Goodbye, Arms Up, Arms Down, Where's Dada?, Go to Mama, Get your wahwah) … I really hope that I'll get to hear her make some simple Neanderthal sentences before I leave for Basic, but that may be expecting a bit much. We all want our children to be intellectually superior than every other child … I want mine to make me feel stupid with her powers of reasoning and recall like a couple of my friends do … though, I suppose, I should be careful for what I wish for.

So with the change in dates on my boot camp ship out, I've also decided to reboot my physical training regimen.  I'm still going to Tae Bo on Wednesdays and Fridays, however, I've decided to start over on my Pre-BCT Walk to Run PT schedule. I've swapped to Training Schedule #2 which, surprisingly, is very similar to the regimen that I'm on now BUT it reboots the running portion. The reason why I rebooted, really, is so that I can actually do the regimen as intended instead of my modified version which only had me going around the nearly mile block once … I need to go around at least twice which would condition me to run over a mile and closer to that two miles.  The block is about 0.7 miles which means twice around is only 1.4 miles … which means, really, I should be making three laps for the 2.1 miles.  If I can shoot for 17 minutes 30 seconds, I'll be good to go.  So to track my progress I'll be writing a daily entry.

Thursday last week I was able to pull out 30 sit-ups and 20 push-ups. Unfortunately, the next Curtis decided to do an abdominal workout … Yikes, that was painful. Yesterday I did 20 push-ups and 25 sit-ups.  Today I did 10 push-ups, 10 sit-ups, and 5 chin-ups.  Tomorrow I'll need to start doing my sprints and then later I have Tae Bo.  So I'll need to do my sprints soon after waking up so that I can be some what capable of keeping up with Curtis' class … things have been getting crazy over there.

Sunday was a rather eventful day for me. Aside from nursing a rather light hangover from the previous night’s festivities, my day was devoted to a rather interesting encounter with my computer hanging itself.  No, it didn’t try to commit suicide, however, it did force my hand on reinstalling the Windows 7 Professional that had previously installed with no hiccups. While I’m not at all certain as to the cause of the hang, my assumptions revolve around running two IDEs while modifying a single file … and a ninja update that happened while I had both IDEs open during a Microsoft Security Essentials Scan … oh, and I turned off the computer because everything had apparently froze when I tried to close out Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional. Far fetched, however, Microsoft is notorious for having the weirdest glitches.

2100 Sunday evening was my deadline for the homework that I needed to turn in for my C/C++ Programming I course. So, at 1900, when several attempts to run the Startup Repair and System Restore utilities both failed to grant me entry into my Windows 7 Professional box, I made the decision to reinstall the operating system and applications.  2030 arrives and I’m finished installing the operating system and by 2100 Ninite has installed all my preferred open source applications.  I also had Visual Studio 2008 Professional reinstalled, however, I ignored a particular error because it didn’t seem as though it would’ve interrupted my ability to get my homework turned in … besides, I ran a repair and it indicated that nothing was amiss.

So, homework is turned in an hour late. No sweat … a mere 5 points off my perfect score of 100 otherwise. Nice to know that all these years casually reading the books worked out just fine. I turn in afterwards as I let Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007 install – blissfully unaware that my IDE was b0rked.

0800 rolls around and I groggily return my beloved digital companion. Today, I decide to read up on this week’s reading assignments and follow along by inputting the code myself and tweaking with the exercises.  All was going well until I decided to compile the example.  “Error spawning ‘rc.exe’” was the ominous message in my compiler’s output dialog. A quick hop to Google.com revealed to me that somehow I needed to get ‘rc.exe’ into my application search path. “No problem,” I thought to myself, I’ll just search my system and add those directories to my environment … “File rc.exe not found” … great. And then it dawned on me, the install didn’t complete properly.

It’s now 2130, 24-hours since I technically got this system back on its feet and still no Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional. This ominous error with Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5 for Devices is still happening and none of the resources on the ‘net has been of any help. The install is currently going on, I finally came to the conclusion that I will attempt to download each package that fails to install and see if that will help at all … here’s to hoping my VS2008pro will work.

So, I've made the plunge to Windows 7 Pro.  Install of the operating system was, in fact, painless.  It seems like yesterday I was dinking around with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and coping with the headache that was the config.sys and autoexec.bat files that were necessary to load the correct drivers for the CD-Rom drive, RAM drive (if it was necessary), mouse, joystick, special keyboard, graphics board, and a myriad of other necessary settings to get the most out of the system.  In comparison, these setups are virtually a godsend … but they do feel considerably dumbed down.

What promtpted this change? Curiosity, mostly.  The other major change that this OS install is moving to a 64-bit OS and as odd as it sounds, I want to know first hand any oddities that are brought about by using 32-bit applications in a 64-bit environment.  In the process, I did find a nifty website Ninite.  Ninite allows a user to select from a collection of popular open-source or freeware applications to create a bundle that will be downloaded and installed automatically.  Another, rather painless procedure for a task that would've taken me a better part of the morning to complete.

I'm currently installing all my development apps:  Visual Studio 2008, Code::Blocks w/ MinGW.  Ninite already installed Python and the JDK.  Next on my list will be to install World of Warcraft and the millions of patches that come from that.  To follow will be to transfer back some of my documents so I can finish out this week's worth of schooling.

Browser: Firefox v3.5.7 (released 01/05/2010)
Web Software: WordPress 2.9.1 (released 01/04/2010)

Problem: After updating both the browser and the CMS software, it appears that adding a new post or editing an existing post causes the browser to reload. The result of this reload is a bar of web form buttons akin to those used when viewing the HTML of the post.

Current Workaround: Use Google Chrome for posting.

UPDATE (01/06/2010) – Tinkering with the plug-ins revealed that the Myspace extension was messing things up.  Disabling Myspace & the OpenID extensions resolved this issue.  Also, updated the default post/page editor with FCKEditor.

It’s already day 5 of 2010. This weekend sort of blew past me and Monday continued to be intense with my continued conditioning, tae bo, and my weekly geeky ritual. So what’s now Tuesday has been spent vibrating at the speed of life … fueled by caffeine. About two weeks ago I stopped drinking soda and started to drink a lot more water supplemented with orange juice. If I could stomach it, I’d drink more milk … it’s not that I’m intolerant of milk in the physiological sense … more that I’m intolerant of the taste and texture of the fluid. I know … let it out …

… are you done laughing?

Okay, so yeah … I stopped drinking soda for the most part which also means I’ve cut out caffeine in my daily regimen. So, I woke up tired today which prompted a desire to drink coffee. I make my coffee fairly week – 1/8 cup to 4 cups … but damn. I’m only now recovering from the buzz I got from drinking just four cups of coffee … I sorta felt strung out which prompted a rather anti-social reaction to today’s activities. So, instead of calling and talking to people like I had wanted, I decided to learn how to create logon scripts to map networked drives (admittedly, in an insecure manner). I know, not entirely significant since all systems administrators should know this already, but it was a little win for me since I designed the script to be slightly intelligent in mapping resources to the necessary drives and making sure those drives weren’t already mapped to something else. The more significant revelation is that in my attempt to distract myself from the fact that I felt completely disconnected from the world around me due to my caffeine buzz, I become extraordinarily focused and experimental with tools that I’m not completely confident in using quite yet. I suppose I’m just happy to have been able to learn something through trial and error and actually produce something useful.