Matt, M.S.

I swear to God. I would do so many, SO MANY, illegal, horrible things to meet Lemmy.

I officially launched 'The Application' at the office on Thursday. The upper management of my firm and myself met with our first outside clients; many of whom happen to be in the military. When I found this out, I was really concerned that they wouldn't find the security of 'The Application' to be up to their standards. After talking over a few security concerns though, they easily agreed that my system would suit their needs just fine. I'm really confident in my work, and I'm glad that I was able to convince them of the same. We now have mulitiple projects with them! User accounts were created successfully, the email system worked just fine and information is starting to flow. 

Ugh. I don't know why my luck with Wireless N routers is so bad, but man, it is. My latest let down is Apple's Airport Extreme (Gigabit version). The setup was clean and slick as one would expect from Apple, but after many hours of configuring, reconfiguring, resetting, rebooting, and googling, I was getting pissed. It seems as though the AEBS cannot and will not forward UDP packets (most notably of which, DNS (Port 53 UDP) packets). While this is not a problem for 99.8% of the world, those of us that run our own internal DNS server are fucked. I've been a professional IT / Network / Programmer guy for a number of years and no matter what I tried, this thing was not budging. Most home networks use their ISP's DNS servers, but I have an internal DNS server that I need to use in order to use my home-hosted domains. So if you need to port forward any UDP ports from your router to a local computer, the Airport Extreme is not the router for you.

Sensing the need for a new toy, I figured it was time to update my old WRT54G to D-Link's DIR-655. I head over to Best Buy and grab the router off of the shelf. On my way to checkout, I happen to walk by the Apple shelf and notice the Airport Extreme is only $160! The Airport Extreme is normally $200! I grabbed that shit and headed to the register. The router ringed up as $200 + tax. I mentioned that I swore the tag said $159.99, and the clerk walked back with me to make sure. After he went and talked to his manager, I got an Airport Express at 20% off!

I had the extreme pleasure of sitting behind the person who delivered the opening keynote at php|works during another talk during the opening day. He has a pretty impressive list of accomplishments and projects, but the dude sat there with his buddy and made fun of the speaker during the entire talk. At one point they started talking out of turn, personally making fun of the speaker. I'm the proverbial class clown, but these guys were being dumb, and shitting on the their own bread and butter.

So half of the selections of 'Adult Entertainment' at the Sheraton Gateway Atlanta are of the young men / older women variety. I wonder who programs these channels? Kind of funny.

I'm about to head to the airport; I'm heading out to the php|works conference in Atlanta for the next couple days. Looking at some flickr photostreams from last year's conference, it seems like it attracts a good crowd—full of geeks and the ilk ;) I guess I might actually talk to random people, or I'll end up having a few Corona's back in my room as normal.

I have a beautiful wife, a nice new house, a job that pays very nicely that allows me to work from home with 100% reign over my work and gives me a free Treo 700wx, and I’m on track to earn my Master’s degree in three months.

What’s the odd feeling?

The feeling that life is passing me by, with a side dish of wasting my days. I have the achievements, but not the memories. My personality has always been to go nuts and focus on one thing at a time, and to focus on that thing until it is seen through, or learned absolutely. I think I need to now focus on life, instead of accomplishments—at least for a while.

Damn, I need a night out!

So the MSCS Capstone at Franklin underwent a change in the last term, from a traditional research project curriculum to more of a normal class. We are focusing on discussions on ethics and analyzing a research paper of our choosing. The final outcome is a few assignments and a short paper outlining our thoughts and criticism of the research paper we chose. 

A good number of students were upset that the capstone was changed. I’ve had mixed feelings personally. On one hand, it’s a hell of a lot easier than doing a traditional project, and part of the switch was that the capstone class’ length was halved. So, I get to graduate a full four months earlier than I initially expected. On the other hand, a capstone should be project based. It should be tough. You should have to jump though the hoops of finding and appeasing an advisor.

On the surface, I should be very happy that the class now has a much lighter workload. One nagging thing is in the back of my head is that if I go for my Doctorate, that process will be that more difficult. It almost feels like when I graduated from DeVry with my Bachelor’s degree. That curriculum was extremely light on mathematics; that was wonderful at the time, but set me up for a much more difficult time at Franklin. 

Ah hell, I’m not sure I’ll be going for my Doctorate at this point anyway. I’m sure in a few years I’ll be bored and figure why not, but at the moment, I’ll get along just fine being away from academia.

Just bought a copy of iWork '08 which includes Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. It's basically exactly what you would expect of a Mac office suite. Very clean, understated, and powerful. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Office 2007, but no one uses 90% of that feature set anyway ;)