Christmas (and Finals) is in the Air

It's been a couple weeks again and as always a lot has happened. Last Saturday on the 3rd of December I went to a friend's wedding reception in South Jordan and after I met up with my good friend Matt Snider from the mission. It's always good to see Matt and chill with him. I've also met up with Gavin Mangelson who was a good friend from the MTC in Brazil. I've seen a couple of independent films lately as well. I went to see "Paradise Now" and "Good Night and Good Luck." The first is about a couple of suicide bombers in palestine...it tells their story through their eyes. It was interesting to see the mindset of those involved. The second movie was about the red scare back in the 40's and 50's here in the United States and most specifically about a group of CBS people who helped stop McCarthy a corrupt politician who bullied many people into admitting they were communist sympathists.

Regular classes at school ended last Thursday, however I still have two finals left. We did finally finish the website we were working on for Provo and that was good to get out of the way. I still need to take my accounting final and write a 3-5 page paper for business ethics class. For the paper I need to read a Dr. Seuss and then do social critique of society using the story. I'm thinking about using Green Eggs and Ham but I'm not sure yet.

In other news, I mentioned last time that I had started working at Network General. Well, I did finally have my exit interview a Novell so I am officially done working there. I really enjoyed my time there and think it's a great place to work. Maybe I'll end up there again someday down the road.

Anyway, the Christmas season is starting to be in full swing and it's kinda nice. I'm excited that I get to go to D.C. to visit Jared and Christina over the Christmas break. I'm excited to see the area and hopefully see as many of the historic sites as possible.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has come and gone! For thanksgiving dinner with the family we ate here at Jeff's house around 12:00. Then we sat around and visited until later that evening. We were invited to go to Edward Vozar's house who is a friend a Jeff. We went to Edward's house around 6:00 and after eating some very good food I sat on a nice massage chair for about an hour. On Friday after thanksgiving I went and did a little shopping but found nothing that I cared to buy. Later that night I met up with mom and dad and we headed up to the new Cabela's store near Thanksgiving Point. That is quite the store. The part I found most interesting was all the stuffed animals that they have in there. Yesterday I went up to Barnes and Noble with mom and dad for while and bought a few Charles Dickens books including A Tale of Two Cities which I've never read and have now started. I also bought a book for developing GNOME apps using mono an implementation of microsoft's .NET platform. Anyway, I fooled around with that for a little while and got familiar with it. I'm currently using it with the glade interface designer which I discussed in an earlier post.

I just got done talking with Nick and Ryan who came over to do some home teaching. They talked about repentence and forgiveness which was good. I now have a meeting down at the church in about an hour so I better get ready to go to that.

First Day at Network General

Today was my first day working at Network General. It feels good to around the small business environment again. Although the company has around 700 employees the satellite office where I work only has about 15 people there. I was greeted this morning by a bright and shiney new Dell Lattitude D610 laptop. It's a pretty nice laptop so I was excited to have that to work with. Anyway, I got all situated and learned a little more about the application I'll be testing so that was nice as well. In other news, we had a meeting with Provo city today about finalizing the project we've been working on for quite some time. It's in the final stages and our meeting went well. I think our project is probably the only one done by students that will actually be used. We left there telling them that we were in lock-down and that we wouldn't add certain features. However, we implemented the features they wanted in about 5 minutes but now they'll be really excited to see that the new features are included. My group for a strategic also picked up an interim report for a project we've been working on all semester. We got a 90% on that so I'm happy about that as well. Everything is well.

Approaching Thanksgiving

Yet again the past couple weeks have flown by! My last post was two weeks ago and it seems like yesterday. Quite a lot has happened yet again. Probably the biggest changed occured on Friday when I finalized a change of jobs. I will now be working for Network General. I turned in my letter of resignation at Novell and will probably be working my last day there this Friday or maybe the 21st. I've enjoyed my time there and will miss a lot of the people that I have worked with for the past couple years. I also am excited to moving on and working elsewhere, it'll be a great change and hopefully will open up more doors of opportunity for the future. School has been going well although I didn't really do a whole lot last week. Class was cancelled a couple of the days so I basically had the week off. This week is Thanksgiving holiday so I'll pretty much have this whole week off as well which will be nice. It will be the calm before the test storm that is finals week. I've been debating whether or not I'd be going home for Thanksgiving but Dad called me last night and left a message saying they'll will be coming down today. It's 5:20 p.m. and I still haven't seen them but they should be rolling in pretty soon. I saw a couple movies this past week as well. I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (or something like that) on Friday morning when Novell bought out the Provo theater. Then later that night I went on a double date and saw Walk the Line about Johnny Cash's life. It was very similar to the movie Ray but I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed Ray. I went with a cool girl named Sara. It was hilarious when we saw a couple together in the parking garage and she started imitating/imagining what they were saying to each other. Anyway, Johnson invited me over to have some Sunday dinner so I better head off to that.

Time Flies

Everytime I write an entry I can't believe how much time has passed. A lot of new things have gone on in the past couple of weeks. With regards to school everything is going great. All of my classes are pretty easy this semester. I had another accounting 210 test and I got a 55! A vast improvement from the 36 I got on the first test. Novell had some substancial layoffs last week on the 2nd of November. A lot of people were let go, I survived. I wasn't too awefully worried about it though because I'm ready for something else anyway. They have me working with NetWare right now which is not what I'm interested in at all.

I went and saw the new Disney movie called Chicken Little on Saturday as well, that was pretty good for the first animated Disney film.

Life is great.

Life Continues

It's been another couple of weeks and things are going well. Mom called today and wanted to know when I'd be available for Christmas break. It sounds like I'll be heading to Maryland to spend Christmas with Jared, Christina, and Eli. I was worried about my schedule but I don't really care anymore. We are supposed to be shipping a product around December 23 and things get pretty crazy when it's time to ship. Anyway, I told her to book me for the 23rd anyway and that I'd come back on the 3rd of January or something. I'm pretty excited about that, I haven't seen Jared, Christina, or Eli since July of 2004. It'll be good to see them again.

School is going pretty well. I do however want to reiterate my hate for accounting 210. Other tahn that things are going pretty good. I took a test for my public management class and feel I did pretty well. I'm also moving along with my business ethics class. I was in a business presentation class but that was only for a block and that finished last week so I am finding myself with a little more free time these days. We've also continued working on the before mentioned project for provo city. We had a meeting yesterday to show them the work we did for the first iteration. That was a disaster. Scope creep is often the term used to describe the situation. At any rate, we are moving along quite nicely and I hope to have it finished soon.

Last Friday I went to a bon fire with a bunch of friends. We put a VW engine block on the fire until it melted. Those blocks are made out of magnezium and it's quite the site to melt it and then chuck a bunch in the air. Anyway, I feel like I'm still hacking the fumes from that night. Not to mention the fumes from the Hawaiian Dream air-freshener that Katie sprayed in my mouth last Saturday.

School, School, School

It's been a while since I last wrote. I've just been doing a lot of work at school. I took a test on the 30th of September for accounting and scored the lowest I ever have on a test at BYU, I received a 36! After all the dust settled that score turns out to be a C+ so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. Work has started on my school project for the city of provo. Dan and I have coded a few classes in PHP and development is started to accelerate. We're developing with the PHPEclipse plugin for the Eclipse development environment. We've also setup a cvs repository to not have a crazy mess with the code.

It's the middle of October so Halloween is coming up and the other day Ryan and I went to a haunted house up in Salt Lake City. It was pretty fun.

Hurry up and wait

So I'm here at Novell just waiting to for an 8:00 p.m. meeting with my web-development group from school. The meeting was scheduled to be at 5:00 but one of the members had something come up. It's all good, I've been in those shoes before. I just don't want to go home because the drive will be a big waste of time. I've a tough decision to make though...Do I go to Brett's BBQ or do I go to Drew's BBQ? I hate these dilemas ;)

I've been waiting for LaMont to finish up the setup of a bunch of NBO servers in the superlab here at Novell so I can run some benchmarking tests. It's taking forever as well, so yet again...hurry up and wait. I have however been making good use of my time learning to do graphical progamming with glade. I'm using the user interface builder to create an xml file and then with the pygtk.glade module read that file and create some sweet interfaces quickly(see above). It's pretty slick and I'm glad I discovered how to use it, glade always confused and annoyed me until now.

School

I'm sitting in public management class right now at the beloved Brigham Young University talking about Porter's five forces. We're doing an analysis of Michelin. I also just finished giving a recitation speech where I recited a Bob Dylan song entitled "With God on Our Side." I'm also working on a presentation I need to give tomorrow in my Business Ethics class. I'm not quite sure what I'm gonna do the presentation on so if you have an idea feel free to write a comment.

New look

I just finished changing the template for this blog. I like the new look. Today I started messing around with iCal and rss. I downloaded blam to try out rss for the first time. For the iCal stuff I used Evolution from the gnome desktop project. I used iCal for the group project I'm involved in I'd never even mucked around with that stuff and it's kinda nice. I like the fact that with rss I can cut to the chase when it comes to all the news sites that I read on a daily basis. I also setup a wiki for Jeff and I today.

Changes

Here I am again! It's been about 4 months since my last entry so I suppose it's about time to update things here a little bit. Everything is going great. Last semester ended off pretty well but was however my worst academic performance ever :) At work things are going great as well. Sometime in March or something I attended Brainshare which is a large conference put on by Novell. It was at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake and I enjoyed myself. I've been working on a new product called Novell Client for Linux which allows someone on a linux desktop to connect to tradition NetWare servers as well as the newer OES ncp servers. On the 6th of June I moved departments within Novell. I left the CPR team and joined system test. My new environment is great and I'm enjoying the new people I work with. Since the move I have quit working on NCL and have started working on a product called Nterprise Branch Office (NBO). The version I am working on will be the first version to ship with the linux kernel instead of the traditional NetWare OS.

I couple weeks ago I was also released from my church calling as the Family Home Evening co-chair. I have since been put in as assistant ward clerk. I'll be working mostly with Jeff Johnson on the ward finances, record keeping and everything else.

Long Time No See

It's been a very long time since I added an entry in here and obviously much has happened. I won't try to record all that has happened but I should at least say that Christmas went well, although quite considering both Jeff and Jared were with their in-laws. Fall semester finished in mid December and I'm now in the first couple of weeks of winter semester 2005. The work load has been a little more bearable so far this semester. Right now I am taking ISYS 411, 412, 413, and MANEC 300 or something like that. Since Christmas Janna has also moved in here at Jeff and Kristie's house in Spanish Fork. She's been here for a month or so now. Today I was able to go to the temple around 11 a.m. and do some work. It's been a while since I went so it was great to be back. I'd like to start going once a week on either Tuesday or Thursday morning. I also started running in the morning with a friend from the Flonette ward, Ryan Sealy. We've been running for a few minutes in the mornings on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. This past Monday I didn't go running because I didn't wake up. I'm not sure if the alarm clock went off or not, if it did I got out of bed turned it off and then went back to sleep without knowing it. All is well, school is moving along, work is going pretty smoothly, and life is great as always.