Look At All The Pretty Features!

So with any system, there is the possibility of the dreaded "system issues" that cause either minor irritation or the terrifying "stop work" scenario. Today, we had such a stop work problem in that one of our servers (or better said, a collection of servers that encapsulates a rather large majority group of clients) was completely down. Not just a little down either. We started with claims not able to come into the system and got to the point where no one (not even us) could so much as log in. The system was down. Completely.

We had our share of people who thought they were special and could have the super secret IP address that would let them work. Yeah, let me whisper that to you. A-hem. What part of "it don't work" are you not getting? I also decided today would not be the best day to call one of the clients I'd been working with to find out how their paper claims were printing off. Yeah. No.

Now while this is a day where billers are sitting on their thumbs, and we're fielding a neverending supply of calls asking when it'll be back up, there was one part that made me laugh. Amidst the notices we sent out saying the server is down, we also sent out this one:

"We are offering education on the functionality of the features available with the next program upgrade. You may register for these educational sessions via our training center starting today. The link to register is ...."

I'm sure since they couldn't work on their claims as our system was completely down, they were quick to jump on the opportunity to find out about the features in our next upgrade. You know, like the one that deletes all the claim info when you press tab...oh yeah, they rolled back that def-... um, feature.

Suncraft and a House

Moving on with the love story portion (feel free to catch up by selecting the Love Story link there on the right), after turning down the bank, I crawled back to the temp agency and asked them what they had available that might pay about the same as the bank and be 8 to 5 Monday thru Friday. It took a week or so, but they found a position for an Office Manager at a builder in Broken Arrow: one Suncraft Homes. This amused me...a lot. Why would it amuse me? The post from May 16th, 2007 details an incident following a tornado where I destroyed a garage door. Yeah, that builder was Suncraft Homes. So, I was to basically apply to work at a place where I'd destroyed the garage door of one of their new houses. Fun.

I went in and interviewed and to my surprise, I got the job. Just like the bank, this job was very, very easy. My job was to answer the phone, file bills, prepare bills to mail, type when they wanted stuff type, make copies, and some other miscellaneous stuff that those front office people do. It was a couple weeks before I saw the superintendant for the first time, and indeed, he recognized me. That gave him a good laugh too, and I found there were definitely no hard feelings involved in my destruction of this door.

Now, a lot of stuff happened during this time beyond my job there at Suncraft. On the creative front, I was in constant contact with these guys from Sweden, and we were working together on a musical that they were looking to produce at their college over there. I assisted not only in the music area, where they had intended me to be, but I also worked on the script and story itself and even delved into the lyrics to make sure they were perfectly coherent. We worked on this whole thing in English before they translated it all into Swedish. I was also working closely with the guy who was going to direct the production, and he was about the most demanding little bugger I've ever met. Talk about fussy! But he did have a knack for tearing things apart and putting them back together better than they were the first time. I honestly learned a lot from him.

That production was slated for May of 2001, so round about April, they started in on rapidly translating it into Swedish for the local production. Well, during this, they needed some music done, and I was also responsible for listening to and extracting the music from their recordings, since none of them wrote music (well, they could write music, but not write or read musical notation, which I had been extensively trained in reading and writing). You see, they'd all done their music on sequencers and tape recorders while playing piano or something, so they didn't actually read music nor write any of it down. I had the fun of listening, extracting, and then creating sheet music in the Cakewalk program for their people to look at. I had a good enough grasp of Swedish at that point in time to be able to include the Swedish lyrics on the music.

But before that production went down, the Queen and I had other things going on. Rock Girl was going to be two in June and we'd been considering cutting off the birth control and having a second child. We knew we'd have to get an actual house before she gave birth, but we also figured that there'd be a month or so before the absence of the pills got her system going again, etc., before anything happened. So fun and fancy free, we hit Spring Break, and she got immediately pregnant. All we have to do is consider doing something without birth control, and we get another child. So that was March, and now we really need to find a house.

We'd been looking for a house for months, trying to get a rent house together so we could move out of the apartments into something more conducive to rearing a child, especially now that a second one was on the way. We didn't feel that we could buy a house, and thought renting one was a natural next step. We know better now, but that was then. After paying a monthly fee with a house hunting service to peruse rental houses, her parents told us about one that was caddy-corner to their house. We called the number and were informed that that house had already been rented to someone. This was the kind of luck we'd been having, but the guy then told us that there was another one in that same neighborhood we could look at. He said it was unlocked and we could just go right in and look around. Great!

We drove right over with Rock Girl in tow and pulled into the driveway of a red brick house with three bedrooms and an enclosed garage (which I particularly liked). A huge tree dominated the front yard, and we thought it would provide some nice shade in the summers (and it did). We walked into the modest living room that opened into the dining room that went on into the kitchen. The back door was missing its dead bolt and had a plastic bag stuffed in the hole. Not major, really. We walked down the hall checking out the bedrooms as we went back. We passed the bathroom, which was also modest in size to find ourselves in what would be considered the master bedroom. We figured it was since it has a half bath attached to it.

We went back down the hall through the dining room and into the kitchen, which was decently sized with a peninsula counter dividing it from the dining room. The Queen was happy with the size of the kitchen since our apartment had a short hallway masquerading as a kitchen. There was no refrigerator, but that was to be expected. Can't have everything. 

We turned down the short hall into what would have been the garage. To one side there was a closet that housed the water heater, heat/air unit, and short ladder to the attic. On the other side was a laundry room where we'd clearly be storing our clothes before running them to the laundromat to wash them as we had no washer or dryer.

Then we passed into the enclosed, carpeted garage area that we referred to as the "den." It was a huge room since it was apparently a two car garage. I was excited, and the Queen seemed to like it too. We called the guy back and asked about getting it, but that we couldn't do anything until the next month since we were part way through the month in our rent at the apartment. He said he couldn't keep it on the market that long. The deposit was a month of rent, and I said we'd take it as is and just fix whatever was broken ourselves. Probably stupid, but we'd been looking for awhile. He accepted, and we gave our 30 day notice at the apartments.

We had a little party with that friend of the Queen's, who we'll call the Teacher since she had some teaching classes in college with the Queen and still teaches to this day, and her husband, who we'll just call Eagle, to take take advantage of his maintenance knowledge to fix the issues in the house. It didn't take long and we were even allowed to paint, which we did. And so, in May of 2001, we moved out of the apartments and into this rent house that thanks to its enclosed garage, had an enormous amount of square footage, though we only really used the den for storage for awhile.

But Rock Girl took the front bedroom, and we painted the back bedroom in a pale yellow (it turned out to be the brightest room in the entire house thanks to the color and the rooms placement in the house in relation to where the sun lives in the sky throughout the day. Rock Girl was still using the crib at the time, though, so the yellow room was rather devoid of furniture for while, but we knew Rock Girl would move into a "big girl bed" before the Queen's due date in December, so we'd be ready. 

Add to the baby craze that the Queen's friend, Wendy, from the apartments got pregnant about a month earlier, and there was even a teacher at the school the Queen was teaching at at the time that got pregnant a month or so later. It was baby crazy around us for awhile.

But we had a house. And we were happy.

Back on Drums

So the Queen got a call from someone from our old church who's actually related to us by marriage (I believe, but it's complicated to explain said relation). We were surprised when we discovered her at the church via the kitchen dedicated to the family relation. Anyway, she is president or vice president of the local chapter of "the world's largest volunteer service organization" (I don't remember which), and they're having a shin-dig here in town and wanted live music. They're apparently having a drummer shortage at the church (not my fault, I'd like to add, since the last service I was there, they didn't want me to play drums), so having remembered that I'd played before, she asked if I would be willing, and being a little starved for the opportunity to play with someone, I accepted. There was a rehearsal last night...

Well, it was called a rehearsal anyway, and I guess it was in a loose sense of the word. They have a program, but of those involved, few showed up, and those that did were huddled around the piano trying to figure the music out with the pianist. I know the movie came out in 1995, but who would have thought people unfamiliar with The Lion King? Yes, the program revolves around some of the music from The Lion King as well as some other sources, but it was that show's music that was giving them fits because they either didn't know it or didn't remember it. Being an avid Elton John listener, I was able to provide some assistance in tempo and I even played-and-sung through one of the songs on the piano to let them hear how it went.

I did occasionally play some rhythms on the drums, but it was more incidental to what they were doing and for me to get a feel for the music and to get an idea of what I would do when it all came together. At the end of the night...well, at 7:00 when church began and we had to stop rehearsing, I am truly afraid for them in regards to having this program together by next Friday. A couple of the no-shows came as little surprise to me that they didn't show, since they are the holier-than-thou leaders of worship whose time was probably far too precious to be bothered with something as trivial as rehearsing (I have mentioned the need to be able to sight-read to play with them, right?).

Part of me does feel a little bad for the praise and worship service as the drums provide a solid beat for them to get into the music, but I have to remember that the reason we ended up going elsewhere was for the princesses to have peer to peer interactions, not because of any real frustrations. They've never asked me to return, nor have they expressed any need for me to play with them in all that time. Part of me wants to help, but at the same time, I have responsibilities outside of my desire to play again.

Well, it's always hard to go back somewhere that you've moved past. It's like seeing an old girlfriend and wondering what might have been, when you clearly know why you're no longer with her. Such is the case here. I wonder how the church is doing out of curiosity, but we need to continue looking forward not back, and if our path leads back there, then we cross that bridge at that time. For the moment, this gig is simply another path leading on, and we'll just have to see what (if anything) comes of it.

Dr. No On Blu-ray

So the comparison game continues with the movies on Blu-ray. This last weekend we watched Dr. No, the first James Bond film from 1962, wondering again just how much cleanup they could possibly do on a movie over 40 years old. I openly asked which scene we should go ahead and make the comparison with between the DVD version I've had for several years and the blu-ray we'd gotten on Friday or Saturday. The Engineer immediately piped up and said "the one with the naked woman." I'm sure it came as no surprise to the Queen that I knew exactly which scene he was referring to.

You see, there's a scene in Dr. No where it's widely believed that Ursula Andress displayed full frontal nudity in a little shadow in this PG rated film from 1962, which at that time would have been under the production code expressly forbidding such a view (not that this prevented the full rear nudity in From Russia With Love). Naturally, the filmmakers have always said she isn't naked in that scene, but on the DVD, you can't really tell one way or the other. You can clearly make out her skin tone top to bottom as she comes out of the radiation wash before she is placed in a robe. Are they just teasing us? Were the shadows done that well? What's going on there?

So we checked out the blu-ray version and everything became crystal clear. The scene, naturally, looked exceptional on the blu-ray disc. They cleaned up that picture beyond reckoning's imagination. It was incredible ... and it answered the question 100% as to whether Ursula Andress was fully naked in that scene. When she comes out of the radiation shower, you can very, very clearly see the shadows and outlines of a flesh colored one piece bathing suit covering her R-rated areas. The Engineer was very disappointed.

VPN Madness

So we've got this client that has a reputation as many of them do around here. This reputation means that when they say "jump," you ask "how high?" The trouble with them is that they are what is known as a Turnkey, meaning they host our application on their own server, and if they have issues, we have to connect to their server over a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection. This connection is established in a variety of ways, but typically via an actual application on a local machine here that connects through an IP address or via a web-based version of the same thing, though these web based connections work in a variety of ways, and those ways are not always ... hm ... friendly. This client has one of these unfriendly web based connections.

I thoroughly understand the need for security and such, but some people go way, way overboard with the idea of security. What these people have set up on this connection is the installation of an application along with a "cleaner" that runs on your browser's history once you close out the connection. I'm not sure what caused my problems yesterday within all of this, but it was a comfort to hear from Optimus Prime that I wasn't the first person to have this problem.

Bottom line is that this client's web based VPN crashed my connection (both internet and intranet) once I was done in their server and ran their stupid cleanup utility. Typically, I login to servers using a Virtual machine that I access from my desktop, since a lot of these turnkey connections kill all connectivity except to their server until you're done, and using this virtual machine allows me to maintain my connectivity while connecting into their machine as well. It amounts to me connecting to a virtual machine desktop to connect through a virtual network to get to the desktop of their server.

On this occasion, I had to make a quick change and the virtual machine was being used by someone else. I hadn't ever had problems with them before, so I just connected to them assuming I'd just lose my local connectivity for a little bit. Once I disconnected, I lost connectivity to everything. I had to do a system restore back to Monday in order to get anything to work again, and even then, I had to clear my history, cookies, and everything before some of my web-based apps would work at all.

I actually did two restores. The first was back to when their application was installed, and I waited 45 minutes for the restore before I finally turned off my machine and rebooted it only to restore it back to the restore point created at the end of the day on Monday. Finally, I was back on track, but it took me about 2 hours to recover from this VPN connection. 

Once my connection was back, though, I had an email waiting from them to update one more thing. I thought to my, "oh, the audacity!" Obviously, I used the virtual machine that time, and all was well in my world.

Edutraining Exertainment

So the Queen told me about this rather odd word combination and said I should try to use it on here, and well, it really doesn't make any sense out of context, so it's easier to just tell what this rather weird combo is. The idea behind "Edutraining Exertainment" is that kids just don't get out as much as they used to. Children's exercise consisted of playing outside, riding their bikes, and generally getting into as much mischief as possible. The computer age has produced a variety of entertainment that serves to keep people inside rather than out, so this combined with the overabundance of processed food has created a generation of people that tend to be a little heavier than their ancestors.

To combat the dumbing down problem that a diet of games and movies can create, there are a variety of games and movies that provide some educational value. I guess you can call this "edutainment." Some Saturday morning cartoons boast that they "e/i" or educate and inform. Leapfrog is big on the edutainment factor in that just about all of their stuff is educational. Sassy Pants got a Leapster as well as a Tag reader, and it allows her to play and learn at the same time. A big recent item in this category a couple years ago was called the V*Smile, which was a 32-bit game system with educational games. It's still around, but they've made some subsequent improvements to it.

But what about the title of this post? What is edutraining exertainment? That would be something that allows you learn something while exercising at the same time. These toys are much fewer and further between, but not uncommon. In fact, I've always said that when you play the drums in Rock Band, you actually learn the necessary coordination to play the real drum set. My playing improved after playing Rock Band. If you crank the level to expert, I dare you to not break a sweat in thirty minutes of constant play. 

For the kids, though, there was a bike that came out that hooked into your TV as a game controller with its own game. I never played it, but the point is that the child rides the bike as they play the game and learn something as they go along. Hence, edutraining exertainment.

It's goofy, sure, but that's what we've come to when it comes to entertaining kids. They don't climb trees anymore (well, actually, mine do), but we've figured out a way to plop them in front of another video game to work out. Nice.