Ben's Blog

Not much new has happened since early February or Perchville, USA (see perchvillepics.com).

Bailey is feeling a little bit better since the back-attack but he is still on the mend.  Its been a little over a week since we first went to the vet and a couple days since his last check-up.  He is definately still sore and we stopped giving him anti-inflamatory medicine yesterday which seems to have made him a bit more sensitive today.  We’ll see how he does tomorrow and if no improvement we’ll have to make one more trip to the vet.  We’ve been going to Cottonwood Vet Clinic in Jenison, Michigan for a couple years and I’ve been really impressed with them.  They have several knowledgable vets on hand, all who have been great to work with.  I should know…we go to the office enough that they know me by voice when I call for appointments.  It gives me a complex, to be honest, but I think we’re in the top 5 repeat office visitors.

Aside from that life has been pretty quiet.  Webcasting GVSU basketball games has picked up a bit so that keeps me busy a couple nights a week.  This week I was going to see Dave Ramsey at Van Andel but I have a game that I wasn’t planning on.  I could have skipped the game but I figured Dave would want me to make money rather than spend it if I had the opportunity.  Holly and I have seen him before too which made the decision easier.  His energy is just contagious though so it would have been nice to go nonetheless.

Here are a couple pics from the last week I thought worthy of sharing…  First, Holly brought home some of her schools “technology” to see what was worth keeping.  I haven’t seen technology like this in the last 10 years so we quickly moved the box to the donation pile.

Next is my sister’s dog that we are watching while my mom is in Florida.  Aside from rough housing with Bailey, he is a very good dog.  He just has a size issue…he thinks he is the size/weight of a jack russel when in fact he is a brute of a dog.  Tonight he gathered some of his favorite things…his blanket, one of Bailey’s toys that he’s made his own and an empty peanut butter container  that was sitting on counter waiting to be cleaned for recycling.  I guess he saw Bailey with a kong and this jar was the right size for his own version.  The entire kitchen smelled like peanut butter and Toby was smacking his tongue for the next 30 minutes.

Not sure what made me think of this, but a couple months ago I saw that Ed McMahon was doing some freecreditreport.com commercials and to this day I have never seen them on TV. With the power of the Internets I was able to find them! I know you want to see them, so here they are:

We’ve been swamped at work the past couple weeks (months, really) so on several occasions I’ve taken off the “project manager” hat and tried my best to do some of the “coding” work myself. Its been a long time since I’ve done this regularly, but it is slowly coming back to me and I’m finding that I actually enjoy it again!  I have always really enjoyed database topics but me and coding have always had a love hate relationship.  I love the feeling of accomplishment with a project comes together but I hate it when I can’t figure things out, and usually I don’t have the patience to track down little bugs that break websites.

I’ve even gotten the bug to do a bit of side work again and have been most recently been spending too much time working on http://www.perchvillepics.com.  I would probably do more if I didn’t have to deal with billing people and putting in all the up front work necessary to “sell” a project.  If this keeps up I may even fulfill a longstanding wish to learn CSS – it just baffles me at the moment.

I fully acknowledge that my strengths do not lie in coding though; Seriously…I am much better at dealing with the people side of things.  This reminds me of one of my favorite clips from Office Space… Like Tom, I have people skills dammit!

After last week’s server conundrum it apparent that we in the office needed to do a better job watching the servers for signs of trouble.  Cold Fusion has a pretty cool monitoring tool with all sorts of info on what the server is crunching at any given time.  What better way to watch stats than to add a new LCD TV to the office setting….

Thanks to a great deal at ABC Warehouse we now have two 32″ LCDs and one 40″ LCD for everyone to keep an eye on the various servers.  To get maximum benefit we also plan on rigging up a dashboard of sorts to monitor real-time traffic and twitter comments about GVSU.  Here’s to hoping for a stable server environment!