January 2012
9 posts
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October 2011
1 post
September 2011
1 post
July 2011
1 post
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Kids are funny
Ethan (our two year old) upon seeing a miniature stop sign table decoration at a Cars themed birthday party.
Ethan: That's an octagon!
Grandma: That's great Ethan what's this?
Grandma holds up a square napkin.
Ethan: That's a napkin!
June 2011
6 posts
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Three Year Anniversary
Happy Anniversary Hannah! I love you!! The last three years have been awesome, and I’m looking forward to many more!
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Video Game Catch Up
I haven’t posted about video games in a while, so I thought I’d just give a quick summary of what I’ve played over the past few months.
Portal 2
Killzone 3
Stacking
Enslaved Odyssey to the West
Halo Reach
Call of Duty: Black Ops
Fallout: New Vegas
Quake Arena Arcade (just not the same without a mouse)
I enjoyed all of these games, some more than others. I liked the story...
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Corsair H50 Cpu Cooler
I purchased / installed the Corsaire H50 Cpu Cooler tonight in my home computer. I’m running an AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition CPU. With the OEM heatsink and fan It was running at around 55 Celsius idle and around 65 Celsius under load. The stock cooler was also extremely loud. Best buy had the Corsair H50 cooler on sale for $40.00 Memorial Day weekend, so I picked one up hoping...
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< whartung> as they say, those who do not know lisp will eventually reinvent it -- badly.
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PS3 Repair
As I mentioned in an early blog post my PS3 died with a Yellow Light of Death(YLOD). It was an upleasent experience, but I ended up purchasing a new PS3 slim and all has been well.
Even before I purchased the new slim I thought about trying to find a used ps3 with a broken blu-ray drive so that I could attempt to get one ps3 working without wasting a lot of money. I just recently purchased a...
May 2011
11 posts
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Swimming
We took Ethan swimming today at our neighborhood pool. He really likes the baby pool, but he’s not a huge fan of the big pool. We have a life jacket for him to wear in the big pool, but he’s still extremely cautious even with the life jacket on. He mostly hangs out on the steps. Occasionally he’ll “swim with dada”, which consists of me pulling him around the pool...
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The Dark Side
Well I guess I’ve officially turned to the dark side. The primary platform I’m using for development at work is now Microsoft .net 4.
C# is a pretty nice language, and Visual Studio 2008 is bearable if you install Resharper, but I’ll be honest. I hated it at first. My first project was creating services exposed via WCF. WCF is a nice web services framework, but there was a...
I feel working with NetBeans is like living with an abusive spouse.
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Why can’t I move my hard drive from one ps3 to...
My old ps3 died after just over three years of use, so I just picked up a new ps3 slim. It’s pretty much the same thing, just smaller. My old PS3 got the YLOD. I tried replacing the fan and putting new thermal compound on it but it didn’t work. I may attempt to reflow the solder at some point, but I don’t have a heat gun.
What’s crazy about this is I lost all of my data off the old ps3. I don’t...
Migrated to Tumblr
I just migrated my blog to Tumblr from a self-hosted wordpress blog.
I like the interface and everything and I’m also going to try to post more frequently!
New Baby On the Way!
It’s a boy! We’re expecting our second child and according to the ultrasound it’s a boy! We’re due August 24th, so Ethan will be around two and a half when the new baby gets here! Exciting stuff!
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March 2010
1 post
Grails
I finally got the chance to write a real world application using grails. It’s kind of funny because my application doesn’t even use a “Controller”.
I wrote an application that monitors an Active MQ Queue for xml messages and then parses and stores the messages based on their contents.
It’s a pretty straight forward application, but I wanted to make use of GORM for persistence. When I started I...
January 2010
1 post
Groovy and Grails
I primarily write Java code at work and lately I’ve been looking for something new and interesting. I’ve looked into frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django, but I can’t really use those technologies at work. This is where Groovy and Grails step in. With Groovy I can write code that makes use of exiting Java classes, I can compile Groovy code and use it in an existing Java project, or I can use a...
October 2009
2 posts
What’s going on?
Wow I really need to get better about updating my blog. Hannah and I recently got back from a trip to New York City. We had a blast! Our son Ethan is six months old now and he is awesome! He gets more fun every day! Here’s a picture of Hannah and I in NYC.
I’ve picked up a PSP and several new ps3 games since the last time I posted. I’ll follow up this post with some updates.
Picked up a PSP 3000.
I picked up a PSP 3000 at Best Buy back in July. I got the Rock Band Unplugged bundle. I also grabbed a few older games at GameStop. Here’s what I’ve got so far.
Rock Band Unplugged
Worms Open Warfare
Resistance Retribution
Killzone Liberation
Burnout Legends
One thing I learned about the PSP is that the games really need to let you save in the middle of a level. I’ve played the first...
June 2009
2 posts
Wolfenstein 3-D
I recently saw Wolfenstein 3-D available for download on the Playstation Network and I had to download it. I thought it would be fun to play for a few minutes and then it would get old, but I was wrong. This game is just as fun as when I used to play it on my 486sx back in the day! The ps3 controller works much better than the mouse and keyboard from the computer version. I’m having fun with it,...
My Little Gamer.
Hannah took these pictures while I was playing my PS3. It looks like Ethan is playing too!
May 2009
2 posts
Stripes, Stripersist, JPA, and Maven
I’ve been using the Stripes Framework now for over a year and I think it’s great! It’s a request based web framework that works with very little configuration. I love the way it provides you with what you need without getting in your way! I’d heard some guys in the #stripes irc channel talking about JPA and a Stripes plugin called Stripersist and I decided to give it a try. It’s awesome! The...
Worms
I recently downloaded Worms from the Playstation Network and I’m glad I did! I first
played Worms almost ten years ago when I was in college. It was Worms Armageddon for the Nintendo 64 and it was a very entertaining game! My college roommate and I were both instantly addicted to the game. We rented it several times while in college, but could never find a copy to buy. I purchased Worms 3D for...
April 2009
1 post
Killzone 2
I purchased Killzone 2 three weeks ago and I must say I have thoroughly enjoyed the game! I initially downloaded and played the demo and because of the demo I almost didn’t buy the game. Lucky for me I played the demo a few more times and eventually got comfortable with the controls and picked up the game. I started out playing through the single player campaign on the normal difficulty level....
March 2009
1 post
Ethan Cole
Hannah and I got the joy of welcoming Ethan Cole into the world on March 24th 2009! He was born at 4:30 p.m. and weighed 8 pounds even. He was 20 3/4 inches long! Ethan and Hannah are doing well! We are back at home now and enjoying life as new parents!
Here are a few pictures of Ethan!
February 2009
1 post
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January 2009
6 posts
Hello World!
I decided to write the age old Hello World program in a lot of languages that interest me. I didn’t get around to objective-c or c#. If the language was object oriented, I tried to write an OO Hello World example.
I enjoyed doing this, and I hope to post some more complex programs implemented in all these languages.
So here’s what I came up with.
Java:
public class Hello{
private String...
Prince of Persia
I recently finished playing Prince of Persia for the ps3 and I have to say I really enjoyed it. I beat the game once, then played through it again to win trophies.
My first time through the game was very different than my second time through. I have to confess, I didn’t understand how to do combos in the battle sequences until the second time around. If you know how to use combos it makes the...
Sony Customer Service
I really do love my playsation 3, but Sony has a horrible customer service department.
I sent in the following question
Is there any way you can view your trophies online using a web browser?
It would be pretty cool if you could see your trophies and compare our trophies with others. It would also be cool if there were an API for accessing trophy information for a user on the playstation...
Trophies and the Playstation Network
I recently got Prince of Persia for the ps3 and I really enjoyed playing through the game. I’m not a serious gamer, I just enjoy playing for fun when I get a chance. While playing the game I noticed I won a few trophies. I was familiar with trophies, but I’d never won one in another game, and didn’t really understand their purpose until now. I’m addicted to collecting trophies. I only lack five...
Playfire PS3 Trophy Card
I found a website that lets you display your ps3 trophies on a card. It has to be manually updated, but I guess it’s better than nothing. So here you go.
PSN Gamercards
December 2008
3 posts
The Coder’s Dilema: What to learn.
I’d love to tell you that I code at work, at home, in the shower and in my sleep, but that’s simply not true. I code at work, and occasionally I’ll mess around with a project at home. I almost always get bored with the projects I work on at home, and I rarely finish them….. OK I’ll be honest I NEVER finish them.
At work I code in java, and lately I’ve been able to work on a new product. We’re...
The Archer’s Blog
My wife has been reading blogs from her friends who are expecting or have newborns. Some of these blogs are extremely entertaining. I created this blog as a place for me to write about my random thoughts, experiences, and programming stuff. Hannah created a blog for the two of us to write about family stuff, post pictures, and keep family/friends up to date with what’s going on in our lives.
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