Had some issues with a present, and finally figured it out with some help from a Product Engineer at Panasonic. The help was so great I wrote a tip into the Consumerist, and they blogged it!
The issue turned out to be the base was already sync’d with two handsets and that is why I could never get my iPhones to sync. I had to unsubscribe the phones from the handset and it worked like a charm!
This sunday (Dec 14th), the Band I am in (Saturday Morning Cartel) is playing at the Annex in Madison. We are doing a charity/benefit show. The tickets are 10.00 and it all goes for the cause, which is for a little girl who is having medical problems. It will be my first show with the band where we are playing in Madison, so that is cool.
We also are playing on New Years at the MT Bar in Waterloo.
Friend and ex-coworker Joel and his wife Allison had a baby girl today. Congrats! Looks like I’m on deck now 🙂
It’s been a week at the new job, and I am really enjoying it. I am working on a project dealing with .NET and SQL, and SSIS. Fun stuff. I am really enjoying the environment and project, hopefully more to come.
The new job coupled with the move into the new apt, I have been really busy. Our new place hasn’t lived up to expectations. They haven’t got all the blinds up, and the master bathroom shower and tub aren’t working. I have called a couple times and nothing in response. Irking me.
The band I am in played last weekend too, which was fun. We are playing again on Halloween at MT Bar in Waterloo. I play keyboards on most songs, piano, horns, synth, strings. I sing backup on a few and sing a couple myself, so it is pretty fun. Lugging all the band gear there and back isn’t so fun. We need roadies 🙂
The baby is still coming along. Coming up quick. Now that we are in the new place, we have an empty room for the baby stuff. Looking forward to it.
Recently, in May 2008, I took a position with Stratagem. Though the summer I worked for 2 places as a consultant, KHS in Waukesha, and The Dept. Of Regulation and Licensing (DRL) in Madison.
A little history. I was full time for W3i around 2 years, and then went independent for about a year, then as a consultant with Stratagem. All the different types (full, indie, and consultant) have the pros and cons, and it all depends on what you are doing, where you are, and things you are working on.
I have done .NET, Team Lead, Database Stuff, C++, Data Warehouse/BI (Business Intelligence), ERP Stuff, more .NET and everything in between. Over the past 2 years I have come to love the database stuff more and more, especially BI and Data Warehousing. It is funny, because pretty much 99% of people have no clue what “BI” is. I was just a High Tech Happy Hour at Pooleys and everyone I talked to, “What is BI?” – and this is a tech event!! Anyways, I really do like BI and wanted to move my career forward doing BI. Stratagem hired me to do BI and work on their BI stuff, but there just wasn’t work out there, and I really wasn’t going down the path I wanted to. Stratagem is a great place, great people, I just wasn’t enjoying what I have been working on. (Although I did work on a small part time project for a couple weeks at night doing some SSIS stuff, which was exactly what I wanted to be doing full time!)
Now everyone probably knows I have an iPhone and use it extensively. A couple months ago, I installed the “Career Builder” app from the app store to check it out. It uses your location based on GPS, which I thought was cool. Just for kix, I typed in “Data Warehouse” and there was a result near Madison! Sweet, but what about details? Yeah everything that hit my buttons. Microsoft, SQL Server 2005, Analysis Services, Integration Services, some .NET, etc. Awesome!
I sent in my resume, and figured I would either hear back, and get the job, or wouldn’t hear back at all, not knowing how long the position had been out there, etc. I waited and finally heard back! Sweet. A phone interview, in person interview, informal interview, and another in person interview, and I got the job.
But who is this job with you ask? Well I am proud to say that this upcoming Tuesday I will be the newest “BI Architect” at Trek Bicycle Corp. You know, “Trek”. “Trek Bikes”. The awesome bike company. The HUGE bike company. The type of bikes Lance Armstrong rides. The USA Teams ride. The bikes that have won a ton of Tour De France’s. Sweet, sweet bikes.
Trek is located in Waterloo, WI, which is about 15 miles from where I live now in Madison, and about 14 from where I am moving tomorrow in Sun Prairie, WI. It is about 4 miles from where our band practices, in Marshall, WI. It is out in countryside, on the edge of a small town. Weird how the world HQ for this company is located in such a small town.
In any event, it is a new adventure that I am very excited for. I am really looking forward to get back into BI stuff head first and work back in SQL Server!! (I have been working Oracle for the last 2 months – ugh!)
I will even start riding bikes I’m sure, and I’m betting I am the envy of all my bike nerd friends out in PDX!!!
So this is Big Change #3 out of 3. #1 was moving, #2 is the baby, and #3 is the job. Another whirlwind couple of weeks here, and then the next couple of months, but I am excited and don’t worry, you will see my blogging to continue here. Although I am twittering more (http://twitter.com/scaleovenstove) but I still want to blog a couple of times a week. And hopefully I dive into BI/Data Warehousing and have more cool stuff to blog about in that realm.
One thing, this is the first time since I graduated college where my title isn’t some kind of “Software Dev” title. When I was indie, I really didn’t have a title, even though I was doing BI, so that is different. I don’t see myself going back to being a full time dev, even though I can do .NET. I will still use programming and development as a tool with my BI work, and also just for myself or helping friends.
Go buy a Trek! Save Gas! 😉
Yes, that’s right. We are having a baby. A baby girl (they think, you never know!) due February 5th. Everything is going along just fine. I am very excited!!
We haven’t done much as far as getting baby stuff yet. We hit some garage sales and got some neutral clothes for really cheap before we knew the gender of the baby, so that was good. I figure after the move (Big Change #1) we will start getting baby stuff like the crib and what not.
There isn’t much more to say at this point, just waiting for the little bugger to come.
Here is the latest ultrasound:
Now that I live in Wisconsin, I guess I have to write about this. Going to school at Saint Cloud State, which is a fairly good party school, you do end up going to happy hour now and then. At the bars there, they always have pretty good deals. “1 dollar for Domestic Taps” etc, etc.
So you walk in, and see that, and ask for a “Leinie’s HoneyWeiss” which is usually on tap in most bars in MN, but then you get a crazy response..
“We consider Leinie’s to be an Import”
WTF? An import? All the way from WI huh, so you can charge 4 dollars a glass? Man..
Anyways, I subscribe to Slashfood in my RSS Feeds, it’s one of my “fun” subscriptions, like xkcd, or gullible info, etc. I read today about “Leinie’s takes small town Wisconsin nationwide” What I have to wonder though, is it going to be served up as a domestic or import? We will just have to see.
As a side note. I wish Madison WI’s cool blog site Dane101 would let you submit stories. This is a trackback to them to see if they see this and take note.
Four years ago, I started this blog. It was on blogspot, and then migrated to wordpress on HostMySite, then moved to my own server, but all the posts are here. I have had many different themes and it actually is fun to look back on posts and see what I was doing at the time.
You can look back and see when I was at Cell 2000, then went to W3i. You can see the jump from ASP Classic, VB.NET to C#, ASP.NET, from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005, from C# to C++, then to Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, and littererd in between with all the gadgets, vacations, photos, politics, fun, random tidbits over the last four years. Music I have recorded, videos too. Just everything. Nostalgic.
I started reading blogs about 2-3 years before I started actually blogging, so that is kind of my time line there. Right now I subscribe to roughtly 350 feeds (My Google Reader see’s a lot of j, j, j ,j, shit+s, s, j, j, j). Newer mediums come in and go. Twitter is one. I use twitter somewhat, but not as much as others. FriendFeed is a new one too. Pownce is good for sharing files. But none come close the full blown blog. I have gotten many friends and colleagues to start blogging, some keep it up, some don’t some come and go. It would be nice to have a “blogging buddy”, but I haven’t found that yet. Maybe in the next 4 years.
People ask me “why don’t you have multiple blogs? One for tech, one for personal, one for XYZ”. Well my answer to that is, this is my blog. This is me. I am all these things. I am music, I am tech, I am gadgets, I am geeky, I am politics, I am random stuff I like. That is me, this is my blog. It is fun for me to do, and once it stops being fun, then I will stop doing it.
I know recently my blogging has been less often, and I attribute that to my 2+ hour commute (even more now with flood detouring! yikes!), but that will change as I get different consulting gigs. I will be introduced to different technologis, different industries and it will get my mind swirling with things to blog about. – Some things are just small snippets that are almost good for Twitter. Like, did you know Excel 2007 lets you have more than 65,000 rows and 256 columns? I didn’t know till today. Not big enough for a blog, but a tweet…
We will see where the next 4 years leads me. I have been from St. Cloud, to Portland, now to Madison. My 10 year high school reunion is coming up in the next few weeks. Funny how time flies so much. Big, fun things to come. Can’t wait.
Fun stuff, and hopefully I get four more!
A MacBook Pro. Yes, and it is awesome.
So the story, my Dell laptop was humming along fine, but then recently I heard some clicking, and was like WTF? Asked Emily “Did this fall on the ground or something”… “No… but I dropped a glass on it”… Oh man, and you know, one month after the warranty expires, as usual.
So this weekend I went to the Apple store and spec’d out a sweet MacBook Pro. 4 GB ram, High Res, everything. Picked up .Mac cheaper since I was getting a machine (soon to be MobileMe).
Right now I am running Vista in a virtual machine, giving it 2 GB, and it flys. This is probably the sweetest machine I have ever used 🙂 I am using VMWare Fusion instead of Parallels like by MacBook, figured Fransen said it was good, so I would try it. I like it.
I really like the light up keyboard. What else? Like they say, everything just works. Take for example my Verizon EVDO card. In XP or Vista, you have to install the connection manager, hope it works, hope all the drivers install, and then hope it launches. You run into admin issues, and just a ton of other stuff. In the MacBook? I plugged in the card, 2 seconds later, connected. No install, nothing. Just worked. God send.
So I think I am an Apple Guy now. iPhone, MacBook, MacBook Pro. Mighty Mouse (wired and bluetooth) and a bluetooth Keyboard. And on the 11th, I will get the 3G iPhone. When I think about it, all I need Windows for is Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and SQL Server stuff. Everything else I can do on the Mac, and with Virtualization, it is almost seamless. I like it.
What’s next? AirPort Extreme, AppleTV, Time Capsule…
I don’t think I will go back, unless something totally changes with the machines and the OS…
Well, new job is going OK. Not much to report really, as you can see from the lack of posting. No new tech or anything interesting leads to… well, boring posts like this. Basically I am knee deep in an older ERP system, and doing report mods and small .NET applications to automate some things, but nothing really exciting. A couple of weeks ago though I went through some online MSFT trainings for .NET 3.5 and SQL 2008 (free clinics on microsoftlearning.com) and that was some good info, now only if I could use it. 🙂
In other news, I picked up an SNES and TWO Atario 2600’s for like 55 bucks, with like 30 games, which is pretty cool. Went to “Bratfest 2008” and helped set the new world record for brat’s consumed.
Picked up Rock Band, so have been hitting that a little bit, but even better news is that I have been playing keyboards more now, and if everything goes right, will be playing with a local band here in Madison in a little while. I am learning the songs now and have some down and ready to go already.. fun stuff.
The iPhone 2.0 Firmware is going ok. Kind of slow at times. I am kind of mad, I lost all my pix of BratFest and other things from Memorial Day weekend, when the new Beta6 firmware came out, I updated, but dummy me forgot to download my pics to my computer first. I tried the Paraben Device Seizure tool that has been used to forensically get data off refurbed iPhones, but it didn’t work, didn’t find anything. oh well, I won’t forget to get the pics from now on 🙂
There is a lot of hoop jumping to get the new firmware loading. Creating certs, importing their certs, creating appid, provisioning profiles, blah blah blah. I do really like the exchange push email, and with my fetch Google Apps email, its like everything right there. That coupled with Google Reader and the Facebook iPhone site, I don’t even need a laptop to browse around anymore…
Also waiting for this Democratic Primary to be over, so things can move on to the General Election. This year needs to be different, if the last 8 years are any indication of what could be, things just need to change.
Last year on this day, my first day in PDX. Time flies.
Steve Novoselac's Blog 