In The World…

Hey folks, we met with the inspector yesterday and was able to take some more pictures.

Enjoy!

Dream House on flickr.com

Lately, I’ve had some real doozy dreams, mainly about the house. But yesterday morning I had one of the strangest experiences of my life, and that is saying something because I’m a very vivid dreamer and often remember them. Sometimes I’ve even been able to control them.

First, the real life events. Jess and I were asleep early early morning. I don’t think it was even light out yet. We have been sleeping with the window open because it is already pretty warm upstairs without the AC on.

Anyway, we were both dead asleep when there is this large BOOM outside. I mean loud. I’m a deep sleeper and it was loud enough to wake me up. In that groggy way, we both kinda turn to each other and ask what the hell that was. I couldn’t come up with an answer. I still can’t. It wasn’t like a firecracker or gunshot, it was much deeper. It wasn’t a sonic boom because it sounded much closer and there were no reverberations. Just one crisp, loud, deep “boom”. It wasn’t preceded or followed by any other sounds. Very strange. I kept my eye on idahostatesman.com to see if something happened that was newsworthy. But no such luck.

So, in my dream, I only remember a very short snippet before I woke up. Maybe 7 or 8 seconds. But its the content that freaked me out. In my dream, Jess handed me a large party balloon tied to a ribbon. She then took one of those safety letter openers and slid it along the ribbon until it hit the balloon and popped it. AT THE EXACT SAME TIME AS THE BOOM OUTSIDE.

I just don’t know what to make of that. Is it purely coincidence? That seems unlikely to me. Is it that my brain distorted “dream time” to make it seem longer when in fact all of that action took place instantaneously upon hearing the boom? Kinda like deja vu or something? Something else? Brain tumor? I really don’t know.

You gotta admit, that is pretty strange.

House update: We’re meeting with the home inspector today. Perhaps I will get some more photos actually taken by me to post on here. Check back.

Along the history of time, man has always striven to improve his lot in life. Specifically, his place of residence. Beginning when the first caveman brought home a new mammoth skin to spruce up the old homestead, and continuing up to and including April 28, 2008.

What am I getting at? Well, we went out and did something a little crazy. That’s right. We’ve bought a new house! We have been watching the housing market for awhile. Watching prices fall and keeping an eye on the houses we liked, we pondered. Never seriously considering making a move right now. I mean, we have enough cooking at the moment without that sort of craziness.

But, we were looking to refinance the house we’re in now, to lock in a lower rate. At the same time, just for informations sake, Jess asked the mortgage broker what we might be able to realistically be able to purchase without literally putting us in the poor house. The answer surprised us. Suddenly, a house we happened to walk through an open house back last Labor Day was well within striking distance. We found a good rule of thumb as far as how much house you could afford which was a monthly payment of no more than 25% of your gross monthly income. Needless to say, we’re well below that. (As an aside, it took us a bit to realize just how well off we are with our dual incomes. Amazing.)

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Yesterday , Ryan Clady became Boise State’s all time highest NFL draft pick. He was taken at twelve by the Denver Broncos. He doesn’t change colors or mascots when going to the pros. I think he will do really well in Denver, because their scheme fits his strength. <football geek speak>They run a zone-blocking scheme which requires some more athleticism than just a straight line up and play smashmouth </football geek speak>.  I wasn’t able to watch a large chunk of the first day of the draft for a reason that I will have to tell you more about later.

Clady will always have a place in Boise State lore. You may remember a little play called “statue left”, aka. the game winning 2 point conversion in overtime in the Fiesta Bowl vs Oklahoma. His block helped seal the left end of the line (along with current Buffalo Bill Derek Schouman) to allow Ian Johnson to scamper across the goal line.

I’m going to be perfectly honest. As good as Clady was for us, I still don’t think he was the best offensive linemen that Boise State has ever had. I can recall numerous times where he was whistled for a drive killing penalty or him missing his guy and giving up a sack. I can’t back this up with numbers, but I trust my own eyes.

Still the best OL I have seen here is Daryn Colledge. Now a starter with the Green Bay Packers he graduated 3 years ago. I think he flew a bit under the radar because Boise State was not as well known then as they are now in this post-Fiesta Bowl universe.

Daryn was a 4 year starter for us. He owns both the consecutive games played and consecutive games started records at BSU, with 52 straight. We went 45-7 in his years here. One of his biggest wins was in that Hawaii game where he blocked 2 fourth quarter kicks, both returned by Orlando Scandrick and directly gave us the win.

Whenever he was matched up against a defensive end who had a lot of hype, he destroyed them. Specifically Bill Swancutt of Oregon State and Mathias Kiwanuka of Boston College. Neither of them did ANYTHING against Colledge.

When one is comparing offensive linemen, there is really very little hard data to go on. They don’t acrue many stats. I don’t think you can even use draft place as a guage either. So much goes into where a player is taken in the NFL. They don’t draft for how good a player is, they draft to how they project their game will translate to the pros. Which are not the same thing.

Then again, I’m just a fan, not an NFL scout. As a fan watching the games, I never had the confidence in Clady that I had in Colledge. So, in my book, Colledge will always be the best left tackle to ever come through the school.

All that being said, this is still a great thing for both Clady and Boise State. Having a player drafted in the top 12 is huge. It shows every single recruit that if you’re good, you can play at Boise State and still be drafted high. You don’t have to go to a Pac-10 school. You will play on national TV 5 or 6 times a year here. You will get seen.

Speaking of Orlando Scandrick, I just saw him get picked at place 143 going to the Dallas Cowboys.

In other ex-Bronco news, Chris Carr made news recently that might have been missed by some of you. He is the defensive back/kick returner who has been with the Oakland Raiders for the past 3 years as an undrafted free agent. He recently signed a contract with the Tennessee Titans for $2 million for 2 years. That is awesome. Despite being with the Raiders only 3 years he is their all-time kick return yardage leader. That is pretty impressive. Congrats, Chris.

It’s a good time to be a Bronco.

Crap.

Last year, I somehow missed commemorating my blog’s birthday, or blogiversary, if you will, by a full month. This year, I missed it again, if only by a single day. I had planned to recognize the “terrible twos” with a little post, but sure enough, April 24th came and went with nary a batted eye.

In the “better late than never” department… I can’t believe its already been two years I’ve been doing this. Amazing. Feels much shorter than that. I don’t even mind that 90% of my readers are people that I know personally. I still get the occasional random hit from google, but nothing major. Like I said last year, this is mainly for me.

Some updated stats:

• 267 Total Posts by me.
• 690 Comments from you.
• upwards of 1,300 unique visitors a month.
• 19,541 spam comments avoided.

That’s not too shabby.

Going forward, I’m thinking there might be a major overhaul of the look and feel of this site in the future. Wordpress (the software used to run this thing) has been updated greatly since I started, but the theme I’m using does not take advantage of all of those upgrades. So, if I can find the time, I may start tinkering with the presentation around here. If you show up and things look all wonky, rest assured, it’s probably just me playing with it.

So, happy (belated) Birthday In The World… here’s to many more.

The latest in the Judd Apatow production machine is a movie called Forgetting Sarah Marshall. He is the guy that gave us The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. However, he didn’t write or direct this one, only produced it. Frankly, this movie isn’t near as good as either of those flicks.

The movie centers around sad-sack Peter who in the first scene gets dumped by his TV star girlfriend of 5 years while in the buff. That’s right. We’re treated to a little full frontal male nudity not 5 minutes into the flick. Not that there is anything wrong with that… Did it feel a little gratuitous? Yes. Was it necessary to tell the story? That is questionable.

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Howdy everyone. I know I’ve been super lax about blogging lately but I do have at least a little something to show for it. Couple little somethings, actually.

If you would like to see the website I have been crunching away on for all those hours the past couple weeks, you can go here: http://www.limelightnetworks.com/

I didn’t design it, I just took the design mock up and actually created all of the html and javascript to make it actually work. Turned out well, I guess. Supposedly, the client is getting a lot of positive reviews, so that’s a good thing.

But, more importantly, I was able to spare a few hours to crank out our wedding site which eventually will be chock full of tasty info about the impending nuptials. Really, what I needed to do was get this up in order to coincide with our sending out of the Save the Date dealies. More on those later.

To view the Wedding Site, just go here: http://wedding.jasonhaberman.com

Like I said, there will be more content (and probably some edits and refining of current content) once I get a little more time. I have another website or two that are in the queue at the moment, so I gotta move on to those for a little bit. Mark and Dad, I haven’t forgotten you.

The funny thing about being a web developer, is you wouldn’t believe how many people out there “need a website”.  Like I said, I have a few sites in the hopper, but I am approached all the time.  We are refinancing the house, and when Jess filled in the occupation box for me, the mortgage lady told her, “Web developer huh?  Well, I need to talk to him…”.  Yeah, get in line lady.

Good thing I still enjoy it.

In two days. That’s what I’ve worked.

27 hours.

This project has been absolutely brutal. Long long hours.

However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Come tomorrow at 5pm MDT I officially wash my hands of it. That is the hard deadline to deliver the code to the client and I can relax for the first time in 2 weeks.

All told, I’ve probably put between 150 and 170 total hours on this project since I began in full on March 24th. That’d be 12 business days. Wow. That’s a lot of work. The project manager and creative folks have been terrific as I have pestered them at great length about stuff I needed from them. No offense Lee, but it will be nice not to have to bother you 14 times a day here for a little bit…

On the plus side, I’ve learned a bunch. Nothing like living under the gun to make you perform. The best thing I can say is that I will absolutely meet the deadline, despite all of the little technical problems along the way. Even today, I was battling with more uncooperative code that just wouldn’t play nice. Pounding headache. Nothing to do but muscle through. So, I did.

You better believe, the first beer I throw down tomorrow at 5pm is going to taste mighty sweet.

I don’t think I did 170 hours of work in my final 6 months at HP. My how times have changed.

Well, in the midst of my working 70 hour weeks recently, we’ve had what some might construe a setback in our wedding plans.

For a number of reasons, we will no longer be married in St. John’s cathedral here in Boise.

This has sort of been building ever since we thought that was what we might want to do. We had plans and hoped they would all work out. However, the Catholic Church has ways of making even the best intentions fall short.

We started off exploring the idea, and began all the paperwork to get my previous marriage “annulled” in the eyes of the church. They certainly don’t make things easy, as we had to wait for weeks and weeks to get cleared.

One of the main reasons we wanted to get married at that particular church was for the priest there. Fr. John Legerski. I’ve really liked him, and he has been sort of a family friend to Jess’ family. Well, Jess was speaking with him when he dropped a bit of a bombshell on us. The diocese is switching up all the priests in June, so he most likely won’t even be there to perform the service. Well, that sucks. Something one would think he might mention at the beginning of the whole process, no? Who knows who would be the priest there, or if we would even like him.

As far as times for the service on Saturday the 16th of August we had two options, neither of which were what we wanted. Either 2pm or 7pm. Well, 2 is way too early, and 7:00 is pushing the limits on when the reception was to start. Apparently, there was zero flexibility in those times. Not to mention, the near 200 people guest list would either be too big for the small chapel there, and look rather paltry in the main church.

Throughout this whole process they have succeeded in making this great celebratory event feel more like a burden to them. Damn near like we weren’t wanted. We have had to pull and prod to get any information or anything. Just disappointing.

I guess what really sealed our decision was the cumulation of the above factors combined with the fact that neither Jess nor I are practicing parishioners. We got to thinking that we might have been making this choice for incorrect reasons. Namely, it would make all of the parents happy. It was perhaps a bit hypocritical of us to try and go this way. Frankly, the church route just didn’t feel like “Us”. And after some discussion, we finally reached our decision. It appears that we aren’t the only ones… we fit squarely in the “younger” category of this story.

That being said, we’re back at square one. We’re probably 95% sure the service will be in the upper level of the Linen Building where we originally thought it would be. Personally, I think this is a great place, specifically because it is such a great space, plus there is no transportation back and forth… nobody has to be in charge of moving gifts or making sure everyone knows where to go.

So, now you’re up to date. Hope we didn’t get anyone’s hopes up for a big church wedding. Who knew that this was such a stressful deal when you are actually included in the decision making process?

Those who know me and my story will get that comment.

Some of you might be wondering where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to… ok… maybe not. Perhaps I have an inflated sense of self-worth… No matter. I’m telling you anyway, whether you want to know or not.

Working. That’s it, that’s the list.

I got handed a rather large website project last week. I spent last weekend dipping my toes into the pool but began with vigor on Monday. This site is quite involved, and consists of many many gradient background pieces and other items which just add to the complexity. I spent so much time staring at gradients that when I got out of bed to go to the bathroom Thursday night, the light through the window cast a gradient on the wall… All I could think was how I needed to slice that up and make it into html. Yeah, I need more sleep.

I’ve got <div>’s, classes, and pixel widths coming out of my ass. Don’t get be started about Internet Explorer’s, shall we say, “limited” standards implementation…

Plus, there were a number of technical challenges I ran into. Strange corner cases with CSS and javascript that took me forever to try to solve. The worst day this week was Wednesday. I was at work for over 12 hours and when I left I was in the EXACT same place as I was when I started the day. I actually accomplished nothing. Spent the day banging my head against the wall. I would fix one little thing, or think I had, only to find it didn’t really work, or worse yet, broke something that was previously working perfectly. Let me tell you, that was frustrating.

Counting the 9+ hours I worked today (Saturday), I am at over 62 hours for the week. It was nice and quiet at the office today though. I was the only one there. I do think I need to invest in an additional monitor for my home PC, so I don’t have to always work in the office. Any of you out there with dual monitors will agree with me on how much more efficient you can be with them. I think Costco might be a destination tomorrow…

As of this evening, I have conquered all of the real sticky technical pieces… and even better, I can reuse all of the code I’ve developed on future projects, which will save me a ton of time. Sometimes, there is nothing better than really getting in that groove where everything is working and you are making killer progress.

Speaking of which, as an aside, have you seen those bumper stickers that say something like “A Bad Day Golfing Still Beats A Good Day At Work”? Bullshit. I would MUCH rather have a good day at work kicking ass, than have one of those rounds where you put 12 balls into the water. It’s not even close to a tough decision. Maybe that’s just me.

On the plus side, Jess is actually out of town in Portland, OR visiting an old college friend this weekend. So, I’ve been able to completely focus on work. Not that I can’t when she is around or anything, but it is tough when you have a metric shit-ton of work but would rather spend time with a certain someone, ya know?

So, the ‘beta’ site is due to show the customer by end of business on Wednesday. With the stuff I got knocked out today, I don’t think I should have a problem hitting that deadline. That being said, I will be working long hours up until then to be sure. Not to mention, that the client will then review it, then provide feedback. Judging by how this client has been up until now, there will be a TON of changes and alterations. I think the final product is due the 8th or 9th.

I will be neck deep until then. It’s unfortunate that I’ve been so slammed, because there has been a lot I wanted to blog about lately… bitching about daylight savings time, Boise State winning the WAC and making the Big Dance, my brackets performance (or lack thereof), so on and so forth… maybe I’ll get to them sometime.