S-t-r-u-g-g-l-i-n-g to stay awake. Seriously.

Last night was nothing thrilling, though it wasn't a disappointment. Erin, Jeffrey and I, along with a handful of others, went to the Timber's game. We watched, Erin and I got a little rowdy, then we went for some drinks afterwards. Minimal drama, a few good laughs... sort of an odd night, as it was an odd collection of friends in an odd location.

That has nothing to do with anything, by the way.

Today is my last day doing the full-time Army gig. I've decided I'm sort of spent with wearing the uniform every single day. I figure I lasted about a year doing this, it's been a great experience, I've definitely learned a lot and had the pleasure of working with some pretty great people. But Laurie/SGT Arterburn took a new position in a different dept a few weeks ago, and Chief is looking to probably head out to DC to work for Nat'l Guard Bureau (<--it just took me three attempts to spell 'bureau.' Hope I did it correctly...). The whole atmosphere of the office is changing. Chief Willis, the PBO who was over in Afghanistan, is now back and has officially taken over the office, along with SSG Raymond. Both really great guys, but... well, this job has stopped feeling like a regular job and has started to feel like what everyone assumes a military job would be like. I'm not a fan.

Instead of the uniform I will be wearing whatever I damn well please to work everyday. Well, within reason. Business casual. But to compensate for the last year I've spent in a uniform, I'm sure I'm going to be going a little beyond what they expect of me and wearing skirts and heels everyday. The 'Oh, shiney!' might wear off after a couple weeks... My old supply sgts wife is the office manager of a dental office out in Cornelius. She called and asked me if I would be interested in coming and working for her as their receptionist. I'm not striving to be a career secretary, but this position is bilingual specific. An opportunity to actually put one of my degrees to use? Weird....

So I said yes, told my boss here that I would be leaving end of July, told her I'd start beginning of August, and starting Monday I'll be commuting out on Hwy 26 (the bane of my existence) on a daily basis. Ugh. The downside to all this (aside from 26) is that I'm taking a major paycut. That's one thing I'll say about the military, they pay nicely. In an effort to make up for this paycut, I'll also be going back to Gap. Ugh, retail (the other bane of my existence). Back to working 15 hour days and sometimes six days a week. I give it a couple months before I'm really hurting for my regular schedule, Army uniform job.

But really, these orders were going to run out at the end of Sept, so I would have been looking for a job in about a month anyway. And if I hadn't found one, it would have been back to Medford with me. Not gonna lie, I cried at the thought of having to go back there. So I'll just keep reminding myself that I'm doing what I have to do in order to stay where I am, and I'll try to focus on the fact that I can actually choose what I want to wear in the mornings.

In other news: wait, that's the only news right now. My life is work and sometimes play. Pretty uneventful....


always.....

God damn, I love this state. If they shut off the borders and said "Oh no, mister, you can't leave Oregon ... EVER", I think I'd be quite alright with that. It's got everything a nerd like me could wish for. Well, except for beaches filled with Brazilian bikini models, but, you know what, I can live with that.

Over the last few weeks, I've had the pleasure of visiting both the Oregon coast -- one of my all-time favourite destinations and a little chunk of Portland gold.

Just over a fortnight ago, Brian, or Gjurj as we all know him, proposed a lightning-trip to the coast to get our feeties wet in the ocean. "Draw up them blueprints, I think we have us a fucking plan" I said.

We rustled the ladyfolk, Sarah and Kim and hit the road to Cannon Beach. after wetting our feeties, we ate some pretty decent food and walked around town. My favourite part was going to this strange Scandinavian shop. It has the most banal novelty items and decorations. Some examples. That page kicks ass. I'm a bit proponent of the "BIG FUCKING TEXT IS BOUND TO CATCH SOMEONE'S EYE, RIGHT?" advertising concept.

FUCK THE POLICE. We approve of the message that you just read. Brian and Eric for City Treasurers 2008. Our slogan: "We're sexy; so you don't have to be."

Kim and I took a page out of Fugitives and Refugees and hunted down Elk Rock Island. Reported to be an island of raw wilderness just a few miles from the city, we found it to be just that. I give it an a-. A few too many signs of human trespass (see also: beer bottles and soda cans) knocked it down to a minus. A very photogenic place.

"From downtown Portland, follow McLoughlin Boulevard south. Take the River Road exit, drive four blocks, then turn right on Sparrow Street to the corner of 19th Avenue.

Me, posted up under the bridge. On the weekend, I brandish switchblade knifez and collect tolls from tourists. To buy drugs. To sell at orphanage open-houses. Hardcore as fuck. 2007.

Beyond random trips, things have been fun. I've been getting some work done on the collective, as my last post details. Crazy good. I love Eclipse. And XDebug. And XAMPP. Yar.

I got a raise at work. 5%. Pretty, pretty decent. I also got a pretty, pretty decent bonus. I knew we got a year end bonus, I just didn't know it'd be so, um, rad. I'm going to build the machine to kill all machines. Nothing short of 4gigs of ram and 2tb of storage for stuff. I'm also going to buy some sweet RS4 rims and some new skins.

I'm 23 now, but will I live to be 24? Fuck yes I did. It was my birthday yesterday. This last year has raced by. So much has changed. Last year, I was still just an intern. Now, I'm neck deep in stress and deadlines and real-job responsibilities. It's, um, intense. I gave a short speech to the interns about 'my story,' since I was successful at getting a full-time position. Due to that, I believe, I've had a couple of the interns shadow me. It's funny to think I was in their shoes, trying to meet and impress everyone. It's a hard life, being an intern, but hey, someone's got to do it.

Anyway, back to my birthday. I would have been out and about, causing hell in this city, but I was on-call and the shit hit the fan. Kim ordered out some dinner while I sat there trying to fix the problems. 12 hours of work yesterday. Not fun. At least I get to listen to loud, obscene music at home, right?

And, just so you know -- the new Ween EP is top-notch. A little BROWN SOUND for the Summer never sounded so tasty.

My friend Abe threw my friend Paul a shindig at a bar attached to the local Lazer Tag joint. They still exist? Whoa. Anyway, there were live bands and dollar beers. It was really fun seeing a lot of people from the college days. They seem so far away. My ex-roommate from the A-frame, Andy, the superpimp to end them all, is getting married. To a really nice girl, I might add. Jeryl is getting married in LESS THAN A MONTH. Holy fuck. I'm getting old. Marriage is crazy -- I'm still such a kid. I mean, I have to aggressively fight the urge to throw M80s from my car when driving through school zones.

In the end, I still feel like I have a lot of mischeif and chaos to cause. I love you all.

I approve of this post.

EDIT: Bonnie ! Like whoa.

So, Corey and I hit a lurker of a bug while working on version 2 of mixtapecollective. For some reason, the pages were loading twice -- but only under certain conditions. We rolled back to an older version of the code and found that the bug was introduced sometime in the last couple months, but we couldn't track it down -- there's been a lot of new code. We hacked away for a few hours before realizing that our current setup was pretty janky (see also: tortoise SVN, FileZilla, Notepad++). Stumped, I finally bit the bullet and decided to get Eclipse, my most favourite IDE, installed and set up for locally debugging (and developing!) our PHP project on my little Windows box.

Setting it up sounds simple enough, but I think I hit just about every stumbling block possible. After scouring bug reports, forums and outdated guides, I decided I'd gather my experiences and throw up a quick how-to guide. Here we go:

Step 1:
Ensure that you have JDK 5 installed. I had a newer version installed, but it caused some issues when it came to line-by-line debugging. Save yourself some time and install this bitch first.

Step 2:
Download and install XAMPP. I've used XAMPP for a few versions and it's been nothing short of perfect. It'll set up a local install of Apache (with PHP extensions), a MySql server and some other nifty things. Really slick. My only advice is to install directly to your c:\xampp directory -- I had issues redefining Apache's docroot when I had spaces in the path name (ie: c:\program files\xampp\...). Once installed, verify your docroot is correct (xamppDir/apache/conf).

Step 3:
Download PDT (PHP Development Tools) v07RC2 from http://europa-mirror1.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/downloads/?release=S20070130-RC2. PDT is a version of Eclipse with some really wonderful modifications geared towards PHP development. Documentation is kind of hard to find, but it's still radical. There is a newer version, but RC2 seemed to work out best for me. Install this wherever you wish.

Step 4:
Download XDebug from http://xdebug.org/link.php?url=xdebug200-522-win. Ensure you grab the version designed for your version of PHP. Copy this to the XAMPPDIR/php/extensions file. Determine which version of php.ini xampp is using (it installs a couple, but only uses one) by throwing up a quick phpinfo(). Once found, comment out the zend_extention_ts line under the [Zend] heading and add the following:

[xdebug]
xdebug.remote_enable=1
xdebug.remote_host="localhost"
xdebug.remote_port=9000
xdebug.remote_handler="dbgp"
zend_extension_ts="C:\XAMPPPATH\php\extensions\php_xdebug-2.0.0-5.2.2.dll"


Once that is done, restart Apache and phpinfo() verify that XDebug was loaded.

Step 5:
Download D Kelsey's XDebug for PDT plugin (prebuilt binary / version 0.1.3) at https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/attachment.cgi?id=58341. Extract these files to the Eclipse plugin directory. There is an included PDF that is a pretty good resource.

Step 6:
Fire up Eclipse and define your workspace as being your XAMPP htdoc root. If the path to the file that your server is serving isn't exactly the same as the one that Eclipse is looking at, there can be some issues with breakpoints. Just do it!

Step 7 (optional):
Install Subclipse from http://subclipse.tigris.org/install.html. You are using version control, right?

Step 8:
Now, this is where our paths might diverge -- it's pretty dependent on your project. Once you have your project set up in Eclipse, select run>debug and double-click on 'PHP Web Script with XDebug' to set up a new debugger. My settings were as follows:

Script and Server: mtc/index.php
Server URL: http://localhost
Context Root: mtc
URL should look like: http://localhost/mtc/index.php

Step 9:
For me, the outline view / PHP project outline pane didn't work -- i fixed this by opening the .project file in my workarea and replaced the buildSpec and natures nodes. Props to http://cakebaker.42dh.com/2006/12/27/migration-from-phpeclipse-to-php-ide/ for the help.

Now, you should be set up. Set a few breakpoints, fire up the debugger and develop to your heart's content. Hell yes. Hope this helps.

Here is the apology letter my roommate and I had to give to our neighbor/classmate today:




Dear Apartment 207,


Apartment 202 would like to sincerely apologize for the way we conducted ourselves in your home last eve. Prior to arriving we drank heavily and didn’t realize how wasted we were before coming over. Being so wasted contributed to a number of poor decisions that we regret happened. First, for taking your food. This was really brainless of us and we hope it didn’t affect your guests experience at the party. Second, for dancing around in our underwear and possibly, but unintentionally, exposing a certain member of the body to you and your company, after taking your food. This was very regretful and embarrassing. Upon second though we realized this was way out of line and a terrible mistake.

Upon arriving at our place, with your bounty of food we did have sense of mind to not eat any of it and refrigerated all of it. So if its any consolation all the food is still edible and clean.

Again, we’re very sorry and disappointed in our actions and would like to remain in good sted with you and your company. Despite how it may have appeared, everything we did was done with the best of intentions. We honestly thought that dancing around in our underwear would positively contribute toward the jovial environment of the party. It wasn’t until the morning that we realized our grave misfortunes.

We would like to remain friends and ask for forgiveness. You have never done anything to hurt or terrorize us and this chain of events was uncalled for and dim-witted.

Despite our actions we would like to sincerely wish Nilam a happy birthday.




Regretfully yours,




Dr. J. A. Ames. Backer Pht. Brien

... I very much envy the persons life that resembles this. Neat and tidy, predictible, and simplistic. But hell, at this point id settle for controlled chaos. I'm sure it could be much worse, and really its not that bad. Wow it's been a while since I've posted, I like the new look though, yay for Edo facelift.

So the Fouth of July was fun, even though the holiday has now made new "bane of my existance status" see: heartbreak, what two three years in a row? Kinda funny though I hate to admit. One day or so shy of our one year anniversary my beau decides "this just isn't working out for me" but wait the funny part? Well he had been in Monmouth for four days and he waited until after he got back to Ashland, and yes after he picked me up, as well as after we had sex twice, but he couldn't give me time to put my clothes back on... it was just too important I suppose, that he start telling me all the faults he finds in me, see: Dan's definition of a "personality flaw", I guess it must have been more effective for me to be naked for this somehow. So after the parade I'm telling this all to Eric and Tallon at the Hong Kong over mimosas, well Eric at least while Tallon has a harder time listening to a sentance then a nine year old with ADHD being read aloud something along the lines of War and Peace, it's ok though Tallon, the free drinks made up for it and I'm sure I was babbling anyhow :P, so I tell Eric my story to which he replies "well, can you blame him??" followed by a lot of stumbling over words and explanations of what he "really meant by that was, I mean every guy at least thinks of trying to, I didn't mean it like that, that was mean, I mean..." but, he made me smile so I forgot about how pissed I was for a while, thanks Eric.

So Kaden and I ended up going over to Tallon's bosses' house with his girly, who is a really cool chick that he better be nice to, and his niece, where we ran into Eli's momma and dad and sis, the latter two were kicking everyones ass at beer pong, gawd I love Wayne. He mad Tallon pose for This Picture.

But yeah so the kids had fun Lighting Fireworks with Wayne and Tallon then we headed down to the field to watch the big fireworks with the chilin in tow and meh up with Wispy, his girly, and Eric, who for some reason Kaden kept kicking and jumping all over while Eric tried to no success to defend himself, see: force push, against my five year old who had had waaay to much sugar and sun. He handled it gracefully though and somehow Kaden conned a piggyback ride all the way back to the car outta him. All in all a pretty mellow fourth but it was fun, despite all the other crap. I wont complain about one good day outta seven, for now I'll take what I can get.

However come the weekend... Kadens Dad finds out he has inpregnated someone, or rather it may be him that did, well most likely, ohoh and my 17 year old sister is pregnant, and then Merkita, the acrobatic aquatic escape artist that is Eli's turtle, has climbed out of his cage again, but unlike the other times the back door is wide open and he is nowhere to be found...

I miss ya'll

-Sarah

o and one last funny, I don't even know what to call it - thing?, my new x just started working at my old x's old work, yup Dan got hired at G'sepps, this town has officially become to small for me.

Jedi

Little Kids + Darth Vader

= Not such a Hot Idea

There's three wonderful traditions in my family: our Christmas celebration, Sunday morning pancakes and The Independence Day shindig with the family friends. Four if you count random towel snaps from my father. The past two years, I've missed out on the July 4th festivities due to being an intern. This year, with PTO in hand, I made the trek down to Southern Oregon to join the fam and friends.

The Ashland Parade is usually pretty lame (see also: really lame), but we always go, since my parents have been doing it for 25+ years. Tradition. Anyway, this year, with Tallon (T-BAG) Jackson by my side, it was a bit more interesting.

I'm going to go ahead and blow my load up front this time. There are normally a huge amount of religious entries in the parade. This year, there weren't so many, but there was a new, sparkling white face -- the Mormons. They looked spectacular. They totted signs that read "Thank You Ashland." They were clean shaven, looked to be polite and whore shirts so white that Moroni was almost certainly smiling.

Despite having been booed by Tallon (which was in bad taste, even by my fucked standards), they were nice enough to pose for a picture. I enjoy the guy on the left flashing a nondescript gang sign. Garments, y'all.

There was also a Delorian present. The picture doesn't quite capture it, but there is a skateboarder on the back. Props. Everyone was going nuts. In all actuality, it was pretty lame, but the nostalgia and sheer pointlessness garnered some points. Mad props.

Now, let's take a closer look. I'd like to extend a most cordial 'fuck off' to the six people who weren't cheering. Yes, I was watching you. Most of all, fuck Mr. McBlueshirt. I'm on to you, sucker.

There was a cop on a Segway. I don't even need a joke for this one. Zac posted up hard for this picture, but you have to wonder what sort of conversation is going on between the five-oh and Mr. McCargoshorts Jr...

Speaking of Segways, there was a whole crew of about 20 people riding their Segways. Some of them had offroad tires installed. 50% of the riders were old men, 40% chubby nerd-types 10% miscellany. As time progressed, it became apparent that the parade committee sure as shit didn't have very high standards.

But let's take a closer look. Look at this little bastard. First of all, he's wearing a helmet. Second of all, he's talking on a cell phone. Finally, he's got a 'for sale' sign taped to his chest with a $3999 price tag on it.

" ... oh hey, what's up dude? What are you up to? Oh, cool! Me? I'm just hanging out, riding my $3999 toy in a parade."

What a douchebag. Serisouly.

This year had girls in bikinis. I am a huge proponent of the 'more bikinis, less Segways' movement.

Fuck you, Mr. McBlueshirt! You don't pay attention to the goddamn Delorian but you can't seem to take your eyes off the mildly attractive girl covered in fake tattoos. I see you sick little grin and your feeble attempt to hide your halfie. You sicken me.

While standing in the plaza after the parade, this guy walked by with his miniature pony. At the same time, from the other direction, a gaggle of partyhos approached. Tallon, being quick on his feet, asked the guy if they could ride the pony. He agreed, as did one of the girls. Our own spontaneous pony show. Wonderful. Let's take a closer look.

Yeah dawwwwwwg, you know what I'm talking about.

The rest of the day was spent drinking, eating and playing with fireworks. Totally worth 8 hours of PTO.

I love you all.