David’s Blog

Just to publicize, my recent large decision and the current choices I have awaiting my voice. First off, I’ve finished my High School portfolio and I’ll be making those four pieces publicly available in the next few days for those of us who wish to evaluate my current literacy rate.

As the post title suggests, I have chosen which college I will be attending - Bellarmine University located in Louisville, KY . I will be going for my bachelors degree in their Computer Engineering course starting June 2nd; three days after I graduate from LaRue County High on May 30th.

For the past few months I’ve been trying to get into the University of Lousiville for their computer engineering course; however, Bellarmine requested me offering $14,300 a year in grants before FASFA . Thus, I decided to visit the college last week to see what I was throwing around beside almost $15k. I ended up in a conversation for an hour with the my soon-to-be professor over the course. The basics of the conversation were that the classes would only consist of about ten students total, and the college did not really have an engineering school; however, because of this he is able to give individual lesson plans to his students. That in itself hooked me into this choice; anyone who knows me knows that I’m quite advanced and I don’t wish to pay for hours of classes just reteaching me aspects of advanced computing I am already very aware of.

That covers the whole reason why I choose that college, now there is another huge decision regarding my foundation of how my occupational future will unfold. While in conversation with Professor Muzaffar - after I told him that I’m a large Linux addict and my current machine consists of five physical drives totalling over one terabyte of space, separated into ten logical drives, three of which are AES encrypted using the SHA256 hashing algorithm -  he stated that I was the only freshman he has EVER had that he’d recommend to a company "off-the-bat".

Three days later, I find myself on the phone with a Mr. Roger Kobal, the president of KiZan Technologies discussing a possible computer engineering and security internship at the age of 17 before even attending my freshman year of Bellarmine. Mr. Kobal, referred me to his head of internships, Mrs. Dense Paul, who is very egar to hire me after an hour interview via telecommuting. Currently, we are looking at visiting with the development team, security auditing team, and the enginerring team next week.

- That’s my story and I’m sticking too it; you have my cell call to talk. If you don’t email me at David@NeoeliteUSA.com and I’ll provide it if I deem it safe.

    About a week ago my old friend, Mike Marseglia, now a security analyst for Verisign, informed me about a promo code on Amazon for Panasonic’s new Globarange joip-phone hybrid. Priced at $100, I would never have purchased such a device; however, Mike also provided me with a Amazon Promo code for a free Globarange BB-GT1500B unit so I couldn’t resist. The phone is both a voip phone, service provided by JoIP, and a regular 5.8ghz cordless land-line with mp3 ringtone options.
    None-the-less, when I went to hook-up the device to my network I was instantly faced with a problem aroused by my paranoid security system; a situation similar to that of the xbox 360 NAT issue I had. Ether-way, I knew the solution was simple, I needed to unblock the ports used by the networked portion of the phone; it wasn’t that simple. First-off, the ports used were not included in the manual like they should have, and they were not listed on any part of their website.
    After several hours of searching for a solution, I decided to call Panasonic’s tech support; this was a sad experience. When I first called, I was questioned and ridiculed as to why I needed tech-support for a phone and got disconnected quite a few times while on hold. Finally when i got though to the help-desk for the globarange phone, I told them the situation and they INSISTED it was because of an incompatible router. I told them I’m a software engineer and given the fact that my router was a software solution and not a cheap linksys box, I KNOW it’s not a router problem and asked for the specific ports used by the router. To-make-a-long-story-short, a few days later they provided me with the port numbers used:

External Ports Used by the BB-GT1500B: (Outgoing)
DNS: 53 UDP
Internet: 80 TCP
Timeserver: 123 UDP
Bind: 3478 UDP
Bind: 3479 UDP
SIP: 23768 UDP
Call ports: 8000-55998 UDP

As you might have noticed, during the past week or so, I have moved my blog from a sub-folder in the main domain (neoeliteusa.com) or a sub-domain (blog.neoeliteusa.com). There have been some other changes in the website struture and neoeliteusa.com now points to the blog. Kinda spooky with holloween having just come; I wonder whats going on…

P.S. I now have a cell-phone so just skype, email, or IM me for the number if you want it. If you want it i’ll provide it, just not posting it becasue I don’t want spam callers or telemarketers.

   Much like totalitarian seeking his intents, I’ve been a busy Humanoid. Having been so busy, I’ve not had time to well…. Eat my cake… ugh… I mean blog. Coming home at 10pm Sunday to Sunday has a tendency to do that. Oh well, Everywhere I look I’m getting thrown more of Newcomb’s Paradox’s; figures. Excuse me while I climb out of this black-hole of troubles….

    There now I have more space to write on DO NOT DOWNLOAD SPACE INVADERS on the wall. Well ether-way, I just signed-up for the ACT, apparently it’s not a test on how well you can pretend to be a fat, smelly, person climbing up Juliette’s hair, but an aptitude test. Now when I say aptitude I’m not meaning that cool Debian (I use Kubuntu; oh and I’m a full-time linux user now!!! Party at my house) program that installed your xine and truecrypt to hide your “movie collection”, I mean like an IQ test but just for colleges (a southern SAT, if you will). Well, now I’m caught studying the red Elmo out of that test, school (mostly program and not listen to teachers), and working an hour drive (given speed =< limit) away from home.

    “BUT THAT’S NOT ALL FOLKS!” Yesterday my debit card got declined when I was attempting to put fuel in my car. See, we here on earth haven’t yet developed a way to run on electricity and solar power. Oh, I was running my car on empty because I had ran Seafoam, the engine cleaner that rids of the carbon, though my gas tank and needed to use it all up. Well, much like a monkey wants a banana, I needed fuel. Worse DID come to worse, and I ended up driving to school without fuel. Before I left school, I called up the bank and asked “Where’s the $XXX I deposited in my checking account Thursday?” Long story short it went in my savings and I had fuel to drive to work. However, somehow I obtained an extra $150 and I have not written my checks lately… I’ll be getting a transaction sheet printed on my account here in a couple hours; those money-handling energy-consuming THINGS where not open yesterday.

One last word: I don’t have Halo 3 pre-ordered yet and it is released Monday the 24^th!!

Been a bit sense I last posted (2 weeks and a day right?) so I thought i’d update you people on my life. I’m still working with Gooma developing a few systems for them for $30/hr. Yesterday I blacked out and today I had an appointment with the psychiatrist. Uh… I really don’t know what to say, i mean nothing is really happening. I guess if you want to know, I’ve been working on fixing Neoelite v2.0 to work with ZF 0.7 and I have to send my xbox 360 in for repairs. …. and checking RIGHT NOW… i mean as i was typing this post ZF has posted version 0.8…. I have some catching up to do and now need to reprogram Neoelite v2.0 to work with ZF 0.8.

As some of you may, or may-not, know, I’ve been having troubles with my last web hosting company. The main problem that really got on my nerves was the fact it only hosted with PHP4 and I require PHP5. Thus Kieran hooked me up with $97 off a dreamhost account and I went for it. It was stated on the website that to transfer a domain, the transfer would take about a week; I thought I had enough time to work on my end, wrong. The transfer took only 5 hours NOT one week, and I still had 60% of my site to download, then upload it, then create the databases, upload the old databases, and then finally edit the configuration files. Turns out my site was down for about 20-30 hours; if you had any issues, that COULD have been why.

As many of you don’t know, I’ve been planning since before Christmas for the PHPThrownDown 24 hour programming contest. Knowing the chances were slim, I still strove to gather programmers for a team. Originally consisting of four programmers, Ole, Kieran, Aaron, and myself, found ourself, all week, planning for Saturday’s activity. The debreffing/venting from the contest can be found on The PHPDN Forums. Using my idea that we should develop a flashcard website, a topic of which I have much experience in, we all agreed, over Kieran’s Incest.us, an idea to mix a dating site with a genealogy site - to which I added “Fun for the whole family!”, would be the best thing to program for the competition. I won’t go over too many details, the debreffing will cover me on that. Now about this whole, “You haven’t updated in over a month” bit, yeah no kidding, for the first two weeks of the month my hosting companies DNS was screwed up, last week I was busy with my $30/hour freelance job, and this week I spent to planning for the contest. Oh and if your wondering, I programmed for 20 hours straight, 7am-4am, and got 2 hours of sleep, 4am-5:45am, I wasn’t able to hold a conversation with my girlfriend come Sunday. I ended up passing out on her lap; she felt great after that.

I really only made this post to conglomerate Joel Spolsky’s blog post “Where do These People Get Their (Unoriginal) Ideas?”. I really have to agree here with Joel, being a programmer I can understand exactly what “THE ZONE” is and how different it is for us to just “get in it”. The zone is great, the zone is fast pace. People ask me how I can spend hours in front of the computer in one sitting. (literally; sitting) They all think I’m gaming because how else can I spend the time? Well truth is I hardly play games, It’s mostly programming and once I’m in “The Zone” just as Joel states I think the five hours I just spent programming was really only 30min. Once “The Zone” is broken you have to remember what you were doing and regain your train of thought; “The Zone” is not programming the code but BEING the code. Once your in “The Zone” you don’t think about anything else, it’s 100% code and project goals.

- Time is money; Don’t waste money, don’t mess up anyones’ “Zone”.

Sound going loud, then soft, then back to loud, then back to soft. (Repeat) Ether my sound card or headphones are messing with me or I’m messed up tonight. Ugh, My head hurts too not a migraine like normal but a sharp pain behind my right eye. I swear I’m not drunk; I don’t drink remember? Anyway check this link out, I doubt I’ll be getting much money but they get a lot of traffic; traffic that MIGHT get me a nice job. DevNetwork Job Posting Anyways, Carrie’s was great; yesterday we ended up going to Tony’s church for their New Years party. Ended up messing the New Years countdown; however, it was still 12:00am so I went in for the New Year’s kiss like every other couple today. As planned went to her house at 10am and had a nice little New Years Lunch and had a little fun.

Alright it�s been two weeks sense my last blog post and a lot of stuff happened so this might seem like a long entry but bear with me.

This month, as I said I�ve been very busy, I�ve had a slew worth of parties to attend, mostly involving my girl; actually they all involved her. First party was December 15^th, Carrie�s father�s company had a Christmas party and he wished for me to attend. The party was rather slow but I enjoyed the time away from reality. Being a Christmas party, it was many aimed towards the brood, thus any alcoholic consumption was prohibited; this was a wise choice on multiple levels. They provided some rather interesting entertainment in the form of a magician; this was rather humorous while the magician choose the adults out of the audience to perform humiliating skits for the children enjoyment.

That following Sunday, Carrie�s grandmother � mother�s side � invited me to their house for their Christmas party. They were going to have it closer to Christmas but because of hunting season they were afraid to loss more then half the family. The time there was short but I enjoyed the time with her grandparents; good people.

I hate to say this again � so I will - that following Sunday, Carrie�s OTHER grandmother � the father�s side - invited me to their house for their Christmas party. I was rather shocked at first because this happens to be the grandmother that hates the idea of any kind of man figure in her granddaughter�s life but by the end of this second encounter she loved me. The chosen array of food was far from scarce; truth is I was debating what I should sample first. I ended up spending all my time on the main meal; I failed to even think about touching the desserts.

That, I believe, brings me to Christmas Eve, and you bet I wasn�t home for this. Christmas Eve I could�ve been found at Carrie�s house from 6:30am till 11pm. At which I attended a church service with them till 12pm honoring our lord and savor Jesus Christ. I found myself home approximately at 1am Christmas night. Ah, but I failed to talk about what I did during the day didn�t I? Sorry you must excuse me, I�m really attempting to be thorough. During Christmas Eve, Carrie was throwing another Christmas party at her house. As wonderful as it was: the food, the fun, the talking with family, it left me with some scares � manly the fact her cousin grabbed my butt; but I�m seeking professional help about that, he said I�ll be ok in a few months.

Now today, December 30^th, or New Year�s Adam (Adam came before Eve � Church joke), I got the pleasant surprise of the presence of my mother; which of whom I have seen in over a year in a half, roughly 18months. Bearing Christmas gifts for Ryan, Jacob and I, she came to wish us a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I was thrilled I was so happy I was able to see my mother after so long; what a wonderful gift for any holiday. We mainly talked and watched as Ryan and Jacob rode their new bikes around the year without a care in the world.

Now to wrap up this post and to start the New Year I present my family and random visitors with a new blog layout. I�m sorry if I change it a lot, I have a habit of having to change the way my website or computer themes look after so long; they get boring. Thus I hope you enjoy this new layout as much as I do, I but a good amount of time and effort into it to make sure it has all the latest technology I could find without messing too much up. You may or may not be seeing small chances here or there but we�ll find out in time.

I�ll end this post saying �OMG how much did I type!� and wish you and your family a �Happy New Year�. For Me, I�m off to my girl�s house Sunday and Monday; I have a little countdown surprise for her, if you get what I mean.