Jackson Harpers Web Log

Here is the new one

People need this?

I enrolled Roxy in obedience school. She seems to really like it, but I am worried about how much homework they are giving her...

Since miguel is looking for activity suggestions

OMG WE SUCKED

With all the unpacking, and everything I have been a little delayed in posting this. Long story short, I got my stuff. It arrived saturday night, was unloaded quickly, nothing was damaged besides some very minor scratches, and nothing was missing. The guys that delivered the stuff were pretty cool, they were quick, friendly, and extremely hard working.

I also received a pretty substantial discount, technically it was 20%, however it was actually 37% of the original price, before there were additional charges for things like a long carry at the pickup, and for my apartment being on the second floor (although technically the estimate explicitly states there is no charge for being on the second floor).

So interpret that as you will. Maybe I was just a one time mistake. Them giving me a discount seems to imply that. However, if asked, I would definitely not recommend this company.

Everyone has been asking me if I have my stuff yet. The answer is NO. After talking to the driver the other day, calling back and displaying my dissatisfaction, I was told I need to talk to the dispatcher and he would call me back. Okay....time marches on, and of course the dispatcher does not call me back. So I call, the dispatcher answers right away, and explains to me where the truck is, there seems to be a lot of confusion, he thinks I am calling to schedule local delivery. Keeps asking me if I am ready to pickup. He makes a comment about my cellphone having bad reception, I mention that I would call on my land line but its in the back of his truck in the middle of Nebraska. To that he replies "Oh so you are not ready to pickup". I'm not sure if that was some sort of threat or just misunderstanding. So he finally figures out how unhappy I am with the service, and tells me that because of the delay he will be offering a discount. He tells me that he can't give me details on the discount because he is "Just the dispatcher" and that the claims department will be calling me about my discount. I ask him his name and he says Rami (remember this for later kids).

So a day goes by and no call. My back is really starting to kill me from sleeping, working, and generally living on an inflatable mattress for the last 24 days. I go through the whole call, leave message, get no reply, call back loop a few times until finally I get a receptionist. I explain my problem, she tells me that the owner will be in within an hour and that he will call me when he gets in. I ask her for her name, and the owners name, since I am now keeping detailed notes of everything that happens. She tells me the owners name is Rami. WHAAAA? So I guess he lied to me earlier. No real surprise there. So of course Rami never calls me back, I call a few times, get no answer, put my phone on anonymous, and get a receptionist who tells me to call back tomorrow.

I believe I have found out why my truck is so delayed. Between August 1st and August 10th their license to operate was revoked because they failed to have insurance :-s.

I also just called the driver, he answered (I recognized his voice), then said wrong number and hung up. Hmpf.

Anyways, tomorrow should be the big day. According to what I was told on monday. This time there will be no cleaning, no water bottles, no extra money for a tip.

For people planning a move in the future I recommend this site movingscam.com.

UPDATE: I have recieved my delivery, and a discount for the delay. Here is a brief write up on that. In the next few days I will summarize the entire experience and post it somewhere more static then my blog. First off, I'd like to get this page google ranked for "Northwest Vanline". So if you can, add a link to this in your blog.

Originally when I spoke to these people and I had my estimate made I was told the move would take from 10-14 days. When my stuff was picked up, they had me give them a delivery date. I set it for Aug. 12th (12 days from the day of pickup) and was told that shouldn't be a problem. So aug. 12th comes along, and no movers. I figure, no big deal, they probably don't do the local delivery on the weekend (it was a saturday). I woke up early on the 14th expecting a nine am delivery. Nothing. I waited until 1pm and called them asking when my delivery would be. "Sir, your truck will be there in one week. Next monday". OK, whatever, one extra week. That really sucks, because now I have to go buy clothes to wear to Daiana's ceremony. I have to buy some kitchen-ware, and I have to schedule another day off work when they get here.

So today is the 21st. Yay, I get my stuff. I went out last night, got extra cash so I would have a tip for the delivery guys, I cleaned up so nothing would be in the way, and I bought some bottled water so they wouldn't die carrying all my stuff in. Again one o'clock passes and I decide to call. They seem really confused, saying things like "Oh good, you are there, now we can arrange local deliver". Yeah, I arranged local deliver three weeks ago, when you took all my stuff. They tell me they will call back, and get a guarantee that it will be within the hour. I get no call back, so I call, leave a kinda angry message "Hi this is Jackson Harper, I am calling about the delivery of my stuff, it is already a week late, and I was told I would be called back with a delivery time however no one called me back". Wait another hour, call back, this time she answers right away saying "Hello Mr Harper, I have good news, your stuff is on the trailer, I have the drivers number for you". Hmmm, so they have caller id, I wonder if thats why so few of my calls are answered. But wow, thats great news, my stuff will be here soon. I ask if it will be here today and she says yes. I ask if it will be before five (I assume no one works after five) and she says she isn't sure, I should talk to the driver. I get his number and name...actually she didn't really know his name, she told me what she thought it was. She told me I should call him because she tried and his phone cut out.

"Hi this is Jackson Harper, I was calling about the delivery of my stuff"

"Oh hello Jackson, what would you like to know"

"What time my stuff will be delivered"

"Oh I am not sure yet, I will tell you when I am closer"

"Where are you now"

"Nebraska. It should be about five days, I have stops in Minnesota,..."

I stopped paying attention there because I was so pissed off. I just thanked him for his time and said goodbye.

My girlfriend started at Eastern Virginia Medical School this week. The new students are given white coats to signify their entrance into the profession. Here are a couple of pictures from the ceremony:

We've chipped away pretty significantly on the winforms buglist over the last few weeks. However I am still thinking we should hire this guy.

Arizona

New Mexico

Texas

Largest Cross in the Western Hemisphere

Beale St. in Memphis

My new Hood

My yard

• Moving truck was delayed so I have no furniture or pants for another week
• I have one pot and a plastic knife
• You are not allowed to swear on Virginia Beach (seriously)

GuluWalk2006 is a one-day worldwide event, focused on raising awareness and support for the abandoned children of northern Uganda. And this year, we are looking for 10,000 people to be the message of hope.

There will be a guluwalk in Boston on Oct. 21st, so if you are arriving early for the Mono Meeting you should sign up, raise your money and plan on walking.

Update Sponsor Me. Do it! Or I will be pissed off at you.

Most of you are probably looking at this picture and thinking "What an idiot he got hurt boxing again". Or "Stupid drunk fell down and split his face open". Sports and alcohol were not a factor in this emergency room visit though, I was in the midst of packing this weekend, and hit my head right on the corner of the back of a wooden chair. I had to get 5 stitches in my eyebrow, but the doctors do think I will be able to walk again. I'll post ER and w/stitches pictures later, they are on a different camera.

So last night I am taking the bus home and we have a trainee bus driver. Basically they are the same as a normal bus driver, but they don't get the cool uniform and they have a supervisor watching everything they do. So two stops after mine this very drunk guy gets on the bus. He can't really stand up and is holding onto the rail to support himself while he fumbles around trying to get his pass out of his wallet. I think to myself "They shouldn't let this guy on, he is going to cause trouble". Bam, on queue, he drops his pants and starts pissing EVERYWHERE. He pisses on the floor, he pisses on seats, he pisses on a passenger, he pisses on the trainee and he pisses on the supervisor. Obviously, they kicked him off of the bus after that, no one was really that mad at him though. I don't think he was trying to be a dick, he was obviously just confused and thought he was in the shower or something. Anyways, I bet that trainee is excited about his future career.

I guess it's not surprising, but the cat came back.

First one kinda reminds me of this:

This ridiculously cute and totally fearless creature just wandered into my apartment tonight. Roxy who thinks all cats are put on this earth purely to be chased was very disappointed the cat would not run away. So she spent the evening whining and trying to convince it to play.

I have just been very busy working on my demo reel.

On Monday I gave a presentation on Mono. Sunday night I was up until two in the morning writing my slides. The presentation was in Burbank so I left early to beat the morning traffic and ate breakfast in Burbank. I decided to look at my slides while eating, turned on my laptop and fsck failed. (For those that don't know this means I have serious hard drive problems and can't start my computer). If I was to summarize my feelings in one word it would probably start with an F and end with an UCK. So over my relaxing morning coffee I ran fsck.reiserfs --rebuild-tree and just prayed that my presentation would be OK. To add to the suspense my battery was most likely running low, and the guy in the cafe wouldn't let me plugin anywhere. So the rebuild tree chugs along for thirty minutes, and I drive to the meeting with it still running, checking the progress at stoplights. It completes and my presentation seems to still exist. phew. I find a nice comfy seat, get a coffee, and go over my slides. Scrolling through my slides I hit slide number 7 and open office crashes. uh oh. Try again, same result. Can't delete slide 7 because OOo crashes as soon as it renders it. Thirty minutes of 'Save As' and 'Export' later I get the damn thing to work consistently. Ok time to enjoy the coffee. The day goes by and things start getting further and further behind. So I revamp my presentation making it a lot trimmer. Finally its my turn, time is really tight between presentations so there is no real setup time. Plug into the projector and of course get nothing. Reboot and its sending power to the pins now (note I specifically rebooted earlier in the day to make sure this was set in my BIOS). I just start without slides. X starts and the projector stops loving me. I am getting 640x480 output for a 1280x1024 screen. Time is way too tight to screw with it, so I continue on slideless. I think slides are lame anyways, and you hold the audience's attention way better without them. This is the last time I even bother to use them. Overall I would say my presentation went really well, but I was continuously let down by the current state of technology, as usual. Whatever happened to things working?

After a frustrating day of attempting to fix some bugs in MWF I decided to take the night off and hack up something that windows forms is missing. I (along with other many other people) have always wanted a gtk like layout system in windows forms. In fact most criticism of the winforms api is because of the lack of a nice automatic layout system. Below is a screenshot of a little demo app using my new packing controls. I will most likely release the code for this after the weekend, I want to write some more tests, and clean up the build though first.

A demo created with Wink is here

Code from my sample app:

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using Mono.Winforms.Packing;


public class BasicPacking : Form {

	public BasicPacking ()
	{
		VBox vbox = new VBox ();

		vbox.PackStart (Row (), false, true, 0);
		vbox.PackStart (CenterRow (), true, true, 0);
		vbox.PackStart (Row (), false, true, 0);

		vbox.Dock = DockStyle.Fill;
		Controls.Add (vbox);
	}

	private HBox Row ()
	{
		HBox hbox = new HBox ();

		Button button = new Button ();
		button.Text = "one";
		hbox.PackStart (button, false, true, 0);

		button = new Button ();
		button.Text = "two";
		hbox.Controls.Add (button);      // Can add Items in a winforms-ish way also

		button = new Button ();
		button.Text = "three";
		hbox.PackStart (button, false, true, 0);

		return hbox;
	}

	private HBox CenterRow ()
	{
		HBox hbox = new HBox ();

		Button button = new Button ();
		button.Text = "one";
		hbox.PackStart (button, false, true, 0);

		PictureBox pb = new PictureBox ();
		pb.Image = Image.FromFile ("roxy-sandy-scaled.jpg");
		pb.SizeMode = PictureBoxSizeMode.StretchImage;
		hbox.PackStart (pb, true, true, 0);

		button = new Button ();
		button.Text = "three";
		hbox.PackStart (button, false, true, 0);

		return hbox;
	}

	public static void Main ()
	{
		Application.Run (new BasicPacking ());
	}
}

NOTE: Can't you just see a postcard with that picture and "Welcome to sunny sandy California" and maybe a little paw print at the end? Man, if the programming thing doesn't work out I think I could have an illustrious postcard making career.

Target digs itself a deeper hole in emergency contraceptive scandal. My favorite quote from the article:

I already have a priest, and he doesn't work at Target, thank you.

and:

It seems that Target will ONLY honor its employees constitutionally-protected (so THEY claim) religious beliefs IF that religious belief deals with Plan B. So Target is now saying that it will NOT permit its employees to exercise their supposed religious rights under the 1964 Act if the medication or product in question is anything OTHER than Plan B.

Sad to see corporations using a Civil Rights Act created specifically to avoid discrimination to discriminate against people.

Tonight I checked in a modified version of the old FormsTest. Basically this version uses MDI child windows instead of tabs to show all the various controls. It exposes some performance issues with MDI that I have mainly fixed locally. I'll check in patches for that soon too.

Q: How come emacs just refuses to use the proper primary selection sometimes? Is this an emacs bug or some bizarre "feature" that I don't know about?

Well its rather depressing to see your last year's worth of work iconically summarized as the universally recognized symbol for disabled people.

So last minute saturday night I get a call from my beautiful and wonderful girlfriend about a halloween party. I didn't have time to come up with a costume but luckily I had just taken a pretty good beating at the gym....

(Note: All old entries gone until I turn on my desktop)

It's been something like two hundred fifty years since I last wrote a blog entry so I decided I should probably get crackulating (SP?) on that.

General boring life stuff
I've moved into a new roommate free apartment. So it's just me and the overly protective dog now. I'm now living in sunny Costa Mesa, just a few blocks from my former roommate Todd. Incidentally I just noticed that his blog is called a diary not a blog, or the ever hipper activity log.....lame. I haven't really straightened out my phone situation yet. So if you have been expecting a call from me, or are expecting me to answer when you call, ummm too bad. I seem to have some dihabilitating disease like the flu or something. I never got sick when I lived in cold places like Canada and Idaho. Move to sunny California and I have gotten the flu twice. Could I get a WTF with that too, please?

Managed Windows Forms
MWF is looking pretty good lately. Most of the features have been implemented, so we are mainly in a bug fixing, and polishing state. There is still a long ways to go, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Right now I am putting the finishing touches on drag and drop on X11. Everything is for the most part working, I am just refactoring a little before checking in as part of the code was written in a theraflu induced haze. Here is an exciting screenshot. Nodes on the right where dragged from the left.

(number of spelling mistakes in this blog entry: 0)