Disaster

The snow was falling already by the time I got up today. It was pretty light, but by the time I got on the road, traffic was quite slow right out of the gate. Rather than spend 2 hours driving to Denver, I turned around and came home. I am very grateful I brought my laptop home with me this weekend.

The day did not treat me well. Some bugs from a part of a project that has been dogging me for some time came back and they were not easy ones to fix. What made it worse is that I had to debug in Firefox. Ever since a change to the data services for the project were made, I haven't been able to test in Chrome. Everyone else's Chrome works, but not mine. Firefox is a pain to debug in, because it only lets you pause the application for a short period of time before it decides Flash has crashed and it shuts it down. It's also a pain because Firefox will occasionally freeze up and not let you switch to other programs that are behind it. Normally that's not an issue because at work I have two monitors. Not so at home.

Today, Firefox was being very aggressive and being an utter jerk about debugging. It kept freezing and was quicker than normal to prematurely end my debugging sessions. Combine that with some difficult bugs, and I was ready to explode. Unable to take any more, I thought I would try to see if I could get Chrome to work again.

I figured the best way to do this would be to reinstall Chrome. I exported my bookmarks and then uninstalled Chrome. I then went to reinstall Chrome. That went all right. I noticed though, that for some weird reason, Internet Explorer had opened up. I figured that was a byproduct of uninstalling Chrome and closed it. I then went to import my bookmarks. And that's when I discovered the disaster: My bookmarks were gone.

That may sound trivial, but my Chrome bookmarks are extensive. I have work bookmarks that quickly take me to resources for different projects. I have bookmarks for hard-to-find resources that required extensive Googling to find. I have bookmarks for blogs and webcomics that occupy me while compiling or during lunch. I have resources for my personal projects that I was saving to use in presentations. So ... many ... bookmarks ... gone.

This was overwhelming in my already dangerously frustrated state. Then I tried to install the Flash debug player in Chrome. It's a version of the Flash player that is necessary for debugging Flash applications. That makes it necessary for me to work. And it wouldn't install. I tried disabling Chrome's built in player. I tried restarting Chrome. I tried restarting my computer. Nothing worked. Not only could I no longer debug this project in Chrome, I couldn't debug in Chrome at all. Defeated and enraged, I went back to Firefox and struggled for the rest of the day, working much later than normal.

Now, having finally vanquished the bugs, I went back to see what I could salvage from Chrome. I tried installing the debug player a few more times, then finally restarted my computer again. Suddenly, magically, it worked, for no apparent reason. I had the debug player again! Of course, I had to try compiling my work project to see if my loss of my encyclopedic collection of bookmarks was all for naught. Yep. It was. The same problem still persists. It's Firefox from here on out.

What a disaster.

Retreat!

Jen's dad was mighty generous and invited me along on the men's retreat his church was putting on. I took him up on the offer and we journeyed up to Estes Park on Friday night for a retreat at the YMCA camp up there. I was expecting a camp akin to summer camps I had gone to in my youth, but this place was pretty swank, and was like a nice hotel.

The retreat was like an extended church week, except with more jokes and snowshoes. We had teaching times, small groups, and worship. And we had plenty, more than plenty of food. I did not eat wisely. I also got to meet a lot of new folks. Steve was very good at introducing me to a lot of his compatriots. As nice as it was to meet a lot of new guys, I wish that it had been a retreat for my church so I could be bonding with the other men there rather than just making a lot of new acquaintances.

On Saturday a group of us went up to Rocky Mountain National Park and snowshoed into Bierstadt Lake. It was in the afternoon of a quite warm day and the trail went up a south-facing slope, which made for some interesting footing on the slushy snow. Once we got up to the top of the slope, the rest of the hike into the lake was really nice. On the way down, Steve and I both tumbled a few times on the treacherous surface. It was a good hike, though, and I felt I acquitted myself rather well for not having hiked for a long while.

Commuted Sentence

This week the RealEyes office is getting a new boiler. This means no heat or water, which means we get to work from home. Working from home comes with its own set of hazards and perks. I don't have a second monitor, so work is less efficient, but I also don't have as steady a stream of interruptions as I do when coworkers drift in and out of my area. The biggest plus in my book is that I don't have to commute. So for three to four days, my commute consists of walking down stairs.

This is a particularly wonderful commute to have after a week of maddening commutes. On last Monday, the commute was in the 4 inches of snow that fell Sunday night. It was slow but traffic kept moving at a constant pace. It was in the rest of the week that the commutes got really bad. Out of the 10 total commutes last week, I would say 6 involved a traffic jam of some sort. Usually it seemed to be a problem caused by accidents. I would attribute that to the lingering snow, but even on Friday, when the roads were clear and dry, there was an accident-caused jam both ways. One was at 36 and 287 which jammed traffic back up through Broomfield. On the way back, there was one in the left lane of I-25 at about I-70 that made me late for Bible study. I'm rather mystified as to what caused this spate of accidents.

I wonder if there were some lingering effects from the snow. Early in the week, accidents were no surprise. A thin layer of slush still coated some secondary roads that was slicker than it looked. I myself had to blow through a stop light on 20th while honking my horn. However, late in the week, it was gone from even the side streets. Perhaps people had schmutz on their windshields that obscured their vision and lead them into harm's way?

Regardless, I have taken the hint and gotten my snow tires put on. This balmy Autumn lured me into complacency. And now my car, clad in its safety-conscious tires, gets to sit in the garage for most of the week. I can't say I'm sad.

Tech Tock Tech Tock

The clock for my technological quests has hit midnight. My patience has run out and the hour has struck. Yesterday I went down to a remote Best Buy to put to rest my running background obsession with phones and laptops. I have been constantly checking up on phones, trying to find the awesome phone that will satisfy me for two more years. I've been off and on researching laptops trying to replace my current one that is freezing randomly.

No cool phones were on the horizon for T-Mobile and I was done with waiting. I decided to throw my lot in with the G2 and its physical keyboard and 4G speeds. On the laptop front, I had a few to look at and eventually went with the HP Pavilion dv7-4285dx. I suppose I can be smug that I bought this the day before it went up $50 in price, but that smugness would be deeply tempered by the fact that when I pulled the laptop out of the box, there was a large dent in the aluminum chassis that looked like something powerful had pinched it. That's not good. I took it back and got a new one, checking for any dents before I left the store. However, once I started loading programs on it, I noticed that the CD drive is not in securely. It sort of pops up and down and in and out when I pick up the laptop and it is a real challenge to open with this ridiculously hard-to-press button. The drive works, so I'm not sure this is something that would warrant a return. It is hardly satisfactory, though. That would not be quite as concerning except that at one point during my installations and fiddling with the CD drive, the computer randomly restarted. I can't replicate it, so I can't really use that as an reason to exchange. I'm not sure what to do here. The sermon today was on humility, and I definitely see choosing the "right" laptop as a mark of pride for me. Perhaps holding onto this laptop would be a good exercise in humility. The laptop is blazingly fast and has a great big screen. It just seems to have been put together with a lack of care. Ugh.

Well, if nothing else, my new phone is great.

Expectations

Winter has finally started meeting some expectations. We had 4-5 inches of snow this morning. I shoveled it this morning as dawn crept over the horizon in some rather frigid temperatures. The commute in this morning was perilous. I slid through one intersection, beeping my horn all the way. Broadway was a mess, like it hadn't even been plowed. It was a long commute.

I finished up Mass Effect 2 this weekend and just cleaned up the extraneous missions tonight. That was a great game, meeting my expectations. The missions were varied enough to avoid the feel of repetition that came with the first Mass Effect. Bioware continued to build on the already lush story world they've created. The story was intriguing and is a good set up for the third game. Many hard decisions were made in this. In fact some of the decisions were the hardest parts of the game. I can't wait to see how they wrap it up. Oooh, I see the trailer for Mass Effect 3 is out! Only a year to wait ...

We watched the movie Salt this weekend. That far exceeded my expectations and was actually a good movie. Gripping, even. Our movie watching capped an exceptionally productive day. The Christmas lights came down, the kitchen was cleaned, chaos kept at bay for another day.

Unfortunately, one expectation that went woefully unmet was that T-Mobile would release some really cool phone at CES. Yeah, that didn't happen. They released a couple new tablets and said they'd up their 4G speeds, but the only phone released was the mediocre Cliq 2. All the really cool phones came out on the other networks. I am bummed I waited this long to get nothing for it. I think that as soon as this snow clears, I'll go out and pick up a G2, unless, of course, some new rumor makes me wait for another month. After all, the Mobile World Congress is only a month away ...