Feeling the Pain From Krav

I am really feeling the pain from Krav tonight. Not "pain" really, just worn out. I wasn't able to go last week and I wonder if that affected me tonight. Probably not. Tonight would have kicked my butt no matter what. We primarily did a lot of front and roundhouse kicks. We worked on choke defense a little as well. I love choke defense. It feels awesome, like it would really work in real life. At the end of class we did kicks as hard and fast as we could for a few minutes. I thought I was going to pass out. I was barely able to stand in the line at the end of class. I made it through and everything, it was just a hard workout. It's a great reminder of why I go. I need that kind of workout to get me in shape. I was working with a first-timer tonight. He looked in great shape, but the class wore him out as well. There is something about the class that can be a challenge even for those in good shape. Ah well. I'm going to sleep well tonight.

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Happy Birthday to Me

My birthday was yesterday. I turned 35. Karen worked really hard to make the entire weekend fun for me. All throughout the weekend things would occurred related to my birthday. It was kind of fun. On Friday evening we went to the ham radio store to buy me my first ham radio. I didn't actually get it until my birthday party, but it was fun to pick it out. I finally got to play with it a little bit this morning. It's very confusing and the instructions seem to be very wrong at times, but I'm trying to learn. I'm certain it will get better. After the radio store we went to See's Candies. Apparently they are only five minutes apart from each other. That is a very handy thing to know. In my mind the radio store was way out of the way. We go to See's every month or so, so it's nice to know that we can just swing over to the radio store if I need. After getting some yummy chocolate we went over to the Church bookstore. I wound up buying a couple of books that interested me. To be honest, I haven't found this bookstore as interesting to browse around as I did the one in San Jose, but I'm certain that's just me. They have a bakery attached to this store and there was a great smell when we came in. They were selling orange rolls at half price because they had a bunch of them to get rid of. We wound up getting a dozen. Later on when we tried them we realized why they were having a hard time getting rid of them. They were nasty! We had already given half ours away by that time and I think we're looking for someone to take the rest of them now. It was quite disappointing. After the bookstore we drove over to a nearby mall to see about getting some dinner. We had never been over there before and it turned out to be a happening little mall. We didn't actually go into the mall, but I have since heard that it is a very nice mall to walk around. We're going to have to go back there and check it out. We decided on eating at PF Chang's, but this particular one was too busy so we headed out for one of their other locations. We ran into a really nasty accident on the way. Traffic was backed up pretty bad. We also ran into some rain which really annoyed Karen. She had just gotten the van washed and now it was raining. Doesn't it just figure? We made it out to the other PF Chang's and had a really wonderful dinner. We've become very fond of their lettuce wraps and they didn't disappoint. We had a couple of other dishes that were somewhat new and they were quite nice as well. Add into that the atmosphere and the company and it was a really nice dinner. Afterward we went next door to Border's Books. Like we hadn't had enough bookstores for one evening, right? :-) I don't know that I had been to that particular Border's before, but it definitely won me over. They had a great science fiction section with a few rpg book options. They even had some of the Munchkin card sets which really surprised me. We were able to find a few things worth spending money on, so it was a good time.

On Saturday I got up early and mowed the grass. This may not sound fun, but it made me happy. Mowing the grass is definitely work, but I love the feeling of accomplishment it gives me. I love looking out at our yard and seeing it nicely trimmed. It's weird, I know, but it makes me happy. I had decided a couple of months ago that I would mow the grass every Saturday morning. Doing it once a week keeps it looking nice and makes it not that tough to maintain. Unfortunately circumstances had conspired to make me unavailable the last three Saturdays so it didn't get mowed. I could have mowed it during the week, but that would have missed the whole point of me making my Saturday mornings available. Silly, I know. Regardless, by the time this Saturday morning came our grass was looking pretty bad. The back grass was especially thick. I probably could have gotten it done in under two hours, but our neighbor came over to chat in the middle of it. It was nice to chat with him but it did throw a little wrench into our schedule. Especially since Karen was feeling a little bit of a time crunch on the day. I got everything done except for the trimming in the back yard and we decided that could wait. We got cleaned up and headed out for the day. Our first stop was to the office supply store. Where else would a guy want to go on his birthday weekend? hehehe. I actually did want to go there. I had some office organization stuff I wanted to pick up. Again we found plenty of things to spend money on, so the trip must have not been that bad. After that we went to Macy's so that Karen could get some more make-up. We found out that they stopped making her old make-up so she had to try to find the equivalent in the new stuff. She played the smiling customer while the little make-up lady picked out just the right hydration cream, foundation, blush, red dye number five, weed whacker, post-hole digger and cement mixer that we just couldn't live without. I dutifully guarded the purse and smiled and nodded at all of the appropriate places. I'm just joking, though. It didn't bother me at all and Karen seemed to be enjoying herself so I was happy. After that we went over to get the balloons and cake for my party on Sunday night. It was an ice cream cake so we had to run it home before we could do anything else. After securing the cake we went to a place called Boondocks. It is one of these mini-golf/video game/go-kart/laser tag/everything-under-the-sun-to-entertain-kids type of places. We had never been there before but it sounded like it would be fun so I chose to go there as one of my birthday activities. Our friends, Hank and Marleah, came with us along with their kids. It was a lot of fun. We had to duck out early as we had a family birthday dinner at Olive Garden.

On Sunday morning I had to hop up and prepare a lesson. I was teaching for the first time in Elder's Quorum and hadn't prepared my lesson yet. I got it finished and ran off to church. I think the lesson went okay, but nobody really said anything so I can't be certain. As Karen said, I guess we'll know if they don't ask me to teach again. After church I went home teaching. I like my families and I like chatting with them so home teaching isn't really much of a chore. Even though I put it off as if it were. After I got back home it was almost time for people to show up for the birthday dinner at our place. Karen fixed a wonderful dinner of turkey and mashed potatoes. I loved it. The birthday cake was my favorite ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins. We did the whole present opening thing where I got way more presents than I deserved and then everyone went home. Karen and I did a little bit of cleaning up and then went upstairs for some well-deserved sleep. It was a long weekend. Whew!

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Stupid Windows Long Path Names

I'm so !@#$ frustrated right now. I've been working on a program to export documents out of our portal and onto a file system. This is enough of a pain in the neck as it is because the documents are stored in four different places. The portal just contains links to the native document. Adding to the problem is that I have to replicate the portal directory structure on the file system. So, my app has to replicate the portal folder structure, figure out where the document that is being referenced actually lives and copy it into the new location on the file system. All of that would be fine (somewhat) if it were for how Windows handles path definitions. Because the portal didn't care how long a path might wind up being it let people create folder structures that stretched over twenty levels deep with folder and file names that were hundreds of characters long. Of course when I try to recreate this on a file system Windows barfs all over it. Or, to be more precise, .NET barfs all over it. In some way Windows can deal with the long path, but .NET can't at all. I say that Windows can deal with it in some ways because the reality is that it's very spotty in its handling of it. You can navigate through the folders. You can open the documents. You can even move the folders around as long as it is on the same drive. If you try to delete something or move it to a new disk then Windows starts barfing on it. There are .NET tricks to getting around these things so that you can build these offending folder structures, but it's not all peaches and cream. Copying from one location to another can apparently only be done if the source does not have the "long path" designator in front of it. Dynamically created shortcuts appear to vomit all over the long path issue no matter what I try. I even tried creating the shortcut in a path-friendly location and then copying it over to the final, long-path location but it doesn't seem to like that. To make matters worse, the methods you use for long paths from .NET are actually calls to the core Windows API. They apparently didn't write any useful error/debug messages into this API because all of the methods either succeed or fail with no explanation of the problem. It's not like a specific exception gets raised that you can work with to trace down the problem. No, the method just doesn't work and continues happily on. I'm left totally in the dark as to what the heck the actual problem is. It's driving me nuts. I've spent the last six days beating my head against these problems and they currently are only sort-of resolved. I think I'm about ready to say screw the whole thing. This is the best you're getting; deal with it and shut-up!

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First Ham Radio

It looks like I might be going out this weekend to get my first ham radio. I've had my technician license for a couple of months, but I haven't bought a radio yet. The primary reason is that I have no clue what to buy. There are all these different options that I no absolutely nothing about. I feel totally and completely stupid about the whole thing. I wish our class had included a trip to the local store with buying tips. I even joined a radio club without any real clue as to what I was doing. One of the guys from church took me to a club meeting and told me it was a good club and that I should join. So... I joined. Part of joining a club is getting to use their repeaters and that part made sense to me. Considering our location I'm guessing most of my chatting would be done on a repeater. If I do any chatting at all, that is. I got into this thing for emergency communications and now I feel like I actually have to do something with it. Otherwise the whole thing will have been just a waste of time. So I'm going to go and buy my first radio and start in on the whole thing. We'll see how it goes. Wish me luck.

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Terribly Exciting Day

Terribly exciting day yesterday. Nothing very amazing happened. I worked late and we had IHOP for dinner. Then I was up late watching our friends' kids while they went to the emergency room. It gave me a good excuse to get a lot of reading in, though, so I'm not complaining too much. I'm working on an application to export documents out of our portal onto a file system while recreating the directory structure on the portal. This has caused me to bump into the dreaded path-length issue that I have been skirting during the last three projects. So, I finally have to deal with it. It's rather annoying, actually. I spent all day yesterday writing a class to handle the main file operations we need using p/invoke methods from the Windows API. It's not nearly as much fun as it sounds. The special part of the fun occurs when the method doesn't work for some reason but doesn't bother to give me any debugging error information. It just fails and moves happily along. I'm stuck with a big ol' question mark on my forehead wondering what to do now. I've actually gotten the primary part of the app working, so that's good. I just have to write the code to extract from a secondary source, but that shouldn't be too problematic. Oh well.... back to the grindstone...

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Good Little Scout Leader

As intimated in a previous post, I was dealing with the dilemma of having to come up with a new meeting plan for my 11-year old Scouts. I decided to be a good little Scout leader and just do it. It really wasn't as hard as I was expecting. I created a meeting plan oriented around earning the ranks up through First Class in order. I had originally been worried that I would have a hard time spreading the topics out across meetings, but it wasn't that bad. There was only a couple of times where I had to have two different topics in the same meeting and that's not really a bad thing. About the only topic I refused to split up was the practical part of the swimming stuff. If I'm going to the trouble to organize a swimming activity to get the Second Class requirements covered, then I'm just going to do the First Class ones at the same time. It seems ridiculous to plan another swimming activity a month later to cover those two additional requirements. I'm doing swimming toward the end of the Second Class curriculum any ways, so a little overlap isn't bad. The plan for each rank also includes one campout; because a campout is required for each rank. This presents a slight problem because it winds up giving me more campouts in a year than the Church allows for 11-year old Scouts. This program is a six-month program so the idea is that it gets repeated twice during the 11-year old's time with me. This means that I can have Scouts start at any time in the plan and they will definitely get everything covered to get them to First Class. The only thing is that the stuff at the end of First Class is a little more geared toward older Scouts. It's not enough to really worry about, though. The plan actually allows for seven flex weeks in the six month period. The idea is that there will be meeting cancellations occasionally for holidays and other things so this plan allows for that. I presented the plan at our committee meeting today and everyone seemed to like it. Now I just have to execute the plan and see if I haven't overloaded a meeting some place.

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11th Anniversary

This was our anniversary weekend. Karen and I have been married for 11 years. It's amazing. The time seems to have flown. We didn't really do anything incredibly exciting to celebrate, though. We went to the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder and did a little shopping. That was fun. There were several things that Karen had wanted to buy when she took Sheila there last Monday but didn't get a chance to. There is a kitchen store there that she loves to look through. They've got a little game store that I enjoy patronizing. I wound up buying a couple of games. I got Settlers of Catan. I have been eying that game for a long time now, but never bought it. So I decided to treat myself. I also bought an add-on to Munchkin called Munchkin Dice and a new card game called Gloom. Gloom seems pretty fun. The whole point is to make bad things happen to your characters before they die and good things happen to your opponents characters. It's pretty weird, but it seems to fit my sense of humor. The guy running the store said the game was great so it can't be all that bad. For dinner we went to The Melting Pot. It's a fondue place not far from here. We went there for our last anniversary and Karen's birthday. It has become a favorite celebration place of ours. It's really expensive, though, so it's got to be only for special occasions. After that we came home and went to bed. Not really exciting, but it was fun.

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New group of Scouts

Last night was my 11-year old Scout meeting. I'm starting with a new group. It's not completely new. I have one hold-over from the last group who doesn't turn 12 until October. I'm supposed to have two new guys starting but only one showed up last night. That always tweaks me as I now have to figure out how to go over that information with him at another time. The first couple of meetings I always go over all of the basic Scouting junk. It's stuff I tend to not go over again later on because it's kind of boring. Of course I also have two more new guys starting in January, so I guess they'll get it again. I've never quite gotten the hang of having guys starting at different times. I much prefer to have a group start all at once and bring them along together. I suppose this is just an opportunity for me to get my program a little more organized rather than "free-form" the way it is right now. The other part is that I'm getting pressure to have these first two guys done with Tenderfoot by our next court of honor in a month. Personally I don't quite agree with it. I don't run my program following a rank timeline. Instead I go with monthly/block focus areas. All of the things get done, but we go all over the place on the "Trail to First Class" requirements. I don't really know what I'm going to do. I suppose I could push the rank timeline with these guys and switch to the block method once the next group starts. Thinking about it I suppose following rank timelines could give me more opportunities to repeat/reinforce information. As we do stuff for Second Class I can make certain they still remember what we learned for Tenderfoot. That just means that I'll totally have to reorganize my program. Could be fun, though. I'll have to try it out...

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Krav class tonight

Krav class tonight was excellent. It kicked my butt as always! Our warm-up included three laps around a small area of the strip mall. It shouldn't have been tough but I was dying. When did I get to be in such bad shape?! One of the exercises we did was pretty cool. We split up into three-person groups. One person was to punch a pad held by a second person. The trick was that a third person held a belt wrapped around the main person and pulled back as much as possible. The pad holder would constantly step back forcing you to fight forward so that you could keep hitting the pad. It was tough and a half, but I really enjoyed it. We worked some of the choke defense from behind as well. I really like that defense. I feel really powerful when I'm doing it. It feels incredibly effective. I know that someone wouldn't normally choke in that manner, but I also know that the technique will lead into more advanced stuff. All in all it was a great class and I got a great work-out.

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First time out

So, this is my first attempt at blogging. The hard thing is that my life is not terribly entertaining. I do my little bits each day and move on. Nothing terribly noteworthy. Sheila went home today. We left the house at 4 AM to take her to the airport. Ouch! We were only gone for a little over an hour, but it put a big dent in my sleep. I expect to be dragging tonight at Krav. Oh well. Life is back to quasi-normal again.

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