Story of my life

This is terrible! No one reported her missing? No family or friends at at all. At least I know if I don't log on for a few days my interweb friends will notice =(

Woman's dead body lies in flat for 35 years

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) -- Governments have changed. War erupted and ended. Neighbors had children, and then grandchildren. But Hedviga Golik never left her tiny apartment in Croatia's capital -- until her mummified body was carried out this week, 35 years after she died.

Police said Friday that no one ever reported Golik missing and no one has come to claim her body.

Residents of her loft building in downtown Zagreb had broken into Golik's flat after deciding that the apartment should belong to them, and not to her. Startled by the remains in bed, they called police.

Forensics experts said Golik likely died in 1973, about the time a neighbor last saw her. Expert Davor Strinovic said she seemed to have died of natural causes, but "it's almost impossible to say for certain" after so much time.

Some of Golik's neighbors claimed she had talked about going abroad.

Experts said her windows had been open, likely diminishing the smell. It remained unclear who -- if anyone -- was paying her bills and who exactly owned the apartment. In the 1970s, when Golik died, apartments were state-owned.

Neighbors now argue the apartment should be divided among the remaining tenants.

The discovery of Golik's body on Tuesday prompted media debates on how it is possible for a woman to die so long ago without anyone noticing. One local journalist said it showed people were becoming more alienated.

"My dear neighbors! Please keep on being curious and a bit tiresome, as you have been so far," Merita Arslani wrote in the Jutarnji list daily.

Wow

I just read over some of my old posts and gosh I seem... neurotic? Chatting with myself post after post, it is a very strange read. Meaningful, I suppose, but strange.

Well as of the end of this month I am moving to the OKC. Yes that is right, I am going to live in Oklahoma. Actually Norman, but still Oklahoma. Fiancee (yes he asked!!) is ridiculously excited to go, being that he is from there, he can't wait to be near his family again.

But boy, do I hate Hate HATE moving. And moving across the country is even worse. What a pain in the butt, and much to expensive. The bonuses to this move include, lower cost of living than the Bay Area, same pay rate for tech industry, leaving my horrible job, leaving my horrible neighbors and taking a couple weeks off work.

In an ideal world I will be able to pay off all my student loans and move back to the coast...Maybe Portland, I hear good things about OR....

Imperial March played on a floppy disk

Does the coolness factor of this make my nerdyness factor go up?

Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy)

I guess they made some changes to the ruby gems and now I keep getting the infamous GEMrunner error. Well, thanks to some resourceful google searchs and a few hours later I got it. Below I have documented my process to help you get through this install yourself

The biggest problem is that Ubuntu wants to use Aptitude to manage your ruby gems, but to get anything to work you need to have RubyGems manage ruby gems.

So the first visit was to here WaltCo Tech who offers a masterful step by step on installing Ruby and Rails.

Here is the steps

1. Apparently there is no such thing as a ruby package, but this will gather everything you need.

sudo apt-get install ruby rdoc irb libyaml-ruby libzlib-ruby ri libopenssl-ruby

2. Currently 1.0.1 is the latest tarball, but if this is out of date you may be the latest on at RubyForge

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/29548/rubygems-1.0.1.tgz

3. Upack your tarball

tar xzvf rubygems-1.0.1.tgz

4. Change to your new directory that you just created

cd rubygems-1.0.1

5. Run the ruby set up. This creates usr/bin/gem1.8 so you are going to need to link it with usr/bin/gem

sudo ruby setup.rb

6. The update only updates to your usr/lib directory, not to your home directory. Along with this everything references 'gem' not 'gem1.8' so link the files before you run the update.

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem

7. Run the update

sudo gem update --system

8. BAM! Install rails - we are almost there

sudo gem install rails

9. Now install Mongrel, this is your webserver

sudo apt-get install build-essential ruby1.8-dev

sudo gem install mongrel

10. Ruby 2.0's default database is not SQLite3 instead of mysql. But still I use mysql so, if you would like the steps for installing SQLite3 see WaltCo for a detailed explanation

sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby mysql-server libmysqlclient15-dev

sudo gem install mysql

11. Now in my app I use a few other gems, so now is the time to install all your gems. I am using RMagick 2.00 and iCalendar. To install Rmagick on Ubutnu 7.10 you are going to need to install ImageMagick first. The current version is 6.3.7, but if this is out of date you can visit ImageMagick to download the latest tarball. You must have v6.0.0 or later of ImageMagick for RMagick to install correctly.

For a Linux distro you are going to need to download, configure and compile ImageMagick yourself. Luckly, Unbutnu 7.10 comes with the tools you need to do this

Download the tarball to your home directory

12. Unzip it

gunzip -c ImageMagick.tar.gz | tar xvf -

13. Navigate to the new directory

cd ImageMagick-6.3.7

14. Now you will configure and compile ImageMagick

./configure

make

15. You will need to be an Administrator to continue and install the package

make install

exit

16. Now we are ready to install our other gems, navigate back to your ruby directory

cd ~/rubygems-1.0.1

17. Install the gems

sudo gem install rmagick --include-dependencies

sudo gem install icalendar --include-dependencies

This is an updated version that was just released this year. When they update the tarball this step will be unnecessary.

sudo gem install -v=1.1.6 rails

18. Now here is the part that is new. Rails handles loading up RubyGems's library file with rubygems.rb. According to WaltCo If you want to run a gem outside of rails there are three options
a. Call require ‘rubygems’ in every single script
b. Call the ruby interpreter with ruby -r rubygems script.rb or ruby -rubygems script.rb every time you want to run your script
c.Add this environment variable to your shell RUBYOPTS=rubygems

The reason I choose option 'c' was because I am still very new at ruby and I am dealing with a pre-existing application. If you are setting up a new application, option 'a' or 'b' might be a longer but better choice.

Replace "profile" with the name of your user profile. You will have to log out and log back in to get this to work.

echo "export RUBYOPT=rubygems" >> ~/.profile

19. If you are creating a new app, now you get to make it!

rails path/to/your/app

Now navigate to the directory that has you new app.

mongrel_rails start

To start the server in the background

mongrel_rails start -d

To stop the server use

mongrel_rails stop

To restart the server

mongrel_rails restart

Some great Tutorials about Rails:
Rolling on Rails I
Rolling on Rails II

Nothing's gonna stop us now

So instead of sleeping I am updating my blog. You are happy right?

As we all know I WAS working in mortgage. And unless you have been living under a rock, we all know what happened to the mortgage industry. That is right, GG got laid off. Who didn't see this coming right? Everyone talks about blaming the lender, "Its the lender!" " The lender made me sign a deal that I didn't understand"... etc. Well guess what people, it is not just the lender, k? It is not my fault that you did not read your mortgage docs, k? I read your docs, and I would not sign that crap!

Here is the break down, everyone who was getting into a Negatively Amortizing or "Pick a Pay" or "Option Arm" type loan was getting screwed. Basically it works just like a credit card, You know, that card you got at Macy's? With the $5.00 minimum payment? Yeah. So you are paying $5.00 a month and they are charging you $25.00 a month. Why? Because of the 35% interest rate you signed on to. And all the interest you are getting charged? It is being tagged on to the principal. So think of this like a home loan...

Loan Amount: $400,000
Interest: 6.50%
Min Payment: 1.5%

This means even though you made a $500 min payment ([400000 x .1.5%]/12)your first month you are being charged $2166.67 ([400000 x 6.5%]/12). So in reality you just made a -$1666.67 payment to you principal loan amount. And it just goes up from there. Compound interest baby! You wonder why everyone is losing there homes.

And the people that suffer? ME Gosh Darn it! I got laid off! Just because those stupid brokers are falsifying documents to the lender! We are wholesale people, I never talked direct to a borrower in my whole life! Ok ok I understand, people got conned. They didn't know what they were getting into. But really, I just gave you the breakdown up there in, about what, less than 100 words? How hard is it really?

All right I'll give, I know there is going to be some broker out there that reams me for saying that so I will give. There are many shady lenders as well as shady brokers out there. And really I can't complain that bad, I did get a really good job. Funny enough,, doing nothing I went to school and everything I went to Flashkit for ! Go Flashkit!! Screw the degree!

No no I can't say that, my parents would never forgive me. I love my degree.

But I really did find an awesome job, so keep an eye out for my rocking the ruby on rails baby! That shiznit is the bomb diggity!

I solemnly swear I will

Update this blog.

ok ready for this?

2007 in 30 seconds
Graduated from School - BIT: Programming :-)
Got the IT job :-) but then :-/
BFF moved up from LA and moved in 2 doors down from me :-)
The craziest bitch I have even know moved in next door to me :-(
Opened up Slimchance Studio for real :-)
Got Laid off :-(
Took a week off :-)
Found a new job doing web junk and not software support and dev :-)
Forced to buy $200 in presents for a family that is not even mine :-(
Getting the end of the year off for the holidays:-)

So summing the year up, 7 :-)'s to 3 :-('s and 1 :-/ I would have to say it was a pretty good year.

Hopefully I will have time to post my gift picks this year too :)
TTYL!

The renewed love

I stumbled across the blog called Hello Kitty Hell which has
reminded me of my intence burning passion for Hello Kitty. Let me just share a few gems from this site with you.

Hello Kitty Klingon

Q: If you take a super nerd and a super fanatic and cross them what do you get?

A: The freakiest guy at the startrek convention.

I seriously wonder how many Trekkies freaked out at this, I could picture small aneurysms all over the convention floor .

Hello Kitty Darth Vader

Though it was photoshoped I can feel the Hello Kitty fanatics rising from the bowels of Happy Fun Land to embrace this new Vader. No more is the Empire evil black, now that only evil in the universe comes wrapped in pink with sweet bow on the ear.

Though, I am disapointed that the Storm troopers are not decked out in pink as well. You know boys, i have heard that pink is the new purple. I think it might be time to run out and get that new Salmon colored suit you have been longing for.

Back to the topic at hand, what hello kitty Vader is complete with out the Hello Kitty lightsaber? Umm the answer is none my friends, though, as comic book girl says I would like to see this one in a rather stunning shade of teal.

I love Geek Boys!

There I said it. There is something so hot about coming over to upgrade my system – even though I could do it myself, I would rather watch you take it apart and stick all the new cards in to my PCI slots. hehehehe

This is what I am talking about

Sitting on the porch, drinking a beer and smoking a cig.

No dishes to clean - because I already did them
No Kitchen to mop - that has been done too
No one disterbing me - they call before they show up.

Sweet sweet silence...how I have missed you so

Don’t be a freaking hypocrite

My my my, this has all been set off by a sweet not so sentimental friend.

I know I keep saying that the reason I wanted to move was because I didn’t want anymore roommates, but it does go a little deeper. Let’s start at the beginning, Morals…Values if you will, there is just a few value that I hold dear to myself. One is the Golden Rule, I am not perfect by any means, but I do try to weight the consequences of my actions to others eyes before I act. The other is mean what you say and follow you own standards that you set for others. In not so many words… Don’t be a freaking hypocrite. If you talk like you are number one – you better act like it too.

Case in point – The filthy house: Mr. Frat Boy that I live with always portrayed (and still does) himself as Clean. That was in fact shattered the first week we were living together. Just the little things, after cooking or eating, after drinking or hanging out, I feel it is your responsibility to clean up after yourself. I don’t ask anyone to clean my stuff!! I do however expect you to mop the floor more than 3 times in the entire year you have been living in this house.

But the part that is the absolute WORST is you fucking act like you are Perfect!! You are the biggest hypocrite I have ever met and it PISSES me off. You are a disgusting grubby slob who wallows in his own filth and acts like it is gold.

You know the most beautiful part though? On Sunday when I made dinner, I did the dishes – all of them – on Monday when I came back to the new house…The dishes were still clean…AND the Kitchen was still clean… I think that makes it all worth it.