Midtown Arts Show

Today Jenna and I went to the Midtown Arts Show to support our friend Joie. It's a small exhibition held at an Atlanta self-storage facility. It was great to see Joie and I purchased two paintings from Jhon A. Restrepo while there:

I really like the style of the paintings and can't wait to hang them up. I posted better photos of each painting here and here. The show continues tomorrow, November 15th, from 12pm - 5pm for anyone interested.

Can you hear me now? Sort of?

I  always seem to get poor cell reception when I am at home. This has been a problem in Acworth, Kennesaw, and Smyrna across numerous providers including AT&T, T-Mobile, and now Verizon. 

After several unsuccessful attempts to call Jenna on my way home I decided to stop by my local Verizon store. I walked in, added myself to the electronic queue, and started to browse phones. I received service extremely quickly and I was pleased with the entire experience. I purchased the Samsung Smooth, a relatively cheap phone, with the expectation of upgrading to an Android device once available. The Smooth is a CMDA phone and has four possible bars of reception.

I placed a couple of calls after leaving the store - each of which were perfectly clear. I only had three bars; however, my hopes were getting higher. In contrast my AT&T phone did have perfect signal outside of the store.

Once I arrived home the new started to feel just like the old. My signal dipped to 2 bars and then started dropping to one or zero at random. I placed another call which lasted about 15 minutes and it sounded pretty clear. There were a few small issues, what I can only describe as sound artifacts, but nothing major. While the call quality was ok it's not enough of an improvement for me to sacrifice my Android device, pay $200 for a low-end phone, and still deal with poor signal.

Tomorrow I plan on going to my local AT&T store to purchase a MicroCell device which I only hope improves things. It will, of course, be returned if it fails.  My Verizon account will be cancelled within the next couple of days as well.

No more online classes.

Over the past 8 weeks I have been taking Calculus I as an online course from Kennesaw State University. Throughout the entire course I have complained about the structure, content, and complete lack of instructor interaction. Tonight I decided to withdraw from the class.

This course has been a burden and overwhelming source of stress. I expected the course to be challenging when I enrolled; however, I did not expect it to consume nearly all of my time outside of work. Every night I came home to eat and work on assignments. This really reduced the amount of time I could spend with Jenna or Logan. All of this and I still do not feel I have a true understanding of the content.

I have watched numerous videos that did not fully explain the content, read cryptic passages in my text, and completed homework tasks that would make sense but not form a complete picture. I feel cheated that I had to pay an additional $100 per credit hour to take an online course that resulted in a professor answering a few emails and grading 3 tests - one take home and 2 given by an assistant.

I am very disappointed that I was unable to complete the online course but I cannot dedicate the amount of time required for now. I am already preparing to register for next semester so I may take the course on campus.

Quickcam Fusion Linux CLI

Today I wanted to setup a QuickCam Fusion webcam to capture snapshots from the command line (Ubuntu Hardy 8.10 specifically). I tried several programs such as luvcview and streamer but both gave me problems. Finally I came across uvccapture and it works perfectly:

uvccapture -x960 -y720 -oimg-`date +%Y%m%d%I%M%S`.jpg

Dragon*Con 2009: The Mad Scientist Ball

This weekend I spent the majority of my time at Dragon*con thanks to an extra pass from Will. The dealer room and art show seemed very similar to years past; however, my main focus was the Mad Scientist Ball. The event consisted of three performances: One Eyed Doll, ArcAttack, and Rev. Ivan Stang.

I decided to actually dress up this year since I had an idea of what to expect from the ball. It was a lot of fun walking around with a lab coat, TI-86, glowing tubes, pens, and welding goggles.

My primary interest was ArcAttack because I had the chance to see them last year. The show was bigger and better than before. They managed to obtain a larger room which allowed for bigger Tesla coils and more electricity. Since I recently purchased a Flip Ultra HD camcorder I took several videos of the performance which are available on my YouTube channel.

Switching to Blogger

I use my server for hosting demos, testing, and other content. For quite some time I also hosted a wordpress blog for myself. I got tired of worrying about uptime and patches for my blog so I finally moved it to Blogger.

During the transition I found Wordpress2Blogger to convert my exported Wordpress WXR file to a Blogger XML file. This tool converted my text content perfectly but stumbled on images. I was pleasantly surprised that it even imported comments. Hopefully I will have all of my posts updated in about an hour - not a bad amount of work for performing a clean transition.

Logan has arrived.

Logan Matthew Schrier was born on Aug. 16, 2008 at 7:57 PM. I posted numerous tweets during the progress but I have been extremely busy and not had time to write about the experience.

Jenna's doctor planned to induce labor on the 15th; however, the hospital was full so we were delayed until 4am the next morning. Jenna was immediately placed on medication and her water was broken four hours later. Sadly she had to endure contractions for approximately eight hours before the doctor decided to perform a c-section.

I was allowed to stay with Jenna throughout the entire operation. I had never witnessed surgery before, especially on someone I care about as much as her. While it was difficult to watch my wife be cut open it was still very interesting and I handled myself well. It was shocking and amazing to watch Logan emerge from her body - I snapped numerous pictures but I doubt I will be posting them. It was an amazing feeling to hear Logan cry for the first time. Approximately an hour later Jenna was stitched up, Logan was doing well, and we were headed for recovery.

Once we were in the recovery room all responsibility for Logan was given to me. I'm not sure why but I expected the nurses to be slightly more involved than they were. Nurses were in the room every couple of hours checking Jenna and, to a lesser extent, Logan. We stayed in the hospital for four exhausting days. Jenna recovered better than I ever expected and was walking Tuesday and showering by Wednesday.

We were ecstatic to return home. Even though we were alone and responsible for Logan we felt much more comfortable. Our routine is improving each day and Jenna and I are enjoying the time together.