So I decided to move my blog, it was hosted on Alakriti but i’m working on migrating my personal stuff to its own site, to make room for business only stuff to be on Alakriti. So over the next few days I will be importing some of my articles from my various blog and getting this thing styled more to my liking.
Fair warning some posts will end up before this one, as I am going to date them to the date they were posted for historical tracking.
So I now have updated information on the burglary of my home. They actually found the kid who did it, and I have recovered my laptop. Which I am really quite amazed on the turn around. I never assumed I would ever see the laptop again. Thats why I had purchased another one.
So the kid was arrested on another charge and they found pawn records, one of which was a laptop.On a hunch the detective decided to go see if I was lucky and it was my laptop, it was pawned the same day my house was broken into. It turned out to be mine indeed, The crazy thing I was never aware of was that if I wanted my laptop back before all the court proceedings were done I would need to purchase my laptop back from the pawn shop, Its kind of weird buying your own possessions back. The shocking thing was he had pawned a brand new Sony Vaio laptop for $120, I mean the jail time you risk and all you get is $120. You could have sold it on the street for much more, and not had to show a pictured ID. Is it really worth the jail time to make $120. Is anyone really that desperate for money? Anyway I’m just extremely glad to have the laptop back in my possession, now I can recover our pictures. I have included a picture of the “winner” at the bottom of this post.
I have been going to 98 Rock’s Livestock for years, do to complications they could no longer hold this event, but this year they were launching a new event they called Rockfest. There were so many good bands playing there, my girlfriend and I were quite excited to see.
Dropping Daylight
Blackstone Cherry
Bullet for my Valentine
Saliva
Daughtry
Puddle of Mudd
Chevelle
Papa Roach
Buckcherry
Three Days Grace
Hinder
So we woke up excited to go, got ready and met up with my brother and his girlfriend but nothing could have prepared us for the day at hand. We get there and we manage to make it through a few bands, and my brothers girlfriend starts getting a bit sick to her stomach and light headed. So they go the EMT tent. She was dehydrated, so the EMT’s got her some water and a damp towel to put over her skin, it wasn’t long till the rest of us started feeling the same way, it was extremely hot out and none of us had drank anything all day we were all trying to avoid the insane lines. By the way the EMT’s had told her there were only 10 of them for the entire event. 16,000+ people in the blazing heat, not to mention this a rock concert, pits etc, with 10 EMT’s staffed.
So my girlfriend and I venture off to try to find drinks, we stop at almost every food stand, we are told they do not have beverages, which I found quite shocking every event I have ever been to like this food vendors sell drinks as well. Finally I reach one who gives me the truth, He pointed at his coolers underneath their tables and said “sorry buddy, we brought drinks we were told we couldn’t sell them you have to go get in line over there”. He points to an extremely long line that stretches across the venue, there were 3 main places that anyone could tell sold beverages. All of which stretched from one side of the field to the other. People were waiting in line for over 2-3 hours to get to the front. It was mass confusion, no one knew whether they needed tickets for the water first (the ticket lines were just as long, so you might have to wait in both. People just looked extremely sick, people were passing out in line waiting for water, my girlfriend and I had waited a bit over an hour without moving more then a few feet in this huge line. We were getting pretty bad, so we decided hey we will just sacrifice and loose out on one band. We’ll just head out the store get some drinks and come back.
So we get to the front gate to find out if we leave we are not permitted to re-enter. I mean this is shocking, and we weren’t the only ones at the gate complaining. There were hundreds of people. Standing around the gates, girls crying because they felt so sick but they wanted to be able to come back. People were complaining as well. There actually was no water, some of them had waited in line for over 2 hours to be told that there wasn’t water available. Someone really screwed up when organizing this. The very least they could do is let people leave to get drinks and come back. We all still had tickets. Instead your options were stay there and pass out, or leave for good. Many were just leaving for good.
After about 30 minutes had passed from the time we reached the gate, and tried to get contact with someone who could allow people to leave and come back we all decided screw this, it’s not worth our health and left. So as we are walking out my brother makes a comment. “I hope you guys have body bags”. A uniformed officer, from Tampa FL replies “Grow the fuck up”. A police officer. So I flipped. I told him he is a police officer, not a child, people are suffering here, easy for him to say grow up, he is standing under a shaded tent with a bottle of water in his hand. The staff were leaving and bringing back bottles of water to their coworkers.
I wasn’t impressed with the police department, the stadium, or 98 Rock. The parking lot was just as bad, people wondering around looking drunk, they were just dehydrated. These people were so out of it they were unable to find their cars, hell it took us 45 minutes to find ours. People were passing out in the middle of the parking lot.
I doubt highly they are going to be giving money back for tickets. All I know is from this point forth I’m boycotting 98 Rock. I will never listen to their radio station, nor attend another one of their events, and I will encourage all my friends to do the same. They aren’t new to this, they had 15 Livestocks. They know how hot it gets, and the things that happen when people get dehydrated.
So the other day I was burglarized for the first time, and its really quite astonishing how these things go down, I would love to know what is going on inside the heads of the individuals who commit these acts. Let me just give a brief run down on what occured.
So I left my house on Saturday the 28th at about 12pm to meet up with my twin brother for lunch, and to go out on the motorcycles for a few, 4 hours later my girlfriend returned home with her mother from shopping to find our front door wide open. Upon walking in she realized our house had been broken into. Which in itself is quite shocking I have a police office across the street, and another behind me, and its a nice neighborhood near Clearwater beach. The community is mostly older people.
We searched the house to find what had been taken, they had odviously gone through all the dresser drawers and night stands throughout the entire house. The only thing they took was my laptop which of course has a high value to me, a small dish of loose change, which he was lucky if it contained more then $20, and a bottle of Armani cologne. Thats it! He left behind guitars, cell phones, digital cameras, TV’s, DVD players, stereos, purse with credit cards, jewelry. It just shocks me, if you are going to risk the jail time why not get all the money you can out of it?
Whats even more shocking is the idiot when breaking my sprinkler system using it as a step to get through my bathroom window, managed to leave 2 huge hand prints on my bathroom window while trying to open it. You may want to think about a new career there buddy. The sad thing is he walked out the front door and no one ever saw him.
What we had discovered we had lost was so much more important then the physical items that had been taken from my home. That laptop contained pictures, probably near 100 per month for the last year, of things my girlfriend and I had done. Christmas, her birthday, a trip to NY to see my daughter. These are things that no amount of money could ever replace, the one thing I didnt have backed up. I will never make that mistake again in my life. I can only hope the laptop is recovered, but we all know its highly unlikely.
I have to come to realize how much burglary effects people. Its not even about what was taken from your home, or what was broken. You feel violated, knowing someone unwanted just came through your house, looked through all your belongings. Everytime you pull up to the house you look at the front door to see if its open, and the windows. I walk through the door and instinctively I want to do a walkthrough my house before my girlfriend comes in. Wondering if maybe while they were there they saw something they wanted to come back for. Its not a good feeling. I do know one thing, he better hope I’m not home if he ever comes in.
I’ll keep everyone updated as I find out more.
Relationships are like getting a new car. This is kind of an odd statement to grab your attention. This is one of my weird analogies / insight.
Relationships are very much like getting a new car. When you first get it you are crazy about it, taking care of it regularly ( washing, cleaning, maintenance, etc..), every time you look at it you get a big smile on your face, you make up reasons to take it places, brag about all the neat features it has to all your friends.
The fact is at some point it becomes just your transportation, you dont think twice about it when you get in it to drive it to work, or before tossing all your garbage in the back seat. Not washing it, changing the oil anymore, and the effect of that is the car deteriorates, and as the car deteriorates you think even less of it, which just starts the whole cycle over again. The more you want to get a new car, all because you have just become too used to the car.
Now take into consideration someone with a hot rod, or import or whatever. You may not like these cars but you have to give them some appreciation. The owners have invested a lot of time in these cars, by continuously spicing it up and adding to it the keep their interest peeked, and it is still just as exciting to them, they take care of it, it takes care of them. If only we could do the same. We are so quick to get bored and move on to the next big thing without appreciating what we have.
I think that if people would invest more into having fun in their relationships they wouldnt get so bored. You become boring, they are bored with you, they therefore become boring. Being in a relationship is all about challenging each other as people, bringing out qualities in each other that, they never knew were there, experiencing things they would have never tried on their own. So when your significant other becomes boring take the initiative to get them trying new things, keep it spontaneous and they will respond, try things they like to do.
I think one of humanitys biggest problems is we are selfish and so close minded, we are so dead set in our ways that we wont even here other people out. You dont need to take on someones opinion because you listened to it. The more opinions that you hear the easier it is for you to formulate your own. Try to experience everything you can, learn from it thats how we progress as people.
A lot of people are curious about what exactly it is that I do and why I do it, so Id like to take a few minutes to describe life as a software developer. Software development or programming as most here it, can be one of the most stressful and most self-rewarding professions.
First I will discuss a lot of the stressful situations, when applications are first designed a lot of factors are left unknown, uses the application may have at a later date things people do that werent taken into consideration. Most of the time the design of the application changes several times from start to finish, this causes a lot of rewrites of the code, so in essence more code gets thrown out then used, not only do the design specs change but also technology changes therefore you must take into account these things and often redesign portions of your application to account for these changes. Unreachable deadlines are always thrown into the equation, and it always seems that if you are ahead of deadline for a particular milestone that some wrench gets thrown in.
Bugs are probably some of the most stressful things, you are usually in a crunch to get these fixed before the application is released to its user base or the application is already in use in a production environment and you need to isolate a bug before it causes any major havoc on its user base. Then you have the time involved to find certain bugs, they become noticeable in one part of an application but triggered in a completely different area leading to many hours of debugging and troubleshooting to isolate where exactly the problematic code is, and I cant count the number of times I have spent hours searching for bugs that didnt exist, the user wasnt using the application properly, or the bug existed solely because of a typo. All of these lead to very long hours worked, and a lot of sleepless nights to get things done on time. Its stressful at the time but in the long run the challenge is nice it keeps you motivated and determined to solve a certain problem.
These are just a few of the stresses involved in the career path, so Im sure by now you are asking yourself why on earth would anyone want to do this, Ill explain. As mentioned above it can be one of the most self-rewarding professions, I say self-rewarding do to the fact that not many understand the profession or the level of technical and creative skill involved, they see a button that does a particular task without realizing their may be 100’s of man hours behind that button, the people who appreciate your work most are fellow developers. Usually you here nothing when things are running smoothly and nothing but bad feedback when the slightest bug is found. Think of it in the way, the task you are trying to do is usually difficult and not easily manageable now we as developers need to know how to develop in the first place which is a lot of knowledge and be creative enough to write an application that is capable of completing the same task, and easily used, this makes it highly taxing on us, so I have tremendous respect for other programmers, there are a lot of brilliant people in this profession who have excellent problem solving skills and a ton of creativity. The same problem can be solved numerous ways so its interesting to see how others solve the same problem.
Anyway to get back on topic, the feeling you get is indescribable when you see 100’, 1000’s, or even millions of people on a daily basis using something you made, and seeing the amount of time that it saves them, I compare this to the feeling a contractor must get when he sees his finished house, he does a lot of tedious manual labor, long hours, but when he steps back and looks at the house completely finished it brings a smile to his face, the same holds true for software development there are a lot of hours involved, as well as a lot of stress but seeing the end result is a huge reward.
Technology is forever changing so there are always new challenges, new technologies to learn, and new problems to solve. I myself love learning; Im a big sponge, so its nice to work in such a fast moving industry. I think the amount of happiness, gratification and respect not just from others but from myself I get from doing this far out ways the stress involved, and I look forward to the years to come and all the knowledge and achievements it brings me.
