Finally got a new car; something a little more respectable than the Dodge Neon -- I am happy with it.

Pics are in the expanded view

So, Graduation was the other day. Which means senior week is over, no more classes, it's all wraped up and I'm a full time working man now.

Now for your viewing pleasure are some photos of the event.

Graduation was fun, I guess. Senior week was ok, would have been a lot better had I not had to work all week. But I made the best of the time I had.

On another untech related topic, I want to discuss the world baseball classic. The WBC is going to be held very shortly [begining of March] and will be a showcase for the overly priced and over hyped baseball players that play in this country. The ammount of money that all sports figures make is another topic for another day as I could rant about that for countless hours. But like I said, this will be a way for the 'world' to see more USA baseball.

However, this is going to be terrible for Baseball. As a avid Major League Baseball (MLB) fan, I love watching the whole 162 game season. Watching carefully as roster changes are made and coaches do whatever they can to assure the team is healthy throughout the whole season; I also take notice to how the numbers change as the season progresses. Pitchers become tired as they've tossed countless innings, batters improve as their timing improves all the more. Catchers are slower, strugling to move as they are on their knees all season long.

Now, usually this time of the year is one of my favorite times. Spring Training, it's when MLB gets ready for a new season and those kids from the minors try and make their move. Those that have no worries on making the 40 man roster, they just chill. Get some Batting Practice in while Pitchers get ready for the long season ahead. They will toss a few innings here and a few there, but nothing crazy.

Unfortunatly with the WBC coming up, things are going to be different. It's a season in-itself that is starting with players not 100% ready. This tournament will be featuring a large quanitity of MLB tallent, ranging from Johny 'Be Good' Smoltz, to Pedro 'Bad Toe' Martinez. Now as this goes on the wear and tear on these pitchers is going to be horrible.

MY predictions, watch for huge Home Run numbers for a lot of players this year even though their are no more steroids in the game [ or so I hope ]. By the All-Star break pitchers are going to tire out, and people like 'Balco' Barry Bonds will continue to jack balls out of the park. I can only hope that a fast ball gets tossed wild and hits Barry in the knee-cap keeping him from breaking the Home Run Record held my 'Hammering' Hank Aaron.

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With the MLB season ahead. Here are my predictions

National League:
NL East: Atlanta
NL Central: St Louis
NL West: LA Dodgers
Wild Card: It will come down to either the Astros, Mets, or my sleeper team the BREWERS.

Yes - My sleeper team for this year is the Brew Crew.

American League:
AL East: Yankees - Run away with it big time 98 win season
AL Central: Twins
AL West: The Anaheim Angels of Cali
Wild Card: Orioles

World Series: Atlanta over Yankees in 6

In a change of pace, I'm going to discuss something non-tech related. I want to talk about Barry Bonds and why I hate him so much. For those that do not know, I watch baseball in mass quantity during the season; I'll watch just about any team sans the Yanks and Philies.

But on to the topic at hand. I hate Barry Bonds, no seriously, I really really hate him. Words can not describe how much; but I should provide some reasoning behind it.

1. The World Baseball Classic - Barry Bonds, whom is always under the microscope for the steroid usage and Balco situation, could have saved his character had he played in the WBC. However, this baseball classic is going to follow the same type of drug testing of that of the olympics. Now you see, the olympics do extensive drug testing. Nothing better than grabbing a hair sample, and seeing what someone has done over about the last 5-7 years.

Now if Barry Bonds is quote unquote clean and innocent, it would have been proven here. But, he doesn't want to so we won't. This is a very greedy man. You are a very greedy Man Mr Bonds. If I were a pitcher and you were one short of Hanks record, you know what I would do. I'd walk you.

If the game was on the line; bases loaded bottom of the 9th, I'd let you get a walk-off walk just so you couldn't get the HR. I hope you just get walked and walked and walked this year once you get close to the record. That is if you even hold up, your knees are soo shot. It's bone on bone and you're probably on more pain-killers than I dunno what.

So yea, I hate Barry Bonds. Y'know, when he was with the Pirates, he wasn't all that bad. But now, total retard.

So, I worked on the weather widget a bit more tonight. I wanted to experiment with a few things, that I really haven't had the time to mess around with in C#.

In the course environment, the exposure I get to it is pre-determined and the prof can only show you so much. We really can't go over every single thing you can do with the IDE, a good coder must keep learning and reading up on the language. And as far as the mp3 organizer goes, that's been moving slow and some things I want to mess with really don't have a need in that application.

So tonight, I wanted to mess with transparency, the notification icon, and making a widget. The application looks more widget like, although I have a ways to go before I can make it look like something you'd see on a Mac or Konfabulator [ Linux ]. However, it's coming a long a little better.

More over, I'm a coder - Not a graphics person. There are people out there that are amazing with UI's, they can make the whole "look & feel" simply amazing. I'm working on backends, making sure buttons do what they should. Making sure there are no memmory leaks. Etc Etc

So here you go http://www.bkardi.com/downloads/widget/Weather.rar

Well, I decided to write a little trivial application in C#. This is to keep me busy and active while continuing the development of the MP3 Organizer.

The current status of the MP3 Organizer is as follows. It will read mp3s, it will rename mp3s, it will do the folder creation and such, it remembers your preferences [thank you XML] and it no longer locks up [thank you multi-threading]. However, we want the user to have the ability to adjust their ID3 Tags and save them.

Currently, we are struggling with this part of the program. Basically this is the last tie up before the next release. This release will fix all those silly bugs users currently face, and they will also enjoy the improved look & feel. Mike has been a great developer to work with, he complements my work very well and without him on the project it would have never taken off. And to be frank, I'd never started it.

Well , on to new buisness. Like I said I wrote a little trivial weather widget; it can be accessed here http://www.bkardi.com/downloads/widget/WeatherWidget.rar

Hello everyone, over this Christmas break in addition to working on that mp3 project, I visited Miami for the Orange Bowl.

I thought that the Ohio State game was the best game I ever went to, but I think it's a toss up now between that game and the Orange Bowl. The trip was nothing short of amazing and it was spent with some awesome people.

Despite getting into an accident on I-95 and getting lost in Miami we had a blast. Oh and for future reference, don't go too south into Miami. As I have found out the hard way, no one speaks english and the only people that are white are also homeless.

Regardless of those little setbacks, the trip was a blast. We spent new years eve in the Outter Banks, NC. That was great, a bunch of people in a beach house just gettin ripped. I probably will never run into any of those people again, but we all had fun. I also learned that everclear can be consumed if properly mixed. I learned I'm horrible at Beer Pong, but decent at Flip Cup.

Below are some photos from the game. The first being outside of the stadium, the second being me by the orange bowl trophy, and the 3rd being me and some random people throwing some random girl into the air after a touchdown.

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Outside the hotel


ORANGE BOWL TROPHY


ME THROWING A CHICK IN THE AIR

For those that are interested, Mike and I are currently working on an opensource project on sourceforge. This project is more ellaborate and complex than prior things I have worked on; however, because we make an amazing development team it can be accomplished.

The project currently being worked on is an mp3 organizer and library builder. The program will allow you to import all of your music and then it will sort it based upon certain criteria. Such criteria would be the Aritist, Song Title, Album, Genre, etc etc.

You then will specify where you'd like your music collection to now be. So if you have music all over your machine; due to programs like LimeWare, Kazaa, i2hub and the like you can be organized. It will then organize the files and go something like this: Artist / Album / Title ... or Artist / Album - title or any version you can think of.

The program will get more complex as the semester rolls along, as I really want to introduce threading and running code in paralell.

Here is a screen shot

https://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=155490


And the alpha can be downloaded : https://sourceforge.net/projects/mp3libbuilder/

Due to the request of a few places that i'm interviewing with, I am going to need to come up with an actua portfolio. This will make me really want to move forward with some programing and might be the swift kick in the butt that I need to get going and writing some apps online.

I think I'm going to put the IST 301 project from last year online, which was one of the nicer applications I worked on in a group setting. That was the emergency response program that interacted with XML. I thought that one was cool, this week I might make something with a DB connection in it. Perhaps some JAVA and MySQL or some C# and MySQL just to write something small.

What exactly I'd write, I duno....if anyone has any ideas for software they'd like me to write let me know. AND YES , I will get around to the soduku puzzle solver

So, the compy still hasn't been performing at a level I wanted it to. After getting more ram and a new video card ... I was still noticing serious performance issues. Alas, it came down to my 2200+ XP chip was no longer cutting it; however, the chip did have a nice run of about 3 years.

I just purchased a new motherboard and proc. The motherboard of choice for me was the ASUS A8V DELUXE Socket 939 VIA K8T800 Pro , this beast will be nice. But more importantly is the proc, as this is what really will do the work for me. I picked up a AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 1GHz FSB 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Processor. Going from a 32bit 2200+ Chip which is running slower and slower in my mind to this 64 bit chip with a nice Front Side Bus and Level 2 Cache, I can't go wrong.

After these parts come in, hello newer and better things. Time to write some heavier processor applications. Speaking of applications; I've been neglecting the open source community for a while and I need to take care of that. I will get around to writing a Soduku puzzle solver sooner or later. All the interviews that I anticipate to have this semester are done with (short of 2nd round on-sites). So I will have more time for course work which relates to more time for other projects.

Other projects include my finally using the.NET framework and learning C# , Working with SQL & Java and other small things. So - that's where we stand. Hopefully these things come to pass.

I guess I haven't been keeping to up to date with things and I should. This is partly due to the massive ammount of things I've had to do and all the places I've been going. There has been a lot going on in my life as of late and I'm just trying to juggle it all.

This mostly has been the job situation for post graduation. I've had a few interviews and a few more this week. I had one with Viecore last week and it went well. They would like me to go on site for a 2nd round interview in November, but I'm just not feeling it. I might reconsider but it would depend on how heavy my schedule is looking and what classes I can afford to miss.

In addition, I just had a 2nd round interview with BAE this past Friday. That was my first on-site interview with someone, and it went well. They really impressed me with how well they treat their employees and even potential employees. They paid for my hotel, my gas and my meals. This was really nice - I interviewed with one gentleman, whom was a Senior Systems Engineer and I thought that the interview went fair. There was one thing that caught me a little off guard; however, I think I handled it as best I could. I'd really like to know who makes the hiring decisions and how important that one person is in making the choice on whether or not I stay or go.

This week I have a few more interviews; tommorow night I have an info-session with General Electric that I can not miss, so I will be attending that at the one Hotel in town. I just need to find out where it is and more importantly how to get there. Later in the week I will be interviewing with them as well for their Management Training program. In addition I will be interviewing with Booze Allen Hamilton for a consulting position , and finally one with Lockheed Martin for various positions that I may be qualified for.

Last week I was supposed to also interview with Northrup Gruman; however, due to my being in Washington DC I could not interview with them. I am hoping that they call me for a phone interview; however, not hearing something after such a long period of time, I am doubtful. This is ok though, because I've had a few interviews with some companies and things are going as well as they could at this time of the year.

BAE says that we should know probably by this Friday how we stand with BAE as far as getting a job with them; however, official offers would not be able to be made until early Decemeber. If in fact an offer is made to me and the $$ is right, then it's time to find someone where to live in the McLean Virginia Area.

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PSU is 7-1 (4-1) and well on their way to an impressive bowl game. Unfortuantly, the loss to Michigan a few weeks back has cost the team a trip to the Rose Bowl. Going undefeated was the only chance PSU could even goto the BCS Game...however, I'll still be happy with a nice Sugar Bowl. PSU has a game with Purdue this week (Homecoming) and Wisconsin on November 5th. I am confident we will beat the snot out of Purdue and being at home should be enough to overcome Wisconsin. This will leave us a game at Michigan State, this team has had some big losses but also some big wins.

My PSU Prediction: 9-2 : This should be enough to take the Big 10

Well, I finally got my new parts in for the computer. This was a long time overdue but now I can work at a higher efficency. I am going from the old cathode monitor to a 19" LCD Monitor with an 8ms refresh rate. From a 64 meg PCI videcard to the GeForce 6600GT videocard, I am also going from some outdated ram to brand new ram (1Gig to be exact).

I still would like to get a new motherboard and processor. Preferably an AMD 4400+ so I could get a dual proc and do some hyperthreading and some cool programming things. But for now, I will not complain. Having this new monitor is great on the eyes and the RAM will be nice for JAVA, which we all know sucks resources like nuts.

Now with this new monitor, ram, video card and keyboard I will hopefully have the desire to get back into freelancing and independent work. Preferably, I'd like to get back into some PHP and maybe finally find a good reason to use Python; however, there is also a strong desire to pick up on C# as that will be my final hard IST class next semester. I really do not want to have to pick up a language that fast, and well, if I know I can get a jump on it then there is no reason not to.

I may also look into getting back into some JAVA stuff. I do really enjoy working with JAVA -- the problem is that I rarely have any ideas on what I want to do. And for all programers, we know the biggest problem is having a project to work on. If you have nothign to work on , you begin to become rusty...and as a great man once said "If you don't use it ... You loose it" Hopefully, I can stay sharp; especially knowing that some places may require me to take some sort of programming test prior to employment to see that I have a pulse.

Well, I've been back in state college for a week now and it's great to be back. The change of scenery and being back with my friends has done me a world of good.

My first week of classes was this week and as we all know, the first week is always very lax and you do a minimal ammount of work. So yea, it was an easy week o courses minus E-comerce Law. If I did not need to take this course for my NSA Certificiation I would drop that course like a bad habbit. The prof made a comment about that and well many people did drop it after the first class.

What else? I'm back in Upark like I said earlier and I'm having a case of coders block. I'd like to write some software and develop something, basically anything; however, I just can't come up with anything. There is this great idea I have for a bar, but that would require some serious $ to get started and it wouldn't really do me any good as I do not have a bar.

First football game is this weekend; we play South Florida and I expect a blowout. I'll be looking very forward to this game. I will post later this weekend

I think the next item on the programing agenda will be web-based. I've decided I think I want to work on an RSS reader / writer for websites. This way you can have them for your own site, and also add feeds to your site.

Currently all I have on my site are those links to the left that mention a few links of interest; however, I think it might be nice to have the link and underneath it the first few lines from their newest story. Messin around with the RSS feed a bit I could achieve this; I think it might be a good idea too. I'm interested in RSS but I'm just not quite sure how I want to juggle this one.

I could use PHP, however, I'm not too sure how I'd do this. I'm guessing I'd have to parse each RSS feed one at a time and just move through the XML until I get to the tag I am looking for. Now with JAVA I know exactly how to do this; in fact I think I have an XML reader / parser laying around somewhere; however, I am just not sure with PHP. It can probably be assumed though that there are XML readers and parsers for it...hopefull that is a correct assumption.

This should be my next project, although I've been quite lazy while at home and have been doing well in my task to get some down time. I will be going back to school in a week from now and plan on not really doing much that first week either; however, after that then it's time to start really getting into the swing of things.

September 22nd is also an important date. This will be the day of the career fair for recruting people such as my self. I however do have a plan, the game plan is to get their right in the very very beggining of the fair and get to places before it gets packed. I'm going to be realistic and avoid Microsoft like the plague. As much as I'd like t owork for a place like that, there are a lot of differences of opinion. I am a fan of open source, PHP, JAVA, Linux and MySQL while the big M$ is against all of those things.

With this being said I am going to try to interview with IBM. IBM is a fan of JAVA and open source and other things; however, it should be said that I'd love the idea of trying to roll out with a startup right out of school. Huge risk but the rewards would be insane if it all went well.

Well, I've finally addressed the JDBC issue I was having with this website. After sending a few emails and getting a few replies from hostgator, they solved my problem and I can now write JAVA that interacts with my databases on the server.

Now that I can interact with DB's remotely thru JAVA, I'm wondering what kinds of applications I should try to write or where I want to go with things. I'd like to just flex the coding muscles a bit, but I'm at a loss of ideas. Any ideas?