Greg Nilsen

Kicking Off A New Year In 2012

Greg Nilsen — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 01:54:23 +0000

Well, a new year is upon us, and it’s time to look at what we want to accomplish in the coming year…

That’s right, the dreaded NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS!

I’m keeping mine pretty simple this year, though that doesn’t mean that they won’t be challenging:

#1 – Lose 30 Pounds

Yes, I spend a lot of time between work and taking care of my boys, but in the past few years I definitely haven’t taken care of myself the way I need to. It’s time to change my routines and diet, and take care of myself for the long term. It’s going to be a lot of hard work, but it’s a change I need to make.

I weighed myself this morning, and I checked in at 267.6 after the holidays, so I’m shooting for 237 by the end of 2012. I’ll be posting updates throughout the year, both to share what has and hasn’t been working, and to help hold myself accountable to my goals.

#2 – Run Four 5k Races

In 2010, I started running over the summer and managed to complete two 5k races by the end of the year. Then in 2011, I didn’t stick with that effort, instead dedicating my time to our boys. In 2012, I want to get back to that level of training and getting that sense of accomplishment from finishing the races.

That’s going to be it for this year. There will still be plenty of my time focusing on my boys and spending quality time with my wife, but this year I need to make sure I take care of myself as well.

My First Gluten-Free Cupcake

Greg Nilsen — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:42:36 +0000

Last night I made my first gluten-free cupcakes. It had never been a thought of mine to try before, because nobody in my family has a gluten allergy. However, I wanted to take cupcakes to daycare for my son’s first birthday, so I wanted to be as as possible. Hence was born my gluten-free maple banana cupcake:

I made mini cupcakes for the kids and topped them with a brown sugar frosting tinted red and topped with yellow sugar and a fruit candy dot.

They tasted good to me, though I did notice the flavors of the gluten-free flour, and they baked just fine. We’ll see the reaction from the kids when my wife picks them up tonight!

5 Reasons Google Music Drives Me Crazy…But I Use It Anyway

Greg Nilsen — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 01:34:53 +0000

While Google Music Beta debuted almost six months ago, I played around with it initially and didn’t find many practical uses for it. I had all of my music locally at home, had a solid MP3 player, and my employer didn’t allow for streaming video or music on a regular basis. So, I pushed it over in a corner and left it alone for a while.

Recently, some of that changed. My MP3 player died on me, and I changed jobs, and my new employer does allow for streaming music. So, I started checking out several online services, which I will write about later. At the moment I have come back to Google Music, mostly because it gives me access to my entire music collection.

That said, there are some things that drive me crazy when I try to use it:

A Lack of Song Information – You’d think that a company like Google, whose entire business depends on amassing information, would provide you with plenty of song information. Nope. You just get Song Name, Artist, Album, Time, Plays (aka Playcount), and Rating. That’s it! And Time is almost useless from my perspective. In a large collection, that’s often not enough to satisfy picky listeners like myself. If I want to groove to “90′s Alternative” music, I’ve got to dig through my library and add the songs to playlists individually. That really doesn’t work for me. At minimum, I’d expect the following fields to be included in order to sufficiently manage my collection:
- Year
- Genre
- Track Number
- Date/Time Added
- Date/Time Last Played
No Way To Exchange Playlists – If I have local playlists set up on my computer, there’s no way to import them into Google Music, or vice versa. So, this means that if I want to recreate them, I have to spend my time doing it manually. Is it that hard to import or export *.m3u playlists.
A Lack of “Smart” Playlists – Part of this comes from the limited song information that is available on Google Music, but even with the information available, there is no way to create “smart” playlists where my music library can basically be searched for matching criteria (again, search is one of Google’s key businesses, so this should be relatively easy to implement). So, even with the information available, I can’t create a playlist like “Top 10 Most Played”, “Unplayed Songs” or “Songs In Playlists A,B and C” to listen to. As someone who likes to keep things mixed up (and I do thanks to the features of MediaMonkey on my local computer) and cycle through my collection on a regular basis, these kinds of playlists are a key part of my listening experience.
Insufficient Rating System – “Thumbs Up” and “Thumbs Down” is pretty much the bare minimum for a ratings system. I’m not even sure that the “Thumbs Down” makes sense…would I really have the song in my collection if I didn’t like it? It’s not like it’s playing me new music and trying to gauge my tastes, like Pandora. I already own the song and had to upload my music, and if I didn’t like it I would have deleted it. Anyway, the bare minimum I’d expect to see would be a 5-star system, so I can differentiate between my favorite songs and ones I like but are not at the same tier. Even better would be the old Yahoo! Music system where for each song I could give the Song, Album and Artist a seperate 5-star rating. That way, I could indicate if I liked a song but thought the rest of the album was garbage. It’s simply more infomation that can be used to better create “smart” playlists or Instant Mixes and a better listening experience.
A Lack of Queuing – This is a Spotify feature that I’d love to see carried over to Google Music, but since you can’t even see the upcoming song order when you’re on suffle in Google Music, there’s no way you can simulate it either. Basically, sometimes you’re listening to a playlist or shuffle, but you just want to listen to one or two songs that don’t fit that playlist, but you’d like to go back to your playlist. Well, it would be great if you could queue up songs like this in Google Music instead of having to completely switch playlists and go back each time you wanted to do this, and only on an individual song basis.

Yes, there are some great things about having your entire music collection available online to listen to as needed on other computers or your cell phone, but that doesn’t mean that the player website needs to be crippled the way it currently is. If Google could add these features to Google Music, they may actually have the killer app that music players like myself are looking for. Until then, it’s little more than a remote storage drive with a basic media player built in.

Pink For October – 2011

Greg Nilsen — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 02:25:46 +0000

Once again, I’ve made my blog these pink-based for October to bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

As you probably know, this is still a personal thing for me, and I want to show our support for all those struggling with this impediment in their lives.

Please support the efforts of the Komen Foundation to help make a brighter future for all those who have to deal with breast cancer in their lives.

Thank you.

Album Review: Hard-Fi – Killer Sounds

Greg Nilsen — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 01:43:26 +0000

I’ve had my finger on the pulse of the English band Hard-Fi for several years now, having stumbled across Cash Machine from 2005′s “Stars Of CCTV“, and the entire album quickly became part of my regular playlists. The combination of great beats and insightful/moving lyrics made it a great album from front to back.

Their sophomore effort, 2007′s “Once Upon A Time In The West“, was a minor disappointment, but still a very good album. However, it just didn’t have the same staying power with fewer catchy beats and strayed a bit from the counterculture vibes of their debut album in favor of a more introspective approach overall.

Last month, after 4 seemingly very long years, Hard-Fi has returned with “Killer Sounds“, which is a very welcome return to the roots that made them a hit in my book, and is one of the best complete albums I’ve come across in the last few years. From the tone-setting Good For Nothing (“Bueno Para Nada!”), the album gets off to a running start, and doesn’t stop until you get through the final title track, Killer Sounds. In between, you get flares of different cultural influences that the album cover suggests, from the Spanish tossed into Good For Nothing to the Asian influences in Feel Good to the European electronica undertones of Excitement, Love Song and Sweat. And let’s not leave out Fire In The House, the second single released off the album, which is a great, powerful and passionate song that should get the blood flowing.

This is an album which I want to put on and just set it to repeat, which is a rather rare occurrence for me to say. Not many artists will give you this kind of bang for your buck. So, if you enjoy alternative or indie rock music, then you’ll want to do yourself a big favor and pick up a copy of Killer Sounds (since it isn’t even avaliable on Amazon MP3s in the U.S. yet).

Greg’s Rating:

9/10

01189998819991197253

Greg Nilsen — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 03:46:25 +0000

If this doesn’t make you laugh at least once:

Then either you haven’t watched The IT Crowd (for shame), missed this clip, or have absolutely no sense of humor.

You’re welcome!

If You Thought Lady Gaga Was Out There…

Greg Nilsen — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 01:28:22 +0000

Here is something that she is likely to never top:

Seriously??? If I were to assemble 254 random pictures and show them each for one second to that song, it might make more sense than that video.

And if Jen at EPBOT is right, and it is a Kraft Macaroni & Cheese commercial…well, it doesn’t make me hungry.

Just confused, and slightly concerned…

How I Got Started In ColdFusion

Greg Nilsen — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:55:29 +0000

Back in 2004, I was attending grad school the University of Pittsburgh, working on my PhD in Computer Science focusing on Artificial Intelligence. I had aspirations of becoming a professor and helping to groom the next generation of CS majors. However, I grew disillusioned with the heavy focus on theoretical Computer Science, and the lack of focus on teaching undergrads that I found at a larger school (I had completed my Bachelors in Computer Science at Hiram College and graduated with just over 200 students from all majors), and decided to leave the PhD program, wrap up my Master’s degree requirements and seek a job where I could apply what I had learned.

While searching for a job that would be flexible enough to accommodate the last of my coursework, I landed a job at UPMC, the largest medical conglomerate in Pittsburgh, working with a customized data collection and reporting application for a research study focused on childhood behavior disorders. Having almost no experience with web-base application languages (I had seen a few pages of PHP previously, but not much), I was thrust into ColdFusion MX 7 and MS SQL to learn what was already in place. With ColdFusion being so easy to learn, I picked up things quickly, and I got some pointers from the other developers. I really enjoyed working with ColdFusion and the ease with which things came together and simplicity when reading the code (for the most part). Within 6 months, I had studied for and passed my ColdFusion MX 7 Developer certification and was working to improve the application I was working with.

However, some time later I had been presented an opportunity to take a job as a MS SQL DBA at a significant raise, and I chose to pursue it. Unfortunately, I found several months later that the job and I were not a great fit for a number of reasons, and I got back into ColdFusion development.

Now a Product Manager/Team Lead/Senior Software Developer, I continue to work with ColdFusion today, this time with Oracle PL/SQL databases, in order to support supply chain management software for the steel industry (OpenTrac). The work we do is by no means flashy, but it is extremely functional and helps to fill a gap that the industry has struggled with for a number of years, and our customers have come to rely upon us for. And to me, that’s important; I help people get stuff done, and do it more efficiently than they had in the past. And ColdFusion helps me to do that for them!

If You Think How Long You Live Is More Than Dumb Luck…

Greg Nilsen — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 03:20:27 +0000

Than check out this testimonial:

A word of advice though: Don’t take this as an endorsement of a life plan, or your dumb luck may get a little bit dumber!

Thanks, Criggo.

A Father’s Day Prayer

Greg Nilsen — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 03:16:54 +0000

I got this from my uncle today, and it was published in their parish bulletin this morning, and I liked it enough that I thought I’d share…

A Father’s Day Prayer

Holy Father,

You are the one who knows how absolutely special fathers are.

You made them that way.

How else can a man work so hard, give so much, and love unconditionally,

without your strength?

So first, Lord, thank You for fathers, for daddies.

For big, strong men with tender hearts,

with hands that are callused and rough,

yet so soft and gentle when hearts need mending.

Lord, help children to delight this day in being with their dads,

even if it must only be by phone.

May the precious memories flow, and bring laughter,

and new love and appreciation.

Lord, please take care of our dads.

Though they are brave and protective,

they must also be frightened sometimes,

when money runs low, when we need things, when we’re hurt or sick.

Lord, when their hearts break because they can’t do it all,

please help us to let them know how much we love them.

And how much You love them.

Lord, forgive the men who know they are not good fathers,

and help them to know when and if they can make things better,

with Your help.

And Oh, Lord, for those dads who keep trying and keep loving after

messing up so many times,

help their children to love them even more in return.

Lord, for that dad who has lost a child, please let him know that You are there,

right beside him,

for nothing else can heal a heart so torn.

For the father who is parenting alone, strengthen him with your love.

For those whose father is already with You,

Give him a hug Lord,

And tell him it’s from his children.

And you too, Lord.

Happy Father’s Day!

In Jesus’ name,

Amen.