Last night, I'd volunteered to bartend the back hall at my Moose Lodge during our "Cash Bash". I volunteered because there were several headaches with the last "Cash Bash" the lodge held, where it was pour your own beer. I wasn't expecting to make much tip-wise, as it was free drinks with the purchase of a ticket.

Nor did I make much in tips, but I enjoyed my time during and after the event. A lot of the people there offered up some conversation while waiting for their drinks, and several were buying me drinks after the event was over. I can't argue with that.

This is what I miss the most from working in a restaurant. More specifically, why I miss bartending. It's that interaction between a bartender and guests, or the general feel of appreciation that many people have towards that person that's been getting them intoxicated over the last few hours.

I'm particular about the bars I go as a regular, but I always go back to the bars where I can appreciate the bartenders. I think it's important that a bartender is capable of developing that kind of interaction / relationship with guests in a short period of time. If that relationship isn't being nurtured, then the person probably has little business being a bartender.

In retrospect of last night, I'm considering trying to find a bartending gig a few mights a week in the Bloomfield / Squirrel Hill areas. I need to figure out my time management a little, but I think the opportunity would be worthwhile.

When I left work today, I'd spent several hours developing a new PHP class to interface with DonorPerfect, an online database great for fundraisers and non-profit organizations for keeping track of donations and members. Unfortunately, users of DP can't create a website and simply connect to their database for information retrieval. All information is externally saved and retrieved with an XML API. My class interacts with this API to create simpler calls and quickly store and access data. This code can easily be adapted to it's own CMS for organizations utilizing DonorPerfect.

These short six weeks of working at Savvior have given me all sorts of ideas on what to implement on BIOSLEVEL, this blog, and Cocktail-a-Day. Now it's just a matter of finding the time and energy to work on any of these three sites when I get home from work. I have, however, had some time to create a new mockup of BIOSLEVEL's new design. It's not finished just yet, but we're getting close. Then I'll just have to spend some time transforming the image into XHTML and CSS.

Maybe there'll be some new features coming up in another week or two. Can't say for sure, but I'd really like to.

Seeing some of the methods they use in both their CMS and other projects, I've had a lot of time to re-evaluate where BIOSLEVEL.com stands. There's a lot more I'd like to do on recoding the site. Much, much, much more. It's just a matter of finding the time to do it!

Time has seemed so short lately. I spend roughly eight hours at work, so that should leave me with eight hours of free time, and eight hours of sleep, right? Think again... Consider that I wake up roughly 1.5 hours before I have to be at work. Stack on eight hours of work, then roughly an hour commute home. Right there is already 10.5 hours of my day, leaving around three and a half hours of free time before needing to get back to sleep.

Not that I ever get a full eight hours of sleep, but I can definitely feel how my free time has been cut down so much. It's an equal trade for landing the job, I guess. My real problem is spending too much time outside of my house. I think this week I'm going to focus on spending a little more time at home so I have time to work on my projects and personal sites.

Sure enough, I got the job... and I can't say that it hasn't been anything but a dream. Honestly, it's everything I've been looking for in a job. I have both the web developer and system administrator tasks to take on, casual dress, and lunch breaks.

I've been trying to adjust to the schedule, hence my lack of updates over the past week. I do think I've seen quite a few interesting techniques in PHP with the few projects I've worked on at this point, and there's definitely a few I'd like to apply to both BIOSLEVEL.com and this blog. Time will tell when I get around to doing that, however. I really don't want to be dealing with PHP/MySQL for an entire day. It's enough for eight hours!

Hopefully there's many more updates to come this week, and hopefully I get around to finishing up the new layout / backend for BIOSLEVEL!.

I spent Sunday at my Moose Lodge's picnic. It was only $5 to come as a member, and free drinks and food from 1PM-5PM. Unfortunately, I'm a big volunteer there and was stuck setting up and tearing down just the same. Needless to say, I was soaked the entire time we were there. It didn't help that I was playing football with three very good friends in the rain.

I wish I could've been able to take pictures of the leaves and trees while I was at the picnic, but I left my memory card of all things at home. However, I'd really like to get out and take some pictures with my Nikon D40 DSLR this fall. I've been learning alot about it's different modes from reading some photographers' best practices online.

Fall pictures to come soon.

Despite these events, I've had a reasonably productive day. I realized last night that BIOSLEVEL.com's new layout and back end was not as far ahead as I thought. I spent a good majority of my evening writing a new back end, trying to push an object-oriented model, as well as an improved template for Smarty.

Whenever I was taking a break from programming, I was (finally) assembling my server. The kicker to this is that a full-sized tower case won't fit my MASSIVE heatsink. It's roughly 1/8th of an inch too tall. I guess I'll be leaving the side panel off until I find a suitable replacement. Aside from this issue, all I have left is throwing in a power supply, DVD-ROM, and cabling everything up. I'm sure I'll have more to write on this in the near future. It's going to be one kick-ass home server.

Once upon a time, Gentoo Linux was a thriving community distro. These days, I've been finding it harder and harder to find solid answers to problems I run into. Much of the time, I find a semi-related problem on Ubuntu's forums that assists me in fixing my problem on Gentoo.

Once upon a time, Gentoo's forums were filled with posts such as "how-to install xyz..." Now, almost every thread is asking a question. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be enough devs around on the forums to answer many of the questions. IRC is another option, but I've never felt right logging on to IRC just to find an answer.

Gentoo has hit some rough times, and holds a whopping 7% share on The Linux Counter. I remember days when that number was much higher, when people had machines that took days to get a machine up and running. Now, I can have myself a Gentoo system running in a few hours, Xorg and all.

The new board of trustees, or whatever body governs Gentoo now, seems to be focused on release cycles and proper management of packages in Portage. Devs come and go, package maintainers come and go. However, where is the focus on Gentoo's community? Listing recent Gentoo-related blog posts on a front page, or running a Twitter Robot to retweet any related Gentoo tweets, isn't establishing a community.

Obviously Ubuntu has come to a point where my grandmother could probably be adjusted to using Gnome in a few hours, but the driving force behind Ubuntu isn't Canonical, but rather a huge community that attracts both those new to Linux, and the seasoned pros.

I don't necessarily know what would help rebuild Gentoo's community. It's not an easy distribution to learn, but it pays off in the performance gained. When I was using Ubuntu as my benchmark platform for BIOSLEVEL, I noticed subtle lags here and there, all the way down to the mouse' response time. That's not to say there isn't boot-time or kernel-level changes I could have made (I'm honestly not sure), just that I have never had performance issues in Gentoo. In fact, after testing some hardware in both Ubuntu and Gentoo, Gentoo typically came out on top.

The point of this post, I suppose, is to remind myself of how easy it once was to find support for all things Gentoo, and how things are now. My laptop's wireless has been working for months. I turned the laptop on the other day, and all of a sudden got a million error messages from an rc script that shouldn't have happened. Nothing's changed on the system all summer, so why is the wireless breaking now (on the software side)?

I may never know. It may be time to move my laptop to a different distribution such as Kubuntu or even Intel's Mobile.

If you haven't tried Gentoo, I really do suggest giving it a whirl. It's time-consuming, but I had always found the end product to be very worthwhile.

I've been glancing at Craigslist and Monster.com since I returned from vacation, and already had one interview for a management position. However, what I'd really like to do is find a gig developing websites as a profession. It's so hard to find an established company that's hiring. It's harder to convince that handful of companies that despite not have a bachelor's degree, you're probably more capable of developing in PHP/MySQL/Javascript/etc than 90% of college grads. Right?

On a different note, I found out my cousin-in-law has a friend that does HR for all the restaurants at the River's Casino. They're opening a sports bar there at the end of the year, and I'd would love to score a management position there. It pays, the hours are what I'm used to, and... it pays! I'd be back to what I was making (hopefully more), and hopefully be able to get back on track to moving out of the parents' house!

I have several TV Tuners that I've used with MythTV for years. Unfortunately, these tuners never allowed access to digital channels.

Sadly, CableCards are still a technology restricted to the Windows Operating System. There's no open schematics or plans available to them, so there's very little hope that the technology will be supported in Linux anytime soon. I have little interest in using Windows Media Center, but I've always loved using MythTV.

MythTV is a client-server set up, where the backend is what communicates with the hardware. But I can set up MythTV frontends on any number of PCs in my network (or even over the internet if I wanted), and stream any media from my server to that PC. I believe MythTV's implementation of this feature predates Windows Media Center's implementation by a long shot. And despite the slow release cycle for MythTV, I still believe it to be a better and more expandable product.

Mythbuntu, an Ubuntu-based MythTV distro, made an April Fools' Day Joke this year about Microsoft opening up CableCard development and that CableCards would soon be supported under Linux. Sadly, the next day was a heartfelt tragedy after the truth was realized.

Maybe someday I'll be able to watch digital cable from my desktop.

Needless to say, it hasn't been the most productive week for me. Hopefully I'll be back to normal in a few days.

Life-wise, there's a few exciting events coming up in the next two month:

Next Friday is Karaoke at my Moose Lodge. It's free and open to the public, and it's always a great time.

Next Saturday is my friend's wedding "reception". They got married by themselves in California, and are having a huge party once they're home.

In October, Penguins Season begins and that is always a great time!

Social Distortion plays in Cheswick, PA on October third.

My birthday is October 7th.

And I'm helping plan out a huge Halloween bash at my Moose Lodge for the end of October. More details to come!