A Totaly Money Makeover

So I was introduced to a book called Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. I'm usually not a fan of self help books, but his book really hit the spot. I recommend it to anyone. For the $17 cost, it's entirely worth it. His book is all about the down-to-earth wisdom of getting out of debt, and how to stay out of debt.

His book doesn't contain any secrets. Nor does it contain any special financial products or services. It's just plain reason. He explains the fallacies and myths that a lot of people believe in. And he explains the simple plan of getting and staying out of debt.

In all my 28 years, I have never kept a budget. Never. I never thought I really needed one. But this week I will create my very first budget and I will keep it. I have come to the realization that I need to take control of my spending and focus my money on staying free from financial bondage. One thing that I really like about this book is that the ideals taught in the book are the same ideals taught by the Church. So after having read his book, I look forward to taking control of my financial future.

My parents are giddy.

So I met this great girl a week before Christmas a few months ago. Her name is Mary. She's from Texas, and is going to school up here in Utah. She works at Novell in the corporate sales department. She works in another building, so thankfully the faux pas of dating someone you work with really doesn't apply here :)


As I mentioned, Mary is great! She's very athletic and adventurous. She loves kayaking, camping, hiking, and just plain being out doors. She has a ton of gear, so she can hit the mountains at the drop of a hat. She has recently picked up skiing, and I'm taking her snowboarding next week. (Hopefully I can convert her)

Anyway, I brought her up to meet my parents and they adore her. On more than one occasion my mother told me "She's a keeper". Both of my older brothers also voiced their approval (not that I need it, but it's nice to have anyway). Andy and Shawn are super excited to have Mary and me join them on some road trips and vacations.

In three weeks I'm taking the plunge and flying to Houston to meet her family. I've heard a bunch about her family and she talks to them on the phone almost daily. Mary tells me that they're going to love me. I sure hope so. It would make for a really awkward weekend if they didn't! (and Texans all have guns... and her dad is an ex-cop, so.... yeah). I'm looking forward to the trip and hope I don't make a fool of myself. :)

Anyway, my parents are just really excited to see me dating such a great girl. We'll see what happens!

Brighton discount tickets

Being from Utah, I grew up going skiing and snowboarding at Brighton. It has always been my favorite place to go. I especially like their night-skiing. It allows me still go snowboarding, but without having to take the day off of work. And it's always less crowded than day skiing.

So Brighton always offers discounts for their night skiing passes. I called them up just now and asked them where to get the discounts. So here goes:


Mondays: Download and print the coupon from Warriors Against Tobacco and get 1/2 off (ie $15).

Wednesdays: Get your 2 for 1 tickets from Arctic Circle. One combo meal will get you the discount ticket.

Fridays: X96 night. Show your X 96 Freeloader card and get 2 for 1.

You can also get $10 off by purchasing two Peanut Roll candy bars.

no habla Espanol

So I was able to take a trip to Madrid, Spain for a conference, the annual Mono Summit. We flew out a few days early and were able to take a trip to Toledo. During the evenings, we were also able to see some of the sites.

On Sunday, we took a train about 30 minutes south to Toledo. This city is so cool. The architecture is phenomenal. I loved seeing the old buildings and cobble stone roads. Being from Utah, the oldest thing we have is from the 1850's.

I posted some of the pictures on Picasa Web

The food is Spain was really good. We had good variety of food. Chocolate dipped churros, typical European breakfasts, kebabs for lunch, and some great tapas.

Madrid has a great subway system, so all we had to do was buy a 7 day pass and we were good to go. The subway made seeing the city a lot easier. We even took long lunches, hopped on the metro, and checked out some cool building or the famous Prado Museum of Art. I wish we had more time there, but I can't complain. It was free.

Digitial cameras and openSuse 10.3

I just recently bought my first digital camera. I took advantage of the Black Friday sales a few weeks ago and bought a Nikon Coolpix S51. It's a small point-and-shoot camera, but it worked out really well for me in Madrid. Maybe later I'll buy a big fancy SLR, but this will do just fine for right now.

I was really excited to use F-Spot to manage my pictures. F-Spot is shipped by default with openSuse 10.3. When I plugged my camera in to the USB port, F-Spot popped up immediately and asked if I wanted to import the photos. Once the import was done, browsing the photos in F-Spot is really simple (and quick).

I also used F-Spot's export feature to post my pics on Picasa. I used Picasa's web uploader to post my first nine pictures, before I remembered that F-Spot can do it for you, and their interface is so tedious. You have to browse for each picture by file name (oof) and you can only upload 5 at a time. F-Spot's export allows you to pick as many images as you want, and because you can see all the thumbnails, selecting which ones to upload is super easy.

Videos are another story. I only took one video while in Madrid, and that was more just playing around with my new toy. But now how do I get this video off the camera? (F-Spot actually does this for you, but I didn't know it. I had to ping F-Spot contributor Stephane Delcroix for help) From Google, I learned that USB cameras behave in one of two ways. One is that the camera gets mounted to the file system and you can manually pull files that way. The other is the camera can only be accessed via USB commands (not sure of the proper terminology here).

I determined that the camera had not been mounted, so in searching I came across gphoto2, a library and command line tool that talks to USB cameras. (I also learned later that F-Spot actually uses gphoto2 to do all its work.)

:~> gphoto --auto-detect

This will show you all the digital cameras currently connected to the computer.

:~> gphoto -l 

This command will list all of the directories in your camera's file system

:~> gphoto2 -n
Number of files in folder '/': 0

This command will list all the files in any directory on your camera. Combine this with the -f switch and info from -l switch to get some useful information.

:~> gphoto2 -f '/store_00010001/DCIM/100NIKON' -n

If you want to get straight to the meat, you can just run --list-files.

linux-dlfm:~ # gphoto2 --list-files
There is no file in folder '/'.
There is no file in folder '/store_00010001'.
There is no file in folder '/store_00010001/DCIM'.
There are 200 files in folder '/store_00010001/DCIM/100NIKON'.
...
#61    DSCN0062.JPG    1653  KB 3264x2448 image/jpeg
#62    DSCN0063.AVI    15664  KB video/x-msvideo
#63    DSCN0064.JPG    1648 KB 3264x2448 image/jpeg

There's a lot more output than this, but this shows you that the video that I want is /store_00010001/DCIM/100NIKON/DSCN0063.AVI Now to pull that video from the camera, use -p.

:~> gphoto2 -f "/store_00010001/DCIM/100NIKON/" -p "DSCN0063.AVI"

So that works. But as I said earlier, F-Spot had already pulled that video for me when I imported all the pictures from the camera. :) It's listed in the import window, where you select all the images that you want to import. It's just not listed in F-Spot's main browsing window, or anywhere else for that matter. But it's on the file system.

:~> find ~/Photos | grep -i avi
/home/rhowell/Photos/2007/11/25/dscn0063.avi

And there it is.

Mono Summit 2007

As a member of the Mono team, I went to Madrid, Spain for the annual Mono Summit. There we meet with all the other Mono team members from around the world. Because our team works primarily via IRC and email, it was really great to put faces to the names.

The Summit took place on Nov 26th thru Nov 30th. The first two days were meetings with just the Mono team members and partners. We had a number of impromptu meetings about the various sub-projects that we have, including MonoDevelop, Moonlight, and yes, the long awaited Mono debugger. The last three days were open to the public. We were fortunate to have presentations from Mono team members as well as from partners. We had demos from the Second Life guru Jim Purbrick, one from Unity, a 3d game development tool.

Very cool stuff. I posted some pics from the summit on Picasa

Once a year seems to be enough

So I guess posting on my supposed blog once a year is enough. :) I just haven't really gotten into the whole blogging thing. I thought I would but not yet. Since last year, I have been hired on at Novell, and am part of the Mono team. I am working in QA for the Mono implementation of Silverlight called Moonlight.

This year's Mono Summit will be held in Madrid, Spain from November 28th - 30th. I'm excited to meet the Mono members that I only know from IRC.

Hiking Santaquin Peak

Andy and I recently bought new camping backpacks and I bought a new sleeping bag and pad. We also bought Trigger a new dog pack. So we tried out all our new gear last weekend on Santaquin Peak. It was a great hike and a great view.

A new iPod

So I just bough a new 60 GB Video iPod on Saturday. I must say it's pretty sweet. I've imported a lot of my music already and I'm quite pleased with it, despite the $400 price tag.

I learned also that you can put other things on it as well, like contacts from your address book. You can even use your iPod as a massive USB external drive. Pretty cool. I found a Mozilla Thunderbird plugin that will export your Thunderbird adddress book to the iPod. It's still in beta, but it worked ok for me.

I haven't tried out the video features yet, but I have high hopes for them.