Hmmm, well I don’t know what to say. This will have to do until I come up with something…

So back on the 15th of December friend and fellow rubyist, Kevin Clark, forwarded me a job description from Powerset. Well, I applied to said job and long story short I’m starting tomorrow! I drove a Budget rental truck up to San Francisco from San Diego on Friday. I don’t have a place yet… a slight problem which will hopefully be remedied very soon. Anyway, we had an awesome party last night to celebrate the series A funding, and I’m excited to get started and settle into San Francisco.

Dang, procrastination is a terrible terrible thing. I had been doing allot of traveling prior to the Holidays and just didn’t have the motivation needed to put the time into setting up Mephisto. I finnaly got around to doing it, and it went pretty well. The Typo conversion didn’t happen as smoothly as I had hoped and I had to hack the Flickr plugin a bit to get her up and going, but she’s finally here. This time around I shouldn’t rank as #1 on Google for a series of absurdly explicit terms describing grotesque sexual actions… Thank you Akismet. I also decided to drop the blog from blog.vandev.com. From now on, this is vandev.com.

I’ve got a couple new little projects that I’ll release in the near future. Merb has entertained me as of late, as well as MooTools. Anyway, I’ll get them up and I’ll finish polishing the site. Polishing it until it shines.

I have just witnessed quite the spectacle. About 15 minutes ago, I saw something strange outside of the Encinitas Ca Starbucks on the 101. In the twilight sky over the vast Pacific a UFO appeared. Screaming up from the horizon the strange object slowed abruptly and than continued on it's path South-Southeast. At the place where it slowed a large smoke plume appeared which seemed to get brighter as the sky darkened. Fortunately I had my new W600i camera phone. I snapped 8 pics and used the phones wireless modem feature to link up to the EDGE network and send them to Flickr.

I watched as the object seemed to emit some type of vapor sporadically as it trailed off. This was definitely not a comet and had to have been something engineered... upon further review it must have been a satellite being launched from somewhere in the Pacific I'm very curious to see if there were any other sightings. As far as the validity of these photos go, I know the quality is poor but check out the upload timestamps on Flickr. If there were other sightings, this could easily be verified. Crazy stuff.

Update

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It is now confirmed that this was no UFO, nay it was a Delta IV rocket launching a NROL-22 reconnaissance satellite into orbit. Here's the press release.

It was launched from Vandenburg AFB just north of Santa Barbara. I'm glad it wasn't aliens or the Koreans...

Recently my health insurance changed from a high deductible plan to a more reasonable PPO. Anyway I still have an HSA from my previous plan. I thought it might be a good idea to transfer my HSA money into my IRA… wow more acronyms than the w3c. After finding the website of my HSA provider, I decide to sign up for an account. This is what I got:

First off, the logo and the layout are simply stunning. Secondly, if you haven’t already, take a closer look at the requirements for both the user id and the password. Why the H are they requiring such a random user id? It’s requirements are way higher than that of the passords. Why only 4 characters of headway? How are you supposed to create anything even remotely meaningful? After 3 - 5 minutes of deep thought I was able to come up with something amusing, but I’m a power user, I doubt there demographic is even capable of figuring out how to make a user id… If they really need this crap to be that random, why not just hand out a random id?

As if this weren’t enough, I was prompted to use there advanced forgotten password system before I could continue. Take a look:

Boy, they were right on the money with this one. For starters, they opened up a new window for me, thanks Leesport, can’t get enough windows. And the questions… “my favorite president?”, who has a favorite president? You’ve gotta love the assumption that all of Leesport’s customers have pets and love sports, why wouldn’t they?

Finally after getting into this valuable service that Leesport is offering it’s customers, I found it to be utterly worthless. There was a transfers tab, but of course this did nothing. How can such a high profile site blow so hardcore? The friggin thing looks like a highschool project.

I can honestly say that Leesport’s service is by far the worst experience I have had with online banking. HSBC comes in at a close second. Fortunately, I found someone that cares about design and functionality in Bank of America.

So, a little over a year ago, I started www.vanblog.net. It was my first experience blogging, and I didn’t really know what I wanted. Well, I have a better idea now. The problem with VanBlog was that it was either too personal or too tech for different audiences. Enter, VanDev. This is my effort to take the tech out of VanBlog. I also needed a place to put projects that I’m working on a place to thrive… I don’t even know what that means.

I’ll take this time to address questions:

1. Why VanDev?

   • Last name = Van Pelt, it’s both dutch and awesome.

2. What’s VanBlog?

   • That would be my personal blog now, where I talk about things like my feelings and changes occuring in my body.

3. VD?

   • VanDev, it’s not what you think.

4. What’s with these old entries?

   • They were brought over from VanBlog.

5. Do you where size 12 shoes?

   • Yes, as a matter of fact I do.

So, there it is. I’ll post something awesome soon about the design of this blog. Oh, you just wait.

Recently I moved to a new apartment. We decided to cancel service and get service with a new provider. Adelphia SUCKS. They questioned me for “illegal” server activity. I made an FTP server to back up one of my servers back home, and the freaked out because they saw activity on port 21 and 22. Anyway, it turns out that Adelphia is the only cable company that offers service in my area. A month ago I made an appointment with Adelphia to “set up” my Internet. It just so happened that during the 2 hour window they gave me to be home, I had other arrangements. I asked them to come towards the end of the window, instead they came at the beginning and all hope was lost. The next available slot was a week from the following Saturday from 1-5. I wasn’t going to commit a four hour time slot on a Saturday afternoon, so I said ‘F’ it and bought an external WIFI antenna for my laptop. That’s when the fun started.

Things were going swimmingly until my neighbor caught on. One day the connection was WEP’ed. Fortunately I was able to hop on to another neighbors. It didn’t last long until they WAP’ed theirs (I have no idea how they knew I was on, probably bandwidth). Anyway, that was my last option. I ground my teeth, and called Adelphia to set up an appointment. That was when the unbelievable happened. I came home from work today, desperate for Internet, and I decided to try and plug my cable modem into the wall. I had thought about it before, but wrote off the possibility of the modem just hopping onto the network. Well, I’ve waisted the past month without Internet, when I could have had it for free. I’m cruising now, will Adelphia find out?

The blog was down for over a day. With all of the traffic I've been getting this is a huge deal... Actually, I had a few other larger projects on the server that were down as well. After around 3 hours on the phone with my father, it's all up and running again. The downtime was due to a faulty cat5 cable, we believe. It was ridiculous. At first we figured it was the router so we bought a new one. After playing with cat5 configurations we discovered it wasn't the router. Our next step was to reboot the server. I was biting my teeth. The server had been running for 216 consecutive days (Debian!). It booted smoothly and we're up and running now! The experience will definitely force me to make more backups more often. It's really difficult living in California and having your personal server in Iowa. I'm blessed to have a father with time and patience.