Kapt Kaos

Archive for April, 2007

I am heading out to Roatan on Saturday. I will not be back for at least a week. If I really like I may just stay!!!! Not really. Still have to do much here in Austin. I will post about my trip when I get back. At least the parts that I remember.

Well, I survived our first ever multi-day event. It was the 4th annual Pirate’s Ball. We do this ball to raise money for Austin SafePlace. For the SafePlace Walk, we raised over $1,815 online; the raffles for the weekend netted us $1,352 and the silent auction items raised $1,865 So, for all our efforts for last weekend, the 2007 Pirate’s Ball raised a whopping $5,032 for SafePlace!!! That is a record setting amount for us!

Many of our club members as well members from other clubs joined in the walk. We even had Snake from Galveston Bay PHC with his Land Jet Ski leading the walk. Looking for pic’s of this to include.

The ball included a happy hour at Sam’s Boat where we had Don Middlebrook play for us. We did a raffle for Safe Place and raised three hundred dollars! Again, had lots of members show up. We ended up taking over the whole deck out back. Did some great dancing and our usual conga line.

Don was staying at the house with us on Thursday. We ended up staying up playing guitars until 5:30am. Then I was back at it at 9:30. Had to spend the day getting everything down to the hotel for the ball.

Friday had Don playing during registration for the ball. We had most of the locals come in and sign up. Then stayed until Don was done playing. At which point a few of us head up stairs to the hospitality suite. The party there lasted until 4:30 am.

Saturday afternoon we got back from the walk we had Troy Allen playing. Which was supposed to have been poolside but the pool was not ready. Did that stop us? No way! A group of about 30 or so headed out for a photo op in the empty pool. I am still trying to get a copy of the pic’s taken from the 5th floor. When I get them I will include them here as well.

Saturday night was the big ball. We had the big conference room decorated to the nines! Hanna’s Reef played for the big bash and were fantastic! Almost everyone came dressed as a pirate or a winch. We had a custom contest and awarded 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes. To do this fair we had a rep. from the PHIP board do the judging. This year our club got a clean sweep winning 1st, 2nd and 3rd.

There is way to much to cover everything that went on but I have the pictures located here. Check them out and see just how much fun we had!!!!

(Austin, TX) The Austin Time Exchange Network (ATEN) helps people trade an hour of work for another hour of work within a community. Instead of bartering between just two people and placing different values on the service, our network allows equal sharing of an hour for an hour within the whole community.

The idea is to build community assets and to match unmet resources with unmet needs. I can mow someone’s lawn for an hour and then have that hour to spend on a service from anyone else in the community. That service can include services as varied as dog walking, housecleaning, massage, violin lessons or C++ program development. If you feel your service is very intensive, you also can cap how many hours or participants a month you’re willing to give for that particular service.
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Newswise — The University of Texas at San Antonio Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will host the 2nd Annual Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers System of Systems international conference April 15-18 at the Holiday Inn Riverwalk Hotel in San Antonio.

More than 200 attendees representing 15 countries including Australia, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, India, Japan and the United States are expected to attend. Conference highlights include tours and demonstrations from the research facilities at UTSA and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI).

System of systems technology involves organizational and industrial sectors working together efficiently to solve problems by integrating independent operational resources. The aerospace and defense industries have already embraced the technology which allows the integration of independent operational systems to create large “super systems” to complete a task.

“We will also announce a new national consortium that will bring military, industry and academia together to network to pursue large governmental contracts,” said Mo Jamshidi, System of Systems Conference founder and UTSA Lutcher Brown Endowed Chaired Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Read the rest…

Well I have been working with a LOT of themes this week. I looks a several sites for themes but found two that stood out above the rest. Alex King’s Theme Browser was by far the best site for viewing and downloading themes. The issue was being able to tell if any of these themes supported widgets or how many columns each supported. The WordPress Theme View ended up being the one that I found what I was looking for. With this site you are able to select a number of options to narrow your search down. I selected 3 column and widget support and sorted by number of downloads. Got a list of 13 pages with 15 themes per page. Of that I downloaded and install about 20.

I have narrowed this down from 20 to 2 themes, Mandigo 1.15 and Munch 1.0. I plan on doing some customization on each before I make up my mind which one to use.

Keep checking back to see which one wins.

OK, it was suggested to me that I should sign up with Technorati.com. To finish the signup I needed to create a new blog entry that includes a small bit of HTML. So the link below is that bit of code.

Technorati Profile

I was just reading an article about how ADHD can have adverse effects on job and/or relationships. OK, this may be a shocker to some of you that do not deal with ADHD but for those of use that do, this is no brainer. Just in case you think I am being a little harsh here is a bit of the article.

According to the April issue of Mayo Clinic Health Letter, more than half of children with ADHD can expect to contend with the condition as adults. ADHD in adults often is more subtle than in children, but still can be troublesome. It usually presents itself in one of two ways or a combination:

Inattention: Prioritizing and focusing on tasks can be enormous challenges. Organizing work or following instructions may be more difficult than it is for others.

Excessive levels of activity or difficult-to-control impulses: Adults with ADHD aren’t likely to be as physically active as hyperactive children with ADHD. Instead, adults may experience ongoing feelings of restlessness or have trouble relaxing. An adult may always feel the need to be on the go. Impulsivity may show up as impatience, mood swings, intense anger outbursts or trouble with relationships.

Yes, all of this is good info to have if you know nothing about ADHD. But having lived with this all of my life I just had to laugh when I read it.

Click here for the full article

Chronic constipation affects 15 to 20 percent of the U.S. population. Nearly one-third of affected people have dyssynergic defecation, in which muscles used for bowel movements do not work well, but there’s some good news. University of Iowa research shows biofeedback treatment can successfully retrain muscles.

The biofeedback approach was better than standard treatment of laxatives, diet and exercise or another treatment (sham) that included muscle relaxation and coping strategies. The findings appear in the March issue of the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

Many people with dyssynergic defecation have life-long constipation and experience significant difficulty with passing stools but are unaware that they have this particular type of chronic constipation, said Satish Rao, M.D., professor of internal medicine at the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine.

Check out Newswise for full article…

I have spent many of my younger years with just awful credit. I have no one to blame for this other then myself. About 10 years ago I started getting my credit score to improve. I was able to get a couple of credit cards as well as a car loan. The interest rates were not the best but things were getting better. I paid everything on time or early. Things were getting to point I was considering buying a house. The the tech bubble busted. The company I worked for closed its doors and I was out of a job. Spent the next 9 months unemployed. Ran out of unemployment so, I went to work for Wataburger here in Austin. It was a rough transition but I was still able to pay my rent and car payment. My credit cards were another story. So, after almost a year of that I was able to get a job back in the tech industry. However, I was still only making about the same as with Wataburger. I was working days though. I did this job for about a year as well before I found a new job that doubled my pay. During this time was in the process of getting married. Within a few weeks of getting my new job my wife lost her job.

Jump ahead to today. I am not married any more I am still working and making almost as much as I did a several years ago. I have been able to get a couple of new credit cards as well as got a loan using my car as collateral. With these and steady reviews of my credit reports I expect to get things back in good shape. What I am going to do is blog about what I do that works and doesn’t work.

One of the things I am looking is using a service to try to do something to improve my credit score. I will include who I go with and what results I have using them here.

Keep checking back to see how things work out.