Ryan Morlok’s Blog

Found a great little utility today on Lifehacker.  This Mac utility just keeps your computer from going to sleep, dimming the screen, starting the screen saver, etc.  Useful for when your showing pictures or non-full screen movies and such.

This reminds me, lifehacker also had a  link to another mac utility that lets you combine multiple PDFs into one.  Sure you could do this with Adobe bloatware, but if you like avoiding crappy products, then this might be a simple, better alternative.

Katy has been suffering from a bit of age discrimination lately.  It started early this week when she went to purchase The Chronicles of Riddick on DVD from Walmart.  When she got up the checkout, the clerk asked to see her ID.  The movie is rated R, so you have to be 17 to buy it, but Katy is 23, so she just stared at him blankly and asked “Are you serious?”  But sure enough, before he would let her buy the DVD, she had to show her driver’s license.

The second incident came later this week when Katy answered the door for a person selling cleaning supplies.  The first thing he asked was “Is your mom home?”  Katy can at least be thankful that she has a few years to go before she gets to that age where she wishes she was younger.

Here is an interesting diagram that recently showed up on digg that illustrates the relationships between the various disciplines of science.  It was created by analyzing the references of some 800,000 scientific papers to determine which disciplines tended to interact with others.

We finally competed our move into our new house this weekend.  Last night was the first night Katy and I stayed there.  The closing finally went through a week ago last Friday, and that following weekend we went down to Champaign to pick up our stuff.  Thanks to friends & family in both Illinois and Minnesota, we were able to get everything moved from Champaign into our house by Sunday night.

We had to wait to finish the move with our stuff from Minnesota because Katy was sick this last week.  She’s feeling better now, though, and it’s nice to be in our own place.

While I’m making up for lost blogging time by posting random YouTube videos, here’s another good one.

Flying around the earth at supespeed was the way to go…

Well, I’ll called it in my previous post.  AS soon as I go posting things about life before they’re finalized, something happens.  The closing of our house was delayed for (hopefully) about a week due to the bank not having it’s paperwork inline.  (We’re buying a foreclosed property and thus the seller is a bank.)  If we were the ones messing up like this, we’d be charged about $100 for every day closing was delayed, but because it’s a bank, the only thing we could do is walk away from the deal.  Oh well…

I’ve taken a couple month hiatus from blogging. Partly because I’ve been really busy with big changes in my life, partly because I didn’t want to push things to the internet before they were finalized, and partly because I’m just lazy. Regardless of why I’ve been gone, I’ve returned to continue subtracting from the global body of knowledge on the internet.

In the last couple months several big things have happened:

1. I’ve moved back to Minnesota
2. I’ve started a new job
3. I’ve bought a house
4. We’ve bought a new dog for my parents

That last one may seem less substantial than the rest, but Wilbur is a great dog, and my mom has been wanted one since our last dog, Minnie, died a couple years ago.

Anyway, Katy and I moved back to Minnesota in mid-April. Katy did so a week earlier than me because her new job at Land O Lakes started before mine did. She started as a contractor there, but has since moved into a full time position.

I began working at EmergingSoft. It’s a great, small software company that makes a product called MeetingPlanner. It’s a tool that’s used to manage the schedules for meeting rooms and equipment (LCD projectors, VCRs, etc..). It really stands out from the competition in that has exceptional integration with Microsoft Outlook. My job is somewhere between a business analyst and a software engineer, so my work has been a nice variety of technical and non-technical tasks.

Finally, Katy and I have purchased a house in Inver Grove Heights.  Saying that might be slightly premature, as we don’t close on the place until Wednesday, but all the details are pretty much wrapped up.  A few pictures of the new residence can be viewed here.

Well, that brings me up-to-date on all the big things.  Over the next few weeks I’m sure I’ll continue my usual trickle of random tech stuff and mildly entertaining YouTube videos.

This is old, but I’m a big Superman fan.  It’s right.  The original movie would have been way more awesome if this was how it ended.

If your coding C# here is a good listing of coding standards for the language.