Well, that's a very good question that deserves a good answer as you all of course are wondering.

As I write this blog entry in digital ink, I shall attempt to relay what happened as best I can.

It all happened one fine afternoon when myself and my lovely wife Jill were planning our trip to see Star Wars: Episode III, Revenge of the Sith...  the date was Sunday, May 15th, 2005. By 8:30am the following Tuesday I'm getting the one phone call from my wrte, the likes of which none of us want to hear: "Matt, your Grand Mother Ruth just passed away." Well, needless to say we were on a plane the following morning (5:30 am) back to Illonois for the Memorial service and didn't get back until the following Sunday just in time to finish up and turning Senror project over at OIT.

I must admit that seeing the rest of the Feyerherm extended family was great. For the other Side of the family that was also visiting, I am very proud to be a Roman Catholic Church supporter and whorshiper. I'm also a head strong supporter of the Portland Police Department since several really good friends of mine work there. I enjoy aftershave I can smell while I'm driving, and I do not consider myself a racist, a bigot, a male shovenist, or bias towards color, religion, sex, or preference in any way shape or form, not to mention still very much enjoying to play the game of golf just for fun.

Needless to say, we had to miss plans for PADNUG, PND, both of our birthday celebrations on Friday the 20th and Sunday the 22nd, and going to see Revenge of the Sith that Saturday before we got back. Life still has that interesting way of catching off guard when you least expect it.

I can definitely expect to post again about my full experience with senior project up until now, my experience with recently upgrading thus wonderful dasblog engine, and graduation that is far too fast appoaching! Our photographs for this rather unexpected trip are viewable at our photo gallery site http://www.klump-pdx.com then click on the photo gallery.

This have really gotten interesting on the data base back end of the application. With the database being itself at a remote location, web services was the natural answer to the “How am I going to get my data over there?” question.

To no surprise of my own, the maximum size of a SOAP message that may be passed is 4 megs by default in the machine.config spec file for my .NET 1.1 framework I'm working with. Personally I don't see why any of this should change in 2.0 when folks (like myself can just override that specification in their own web.config specification file for what ever their application needs to do.)

Just for yucks, I'm increasing the default to 256 megs and seeing how much hang time I can get while passing the HUGE objects generated by the Puzzler's output.

Especially when you have your kids and in-laws around to hope you enjoy your Strawberry Shortcake with ...

For my senior project still in progress, "The Puzzler - 3D Style," .NET multi-threading has played a CRITICAL role in shaving off additional mintues that the Solution Algorithm is taking to come up with finished final results for a three dimentional puzzle of variable size. On the average, up to four mintues is being saved for a 25x25x25 randomly generated puzzle.

The power of .NET muti-threading support for algorithm enhancement, pass it it on!

foreach( Thread trailingThread in solutionThreads )
{
     trailingThread.IsBackgroundThread = true;
     trailingThread.Priority = ThreadPriority.AboveNormal;
     trailingThread.Start();
}

foreach( Thread trailingThread in solutionThreads )
     while( trailingThread.IsAlive );

I've really got to hand it to the people over at Acer Inc., They've truly out done them selves with their brand new, just recently released Acer Travelmate C303 Tablet PC, of which I can now say I'm finally the proud owner of.

For the Intel Centrino processor it's packing (not to mention a complete list of other compiled goodies that made this absolutely irresistable), this thing is POWERFULL when compared to some other tablet pc's I've been checking out over at Toshiba such as the Portégé or the Satellite.

Congradulations Rory and Aydika, the two of you truely are a match made in heaven, as the cliché goes!

I never met a heavy weight build script interpreter I didn't like. Quike frankly, that goes with out saying for NAnt. My first try at using NAnt with my senior project, “The Puzzler - 3D Style” whos current beta parts are listed here for anyone that care to inspect.

I was very surprised with just how quickly I was able to take off with using NAnt builder by just using my .sln and .proj files autogenerated by VS.NET 2003. This is a very simplified use of NAnt starting out, but just by looking at it, it's easy to tell just how complex such a build script with NAnt can get...

That batch file build.bat executes two lines:
NAnt.exe -l:build.log.txt clean build
start /B /I NOTEPAD.EXE build.log.txt

This then executes the build script xml document:

      The Puzzler - 3D Style build files.
     
     
           
                 
                       
                       
                 
           
     
     
           
                 
                       
           
           
                 
                       
           
     

The Roomba Robot vacuum cleaner by IRobot has saved us more time by taking care of the vacuuming chore than any of our other house hold investments time ten! Like the self-propelled dirt-magnet that it is, it took care of all three levels of our house in the same day... As a result it has more than paid for itself.

As long as the brushes and its sensor are kept clean and the battery charged, our Roomba should last indefinitely and quite frankly as a result, we're going to donate or $250 upright vacuum! If you would like to REALLY take to steps to simplify keeping your house clean, you'd go here to check out the Roomba by IRobot. I'm not trying to be a salesman folks, for the money, this device could really make life much more bearable for you.

I absolutely had to blog about this! As you all know, Scott Hanselman was recently published in the OIT Alumni's magazine. This is an outstanding story of Scott's life and career at Corillian Corp and can be read here. I must agree that the photography is quite remarkable! The artist's name is Laszlo Bencze, and his handy work can be look at on his website here.

Scott's thoughts about being an honored OIT alumni is posted here.

But that's not the point of this blog entry. Little did I know that for the last week I've been carrying around in my pocket an invitation to the 3rd Annual OIT Alumni Awards Banquet with guess who as the “Master of Ceremonies,” none other than himself in the flesh Scott Hanselman!

Needless to say that when I finally read this last line at the bottom of the invitation, I was litterally blow away, and logged on immediately to get this posted! I may be taking time away from my CST 415 Computer Networking final exam that I owe for Sean Hefty today, but this simply could not wait...

And Sean, if you reading this you can rest assured that all is in good hands with that exam. :)

Such an honor...!

For years and years, my Dad has been a strong advocate of the “Work Hard and Play Hard” ideology, and quite frankly I couldn't agree more with him on the subject. So, for an entire weekend about a week ago while mom was out of town in Palm Springs with her friends, it was just myself and my Dad, John Klump.

Neither he nor his business owns or maintains a website of any kind, which is perfectly okay when you own and operate an Insurance Agency as successful and influencial in Oregon as Anchor Insurance & Surety Inc is. The link I've posted is for a google search of his business name.

It had been what seems alomost over a year since it was just the two of us playing hard at Neskowin Oregon after such a long time of working hard. Here we are with that over-spunked pooch of their's GRETA looking to see what car or person to chase after next: