A Scattered Brain

Mitt Romney has decided to drop out of the race and concede to John McCain.  This is a very sad day for me as a Romney supporter, but even more so as a conservative.  It is now guaranteed that we will have a liberal in the White House come next January.  Right now McCain is claiming that he would push a conservative agenda.  I can’t believe that given his record of late opposing most, if not all, any conservative positions on legislation.  He was against the tax cuts.  He wrote the very illegal campaign finance reform bill (breaks freedom of speech in the ways candidates can and cannot respond to attacks).  He wrote the bill for immigration reform which would have given amnesty to millions of people who shouldn’t be in the country now.

So now what to do?  I can’t vote for anyone at this point.  I almost would rather a DemocRAT in office so Republicans can oppose all non-conservative legislation.  If McCain gets elected, the rank and file Republicans would have their hands tied in opposing the President (much like they do now with many of Bush’s proposals).  I don’t know if I could ever actually pull the lever for a Dem, but I really can’t say I approve much of McCain at all.  A lot can happen between now and November, of course, and I can only hope that it won’t be nearly as bad as I currently fear.

My company has required all of the project managers to visit a site during the first three days of a new linear accelerator push-in. Today was the first day for me and some of my co-workers. Today’s main job is for the riggers to bring in parts of the machine and load them into the treatment delivery room.

The process takes a full day and starts with bringing in the base. This piece is bolted into the ground. After that, a large drum is put in place. This is the main component that holds all of the electronics as well as the gantry used to deliver radiation to a patient:

After that, a bunch of 30 pound plates are added in the back of the drum at the top. This will counterbalance the beam arm where electrons will be accelerated and radiation will come out:

This beam arm is about 12 feet long so moving around corners through the hospital can be quite challenging.

I’ve seen equipment used to move heavy items like I’ve never seen before. They use a large A-Frame with two pulley systems to lift pieces of the machine out of crates and into place. It was pretty cool to watch, even though most of the day I felt like we were all in the way of the workers trying to get their job done. The amount of work and effort it takes to bring in the larger pieces of the accelerator is daunting. The company that we contract to do these has got their stuff together and they know what to do to get the job done right. To think that in about 10 weeks, this empty room will deliver radiation treatment to a patient is pretty amazing and it helps me remember that what I do has a real impact to fighting cancer.

We’re all pretty tired from standing today but not nearly as tired as the riggers, I’m sure. Tomorrow is the first day of putting on the smaller parts of the machine and we may actually get to help where possible. I’ll write a full report.

Take care and have a great day, all!

So, last night was the Super Bowl… la di da. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to pay attention as much as I would have liked as Connor is really keeping us on our toes now with all of his crawling and pulling himself up on things. Even more unfortunate is that I don’t seem to have missed anything. From what I saw, outside of the 4th quarter the game was boring and none of the commercials were all that great.

First, the game. I was routing for the Patriots; partly because I do like them, but mostly because I think the 1972 Dolphins are insufferable and I’m sick of hearing how they are the only perfect team and all of their pomp and circumstance around that. I hope the Giants enjoy their cases of champagne that the Fish will send them. I am, however, happy for Eli Manning. I used to not think much of him as he seemed in his past to not work very hard. This year, it was evident that he worked much harder on becoming a good quarterback and while he still has room for improvement, I was impressed with him the 2nd half of the season. That pass in the fourth quarter to put them ahead for good after a scramble was Elway-esque and made me happy for him.

Now the commercials were just as pedestrian as the game itself. I only have a few to judge from but in my opinion the first Diet Pepsi Max commercial was the best of the game. Taking it’s play from a classic 90’s SNL running skit (Night at the Roxbury) was pretty clever and the cameo by Chris Kattan at the end really added to the whole thing. Other than that, nothing really grabbed my attention enough away from everything else going on.

Overall, I would rate the Super Bowl experience this year a D+. Nothing worse than a D+. How do you dress it up? “It wasn’t a D, it was a D+!” If there are any commercials that you liked that I should check out, please let me know. I know you can see all of the commercials on MySpace and I may check them out with recommendations.

As I gear up for my annual NCAA Tournament Pool (details to come closer to tourney time) I have been working on a completely new site design with new features and a more flawless method of keeping the site up to date.  In previous years, the pool program I use would run a scheduler periodically and build all of the web pages for my site and upload them via FTP.  Not an entirely bad solution, except the FTP wasn’t the most reliable and would just die in the middle.  I’m sure this was more of an issue with my free cox.net account than the pool software, but nevertheless I wanted something more.

Low and behold, in comes PHP and MySQL to the rescue.  Now, I can use a database on the web server that will still have to get updated by the scheduler in my pool program (connected via ODBC).  Instead of having to FTP all of the report files, I’ve written PHP functions to connect to my database and update things automatically.  So far everything has tested well and looks good.  I think there are still some reports that will have to get uploaded unless this year’s software adds more information to the database or I work more on parsing through the data currently there to generate all reports myself.

PHP was fairly easy to learn and work with once I figured out how scoping of variables work (quite differently than all other programming languages I’ve worked with in the past) and the speed seems to be reasonable as well.  It reminds me a bit of Java Servlets  in that you use the scripting language to generate HTML code.  I look forward to hopefully enjoying a much more automated pool running experience this year.

Game of the Week – Tower Defense

Tower Defense is more than just one game, really. It has become an entire genre of games. The overall principle is the same for each: build up a set of defenses against waves of enemies. You earn money by defeating the different levels allowing you to purchase new towers and upgrades. With the dozens of variations out there, most games carry a unique style of game play and offer different levels of difficulty.

The one that got me started and hooked was Vector TD. One of the things I like about this game is that every few rounds or so, you got a “power up” of sorts where you can extend power or range to your defenses, add 5 lives, or add interest to your bank account. While it may be tempting to add power or range, the key is interest and if you only add that and are frugal with your spending at the beginning, you can finish with more money than you know what to do with.

The link above isn’t to one particular game but a repository of most of them out there. You should be able to find a few that you like. 🙂 A couple of suggestions outside of Vector TD:

• Desktop TD
• Flash Circle
• Antbuster
• Bloons 1 & 2 (TD games based on the Bloons game from last week)

Let me know what you try out so I can as well if I’ve not played it.

The Monte Carlo hotel and casino in Las Vegas has just caught fire. There aren’t many details right now but it appears to have started near the roof and is going down into guest rooms. The hotel has been evacuated and firefighters are working on it now. It is unknown at this time how the fire started.

UPDATE: As of 12:30 PM PST, the fire appears to be under control and nearly out.

So, the government has decided to enact an Economic Stimulus package. The package calls for $600 for individuals and $1,200 for couples with an additional $300 for each child for those who pay taxes. I’m guessing we won’t get anything for our kid yet, but the $1,200 extra back of our own money sounds nice.

The checks are scheduled to come out in June or so if the vote goes through this week as expected. It has a wide range of support from both sides of the aisle as both Democrats and Republicans know that if they were to look like the party opposing this, they could pay dearly in November.

I, for one, don’t necessarily agree that the economy is in dire straits. I certainly don’t think the government should get involved in the housing issues out there as the market will correct itself in time. But I won’t be sending back my check either. 🙂

Game of the Week – Bloons

Sorry I’m a bit late in this week’s game, but due to the movement of the blog to a new location I’m a little behind.

This week’s game is Bloons, created by Ninja Kiwi.  Bloons is a fun game involving a monkey and some darts (as promised in the previous GOTW post).  The goal is use a set number of darts to pop the required percentage of balloons on the screen.  Each level differs in the number of darts and number of balloons you have to pop.  To add to the fun, there are different types of darts hidden in some balloons to help you pop the rest.  Other balloon types include bombs, ice balloons and for all of us Star Wars fans, a light saber balloon.

This game has become wildly popular that they have created a secondary website: BloonsWorld.  This site allows users to create their own levels and you can play until your hearts content.  Or you can play any one of 3 current player packs of some of the best levels.  There is even a Tower Defense game based on Bloons that is equally fun, and may be covered as a separate game altogether.

So, if you want to monkey around and pop some balloons, head on over to to Bloons and have a blast!

After about 2 years of blogging (less than regularly at times) on MySpace, I have decided to move my blog to a more permanent home.   This is nothing against MySpace and without it I probably would have never started to blog or have any desire to do more web development at all.

I have recently decided to create a family web space.  I have a grand plan and hope that it will serve as a long time portal for my family to share news/pictures/videos and also allow for family members to have their own web pages if they so desire.

I’m starting mine out with just a blog.  I have taken the time to copy most of the posts from MySpace (not including comments) and will remove the MySpace entries in time.

So, Spencer, where is this new blog of yours so I can keep track?  That is a wonderful question and I’m glad you asked.  The new blog is called (until I come up with a better name) A Scattered Brain.  My hope is to continue or even expand my posting and with a dedicated blog, I believe that will be easier to do.  I still have a bit to learn with all the capabilities and options but I’m excited about the future of this blog.

So, we’ve just nearly passed the mid point of the season and so far, not too bad. I’ve had a few bad weeks, but for the most part it was pretty nice. I’ve been able to maintain a 180+ average, about 10 pins higher than last season so that’s a positive.

My biggest issue and average killer is my recent decline in spare shooting. Outside of this past week, I’ve been missing about half of my single pin spares. Sometimes I would shrug it off, but then I realized that shooting a single pin spare (no matter the pin) is like shooting free throws in basketball. I have a high standard when I see pro and college players shooting less than 90% free throws and now will hold myself to the same standard. If I can’t make 90% of my single pin spares, obviously I should work on that first and foremost. I can’t expect to strike more than 50% of the time so spare shooting is extremely important. Missing a single pin can account for 11 pins in scoring (the spare + next frame) so it is worth much more than just the single miss. This will be the thing I work on most over the rest of the season.

So, here are my scores for the first 17 weeks. Enjoy.

Did you see that last week!!!! I had some lucky breaks in the first two games and some equally unlucky breaks in the third game. Regardless, 641 is my personal best 3 game series so I’m pleased with that. I’ll be even happier if I get another 600 series next week…

Please note, I’m not sure why the table gets a little messed up when it posts, while editing everything looks good. It doesn’t seem to matter how I input the table, so oh well. I’m thinking about moving my blog elsewhere, and this may be the catalyst to do so.

Take care all and have a great week.