So the next few weeks will be quite crazy for me. Friday I will be heading over to a hotel in Detroit. Saturday morning I have a flight at 6am to Cozumel Mexico for a nice 8 day SCUBA diving vacation. SWEET!!! Ive been waiting for over 6 months on this trip and its finally here.

6 days after I get back from that trip I will be heading to Germany for just under 3 weeks for some National Guard training. I hear its going to be boring, however it will be a great expereince in my opinion. I had to get a Hep-A, Hep-B, and Flu shot as my records were out of date. Then they health department also gave me a tetnis shot because my state records didn’t show it even though the military records did. (bummer dude!)

I applied for an AGR (full time) job with my Guard unit as a Personell Services Delivery Redesign Clerk. Essentially I take work that would happen at the state level and do it here. After a few short weeks I found out I got the job. So I will be moving to Charlotte and starting that job shortly after I get back from Germany. I am really excited for this. Though I will have to reclass my MOS to a 42A (Human Resources). Though, I think this is a good thing so I have no problem doing it.

The final verdiect is in (and has been). Lately I have been confused over whether the DTV switch was happening in February or June. I now have a clear answer, well sort of. The DTV switch was delayed until June 12, 2009. BOOOO! The unclear part is when channels are going to switch. June 12th is the deadline. Some channels will switch on February 17th and some might not.

So, by law they must switch by June 12th and anytime before then.

I don’t really know what the huge deal with twitter is. I have had an account for a while now and don’t use it much. Today I got bored and took a small look at there API and came up with a little thing to grab the last tweet I made on there. You will see it up at the top right of the page.

To keep the page load time down I implemented a “javascript” way to do grab the last one. The page you are looking loads with all the content. Down at the bottom just before the </body> tag there is a div and inside it I load a PHP with javascript. That PHP file grabs the last post from Twitter and shows it. Thus, the only content not rendered right  away when waiting for Twitter is the last tweet.

=)

Not sure how much I will use it, but it was fun.

So today I was picking up some Christmas presents and one thing I needed was a movie. Do you know how hard it is to find 1 particular movie. The first place I was at was BestBuy. Oddly they had the biggest movie selection of the three stores I went to. I spent a good while searching through the comedy section to come up empty handed at least with movies I was. So after I couldn’t find the movie I decided to go across the street to Walmart. Surely Walmart would have it.. So I thought.. Walmart had a terrible selection and it was quite small. I spent some time searching then hopped on the handy dandy iPhone to see if it was in stock. Acording to their website its only available online so I was out of luck again. After being 0 for 2 I decided to try Meijers. For those of you who don’t know what it is, think of it as a smaller version of Walmart. This store had even less movies than Walmart and I didn’t have good cell phone reception so I left after spending only a few minutes looking. In the end I bought movie on Amazon.

I have ranted several times on the local grocery store and its horrible categorization. This is why I hate traditional stores and have been working on building the ultimate eCommerce solution which I am expecting to be out later this year.

So Sears has impressed me this holiday season. How so Jeff? Well they are doing this thing for the deployed troops and their families. Whne you register you family gets a gift card and Sears splits up donated money across them. I was expecting the one my mom got to only get like $15 however I thought it was still very nice of them. When the card came it had $100 on it and they haven’t even dispersed the donated money yet. $100!!!!! Now to some that might not seem like a lot, however I find it a great gesture and thank Sears for that.

Then, today my mom received an email (from my dad I believe) with another gift card of $100 for military families to spend on Christmas stuff at a Sears store. Need decorations? No problem Sears to the rescue. During the holiday season there are many places taking donations and the one that effects my family and I the most are those that do donations to military families. While my family may not need this stuff, there are those that do, and it brings joy especially to the kids of those families.

To which I say thank you Sears and those who made any donations to give family members of deployed soldiers and the soldiers themselves a better christmas. Thank you.