On My Way Out

I'm all packed for my trip to Hawaii and am just waiting for Marci to show up to take me to the airport. I put off packing until the last minute, and just barely finished in time. Unfortunately, I will probably be relegated to dial-up internet access for the next week and a half so I'm not sure how often I will be able to update. I will try though :) Merry Christmas!

Zarro Boogs

I just whittled my bug list down to Zero Bugs. Hooray! I'm sure that it won't last long. In fact, I wouldn't be extremely surprised if several more bugs 'magically appear' by the time that I get into work tomorrow. Oh well. At least I have the night to revel in my bugless-ness.

Second Times a Charm

I got back out to Stuart Falls on my snowshoes today. This time I actually remembered to put batteries in the camera before going. So, you can check out the pictures here.



As I approached the falls, I noticed a little red dot up near the top of the falls. "Hmm", I thought to myself, "Surely this red dot cannot be of natural origins. In fact, I'm quite certain that this is an artificial red dot that has tainted my picturesque frozen waterfall.". As I got nearer I could make out that the red dot was in fact moving. As I got nearer still, the red dot grew arms and legs. This red dot was in fact a person who had climbed several hundred feet up the frozen waterfall. Crazy bastard!



As it turns out I probably could have done this hike today without snowshoes. There was plenty of snow, but the trail was packed so hard that the snowshoes were almost overkill. In fact, as I was relaxing at the waterfall, a group of 6 people showed up behind me, none of whom were wearing snowshoes. On my way back I went out of my way to walk off the trail in the deep snow just so that I could feel like I was justified in wearing my snowshoes.

My Email is Better Than Yours

I just got accepted into the Yahoo Mail Beta today. The new web client is incredible. It sports tabbed email, a virtual message list, integrated search, inline message preview, a reading pane, drag and drop, context menus, and many more goodies. I'm loving it! Click on the screenshot to view it full-size.

Malina's Dance Recital

I had the distinct pleasure of attending my niece Malina's dance recital this evening. It was adorable. The whole thing was captured on video and can be downloaded here. Unfortunately, I don't think that I did a very good job with the video camera. I wish that I had zoomed in on Malina instead of always trying to get the whole group in the frame. Oh well, you live you learn.

Down At The Bayou

Met some friends after work at The Bayou on State St. in Salt Lake. I had never been there before but it was pretty cool. The Gumbo was incredible and their beer menu, consisting of more than 200 varieties of beer from all around the world, was awe-inspiring. After starting off with a safe Oregonian beer, I decided to go international and tried a New Zealand beer (not very good), followed by an Armenian beer (not too bad).

What I'm Listening To...

Soul Meets Body - Death Cab For Cutie
Unwritten - Natasha Bedingfield
Chocolate - Snow Patrol
You're Beautiful - James Blunt

Mad Debugging Skillz

My kung fu was strong today. I managed to slay two really annoying bugs that have been occupying space in my buglist for far too long now. To earn my kill I had to chase both bugs down into the lair of the nefarious MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface).

The first bug manifested itself as a lack of any and all address books when you installed GroupWise after Outlook XP. I had recently chased down a similar bug against Outlook 2003 and assumed that the two bugs were related. The previous issue had to do with how the MAPI stub was routing calls to the extended MAPI implementation. I verified that the calls were being routed correctly, but still wasn't getting any address books. I was about to write up an incident with Microsoft when it occurred to me to try running a test app against my MAPI profile to see what address books I got back.

When I ran the test app, I could see in the debugger that I got the correct number of rows back when I queried the root address book's hierarchy table, but none of them were being displayed to the debug output. Upon closer inspection, I realized that there was a bug in my test app. I was specifically looking for the ANSI version of PR_DISPLAY_NAME but I didn't specifically ask for it when querying the rows. Instead, I was getting back the UNICODE version of PR_DISPLAY_NAME.

It turns out that the address book application had the exact same bug. We were getting results back from the MAPI subsystem but since we weren't looking for the UNICODE display name, we ended up skipping over all of the address books because they looked like they were unnamed.

The second problem was that the DLL for our Message Store Provider was failing to register when anything other than Outlook was set as the default mail client. I was getting an error message that no default mail client was installed or that the default mail client wasn't capable of handling the call that I was trying to make... or something like that.

It is precisely the error message that you would expect to get when trying to use extended MAPI against a mail client that didn't provide an extended MAPI implementation. The problem was that registering the Message Store Provider DLL shouldn't have been making any MAPI calls. All it is supposed to do is modify the mapisvc.inf and register a COM server for our free/busy support object. It's basically just registry and file access.

I was able to trace the problem to a line of code in the ATL CComModule class that was calling 'ocslen' to determine the length of a string. When I stepped into the assembly for the call I noticed that ocslen was inlined to call a function called 'MNLS_lstrlen'. This function was resolving to mapi32.dll and was causing the MAPI subsystem to load and generate the error message... a stupid string length call. What the hell?

After some investigation, I discovered that in 'mapinls.h' lstrlen is #defined to MNLS_lstrlen. Bastards! I was able to resolve the problem by making sure that 'atlbase.h' was included before any of the MAPI header files.

Congratulations, if you have actually managed to read this far into this post. Unfortunately you don't win anything except for my respect :) I don't normally post this much detail about work, but I was pretty happy to have solved both of these problems today. What a pain in the ass.

It Only Hurts When I Walk

My new snowshoes weren't the only thing that I was breaking in on the trail yesterday. It was also the first time that I had worn my new boots hiking. I was hoping that wearing them day in and day out for the last month would have broken them in already. Alas, I was mistaken. Over the course of the two hour hike, I managed to rub off a significant portion of the skin on the back of each of my heels.



It probably goes without saying that I didn't get back out hiking today like I mentioned that I probably would in yesterday's post. Actually, I guess that it doesn't go without saying, considering that last night I told Master Fob that I was going to just suck it up today, tape up my ankles and head back out on the trail. I'm glad that I came to my senses. Even just the incidental walking around that I did today while I was grocery shopping nearly brought me to tears with every step.

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

I bought some new toys today. As mentioned in an earlier post, I've been itching for some outdoor activity lately. So, I had planned on going snowshoeing today. I was going to just rent a pair of snowshoes from Outdoors Unlimited, but over breakfast at the Village Inn (a chicken portabella skillet) I talked myself into just buying a pair. I figured that this was something that I could see myself really getting into and there was no sense paying a rental fee today if I was just going to end up buying a pair in a couple of weeks. Although, now that I think about it, in a couple of weeks I'm going to be in Hawaii and shouldn't have much need for snowshoes :)

Anyway, so I stopped by Copeland Sports in Orem and picked up a pair of Atlas Snowshoes. I'm kind of an impulse shopper. I didn't do any research ahead time. They looked like a good pair of snowhoes, so I bought them. I'm sure that if I was to go online, I could find them for half the price that I paid for them at Copeland, but then I wouldn't have had them to go hiking today.

I had done a little bit of research on a good place to go snowshoeing. I found an article in the Salt Lake Tribune (it was actually a weekly feature called "Short Hike of the Week") that detailed a short hike in City Creek Canyon. The article began with the phrase, "Dust off your snowshoes", and featured a picture of two hikers trudging through the snow on snowshoes. "Perfect", I thought to msyelf. I probably could have found someplace closer, but this was a surefire bet. I mean they had a picture and everything :)

Well, after an hour of driving up to North Salt Lake, I finally arrived at the trailhead... and was shocked and appalled by the lack of snow on the ground. The picture in the article had lied to me! Sure I could have worn my brand new showshoes in 2 inches of light and sparse snow, but I probably would have looked pretty foolish. Not one to be discouraged easily, I decided to go with plan 2.

Plan 2 was to head to the trailhead of my favorite summer hike, Stuart Falls just above Aspen Grove. I had no idea whether or not this trail was even accessible over the winter. But I figured that I would hike as far up the trail as I could and turn back if things started to get too hairy. I was pleasantly surprised when I got to the trailhead and discovered that there were plenty of snowshoe tracks already in the snow. I should have come here first and saved myself an hour of driving back and forth to Salt Lake.

I learned a valuable lesson on my hike today. Wearing jeans to go snowshoeing; yeah, that's not a good idea. About half an hour into the hike my pant legs were completely soaked from the snow that was being kicked up by my showshoes. Shortly after that they had frozen solid. I was a little worried that I might get too cold on the hike, but it was a pretty warm day so I decided to press on anyway.

The hike was totally worth nearly freezing to death. When I finally got to Stuart Falls, I just stood and looked at the waterfall, and looked at snow covered mountains towering above it, and I thought to myself, "There is so much beauty in this world". I know it sounds corny or like I line that I stole from the movie "American Beauty" but it was a genuine thought. A second later I also thought, "Life kicks ass". Thinking those two thoughts are the reason that I love the outdoors.



Unfortunately, the above photo was the only one that I was able to take before the batteries ran out on my camera. The ironic thing was that I had actually made a special stop at a 7-11 to buy batteries for the camera before I went hiking. They really would have come in handy had I not accidently left them in the car at the trailhead. I am actually thinking about going back tomorrow and doing the hike again. If I do, I'll make sure to take plenty of photos.

I'm going to Hawaii

I just got off the phone with Dad, and he decided after reading my blog that he wanted to fund my trip to Hawaii over Christmas as my Christmas present. Thanks Dad! To the family that I will be visiting in Hawaii, I hope this last minute plan is not an inconvenience to you. I am more than happy to stay in a Hotel if you aren't able to put me up for a couple of days. I will arrive in Hawaii on Christmas Eve, leave on January 4th and then be back in Utah on the 5th. What a crazy life! Thanks again, Dad.

Status Report

Work - After floundering for the last couple of months, I feel like I'm finally starting to get my groove back at work. We are currently working on a service pack for a major release which means that we are primarily in bugfix mode. It's not always the most exciting work, but I'm starting to cruise through my buglist, and I was even able to sneak a renegade feature in while noone was looking :)

This is also about the time that we start working to design the next major release of the product. This is something that I'm usually pretty excited about, but I've been having a tough time getting into it this time around. I think that it's because we have recently hired a full time usability guy that is now responsible for doing all the fun parts of the design work that I used to enjoy doing; like mocking up screenshots of new features. We also did so much design work for the last release that we could practically take all of our leftover ideas from last time and turn them into the feature list for the next release.

Finances - I've heard from several sources now (one of them very reputable) that bonuses this year are going to be slightly less than they were last year. Although I'm always glad to get any sort of a bonus, I'm still kind of bummed. I think it's mostly because I heard several weeks ago that bonuses were going to be better this year than last and my expectations had been elevated. My expectations were also a little higher this year since I feel like this year more than any other that I've worked here, that I really busted my ass and went above and beyond the call of duty to get things done.

I was hoping to use the money to make the final payment on my student loans. Yes, I was one of those irresponsible people that borrowed way more money than I needed to go to school. Oh well. Even in the worst case I should have the loans paid off in the first couple of months of 2006. I'm kind of pumped for two reasons: (1) It's going to feel awesome to know that my education is finally bought and paid for and (2) It will free up $1000 a month for fun money; and trust me, I've already thought long and hard about what I can do with an extra $1000 per month :)

Fitness - As of this morning there is nearly 70 lbs. less of me than there was 6 months ago. I never could have imagined that I would have this kind of success. Yet, despite all my success, I'm still not happy with where I'm at. My next goal is lose another 5 lbs. by the end of the year and then another 25 over the next 3 months. I haven't a doubt in my mind now that I will be able to pull it off.

However, I have kind of hit a temporary brick wall lately. I've been hovering within a couple of pounds of the same weight for the last couple of weeks now. It's frustrating because I feel like I'm working out harder than ever and I haven't significantly modified my eating habits. One possible explanation is that I'm not dropping weight because I have been putting on muscle mass as the result of stepping up my weightlifting over the last month or so.

I am currently spending an hour on the exercise bike 5 to 6 times a week in the morning (running at about 75-80% of the maximum resistance) and spending an hour lifting weights 4 to 5 times a week at night. I know, it's nuts. But I feel great. Although, I have to say that I much prefer the spring and summer months where I could get my exercise through outdoor activities instead of being holed up in my basement.

Adventure - It's been way too long since I've had a good adventure. Discounting the time that I've spent with Holly lately (which may very well qualify as adventurous), I think that the last minor adventure that I went on was when I climbed (most of the way up) Spanish Fork Peak, and the last major adventure that I had was Barcelona.

This weekend I hope to find some adventure out in the snow. I'm thinking of doing either some snowshoeing or some cross country skiing. One of these days (real soon) I'd like to try downhill skiing but it doesn't quite feel right for this weekend. I'm thinking that I'd like to take a weekend sometime and head down to Brian Head Ski Resort in Cedar City to learn to ski. Their rates are reasonable and I've heard that the slopes are much less crowded down there.

For next weekend, assuming that there is enough snow by then, I'd really like to head down to Bryce Canyon National Park and hike the rim in the snow. I stopped by Bryce Canyon earlier this year with Owen and Kim and the red rock formations look almost surreal blanketed in snow.

In the longer term, I'm planning a snowmobiling trip with a bunch of guys from work up in West Yellowstone. We are planning for the last weekend in January. I can't wait. I was up there a couple of years ago with Dale and Bethany and had a blast. It should be twice as much fun though with a group of rowdy guys (well, as rowdy as a bunch of Software Engineers get anyway).

Christmas Plans - Unfortunately it looks like I won't be able to spend Christmas in Milwaukee with Holly like I was originally hoping. Her schedule over that week is such that it would be an inconvenient time for me to visit. Oh well, hopefully we'll get a chance to see each other sometime in January.

For a fleeting moment, I had considered hopping on a last minute flight to Hawaii for the week. But then I looked into the price of last minute flights to Hawaii over Christmas and had second thoughts. I might have still considered it if my bonus had been really spectacular but it looks like that's not going to be the case. Sorry Mom :(

Ironically, I may end up in the midwest anyway over Christmas break. I was talking to my buddy James last night and we tossed around the possibility of getting together for New Year's. James currently works in Milwaukee during the week but then goes home to the Twin Cities on the weekend. So, if the plan comes together, I may end up flying in to either Minneapolis or Milwaukee.

Whatever the case, I've decided that I don't want to be in Utah for New Year's this year. I don't think that I can take another alcohol free New Year's eve. Although now that I think about it, I got pretty shitfaced last year; Montri's family came down from Colorado and I tied one on with his brother and sister. That was fun :) Montri's sister, Missy, spent the entire next day puking her guts out. She should have known better than to mix pink champagne and Thai whiskey. Silly girl.

A Private Life

A friend commented to me the other day that my boycott of blogging personal thoughts and experiences is making it a pain in the ass for him to keep abreast of my life. Now he actually has to, like, talk to me to figure out what I've been up to. Blogging really is a much more efficient way of keeping up with your friends. From the blogger's perspective, instead of retelling the same story, or sharing the same thoughts several times over with multiple friends and family members by email or over the phone, you just post it once to the blog and it's there for everyone to read. From the blog reader's(*) perspective, you benefit from additional information that might not have been shared with you in the old fashioned world of direct communication. Of course, if you are reading this, then you are probably already clued in to the superiority of blogging and I am preaching to the choir. If you are reading this through an RSS aggregator, then you get extra bonus super geek points and I am really preaching to the choir.

(*) - Is there an official term for this? I was thinking 'blogee' but that's more like the subject of the blog, not the reader.

Feeling Better

I woke up this morning feeling much better. Maybe I did just need a good night's sleep. Or maybe, as FoxyJ put it, there was just something in the air yesterday.

Torpor

I am glad that today is almost over. It's not that it was a bad day; nothing necessarily bad happened. I've just spent the entire day in a state of torpor. Even as I sit here typing this I barely have the strength or motivation to keep my head upright. I feel like I just want to let my whole body go limp and melt into a pile of ooze on the floor. It's been that way all day.

I might think that I was getting sick, except that I don't feel that sick. I might think that I didn't get enough sleep last night, except that I was in bed at 11:30 last night and slept until 7:30 this morning. I might think that I was hungover, except that it's been several days since I've had anything to drink at all and several weeks since I've had enough to drink to produce any sort of an effect on me.

In short, I don't know what's wrong with me. I can only hope that when I wake up tomorrow I don't feel the same way. Wish me luck.