So allergy season is in full swing now and as a result my day to day routine is now a near death experience. I of course am on tuns of medication but like every new season it seems that I need to change medications to get any relief. I had a lot of hope for Allegra and hoped it would pack a bit more staying power but it would seem that even at high dosages it isn’t working. So nearly all of my weekend was spent laying around miserable and trying to work on my DSGD 105 project. I did manage to distract myself with upgrading WordPress. This, however, was short lived due to the fact that the upgrade was super easy and didn’t require much time so I went back to being miserable. I will have to cut this short because I need to finish up this project but look forward to some new posts soon. I will likely post my final project for you all to see so if anything check back for that.

Adept

I will be upgrading my WordPress installation today to the newest release 2.1.x. So expect a bit of strangeness on my end for the next few hours. I will let you all know when the installation is complete and everything is back to normal.

Adept

::Update:: Everything seems to have gone supprisingly well. Not a single problem and the new 2.1 interface seems to be pretty nice.

I have been a San Jose Sharks fan since I could remember. Being that the Sharks are the only NHL team in northern California and that I happened to end up in college in San Jose I again am in a position to support my sharks. And to add to it I have had the privilege to even work at the Shark Tank putting me just about as close to the Sharks as one could want. Well how about playoff apperances ever year since the strike and quite possibly the best season the Sharks have played ever. Well today is game two in the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs against the Detroit Red Wings. So lets all root the Sharks to another win with a collective

Lets Go Sharks!!!

Adept

::Update:: The Sharks had a disappointing loss that tied the series up at 1-1.

I had the pleasure earlier today to sit in on a the last in a series of guest speeches at SJSU put on by the Dean’s Speaker Series. This time Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen gave a talk about everything from how Adobe deals with pressure from competitors to its hiring policies. The best part about Bruce’s talk was just that, it was much more of an informal talk then a organized presentation or formal interview. This allowed Bruce to really get comfortable and give a very targeted talk to SJSU students. Among the highlights was a discussion that led to a open comment on his distaste for Microsoft and Stanford. Saying that “Stanford has an attitude that is hard to work with. They don’t need Adobe and we don’t need Stanford.” He also gave what was an almost jealous comment on how Google is making it hard to find good programmers in Silicon Valley because of there Segway’s and free meals, saying “they will have to grow up eventually.” In all it was a great time and I managed to snap a photo at the end. If you are looking for more coverage of today’s even be sure to check out The Soup Box Prophet and Kyle’s Comments as they will likely have a more journalistic approach to todays events.

Adept

I am currently sitting in the Engineering auditorium looking at one of San Jose’s most important business figures, Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe. Today he will be speaking at SJSU as part of the Deans’ speaker series. I will be posting periodically as it happens so stay tuned.

Adept

I have just recently started using FeedBurner to track all my feed stats and such. As a result my RSS feed has changed and you may need to update to the new feed. If so, I apologize for the inconvenience but at least now I can track all of my rss feed goodness. It shouldn’t cause too many but seeing that very few people read my blog I don’t want to lose any of the faithful. In case you were wondering how to find that new feed just click on the link to the right (subscribe here). I will also be giving a run down on FeedBurner integration into WordPress and its performance after I have had some time to see how it works. So you might want to check back for that. Until then… sorry again for any problems this might bring up.

Adept

So, last week I did a basic introduction to Flash for STEM, SJSU Technology & Emerging Media. Everyone seems to have enjoyed my presentation so today I will be returning for a recap of last week and an introduction on basic action script and its uses in flash. It should be good so come on out and learn some flash.

Adept

WHAT: Intro to Flash
WHEN: 4:30 PM, Wednesday, April 25th, 2007
WHERE: The Academic Success Center (formerly Clark Library), Room 116

Let it be known that after some serious reworking of my tags and such I have managed to reclaim my own name for myself on the Google index. For a good time a Google search for ““Burke Shartsis” would result in the first listing on google being The Soap Box Prophet, a blog by my good friend Andrew Venagus. But now, the universe has been restored and my name belongs to me again. Until next time…

Adept

We celebrated Mike’s 23rd birthday last night. I set up an impromptu photo booth so people could have a go at it throughout the night. It turned out to be a pretty good idea. I also put up the photos from last weekends airsoft trip and the dinner that fallowed. Overall, there is a tun of new pictures to explore in the gallery so check it out at gallery.axisds.com

Adept

I know that this isn’t exactly new information but I thought I would talk about it because I find it interesting. So earlier this year Google announced a competition called the Google Summer of Code. The competition is slated to compete college and university students around the world against each other for a chance to get paid $4500 to work on the idea of there choice all summer. Of the 6200 applications 900 students were accepted covering some 300 different projects. For those of you doing the math, Google will be paying $4,050,000 in an effort to help fund student developers this summer. There are a number of projects including most notably Wordpress, the Mozilla Foundation, and a number of Linux distributions. I look forward to seeing what this kind of big name involvement on the small level will bring to the many coding communities Google has now invested in. For a complete list projects selected and the goals they aim to address over the summer check out the Google Summer of Code (SOC).

Adept