Some new pictures

I finally uploaded some new pictures to the site, I know it has been quite a while, but with Kirsten and I buying a house, getting engaged, getting Maggie Sue (puppy) and getting Chloe (kitty) we have been extremely busy. Hope you all enjoy. Pictures can be found clicking here.

Building a Washer & Dryer Stand

Today I finally finished my washer/dryer stand that Kirsten wanted. We bought front loading LG washer & dryer that have optional pedestals. However, they cost $200 each. We really wanted them elevated a little so I decided to build a stand. I bought all the wood from Home Depot and luckily got them to cut it to size for free. Unfortunately I measured incorrectly and had to cut an additional 2 inches off everything. On the good side I finally got to use all my power tools again that I haven't used in 2+ years living in an apartment. I went right to down cutting 2x6's and plywood on Monday. Thursday I finally got back to the house to finish the project as was able to get it all put together relatively level :-).

Next was to put on the vinyl 12"x12" flooring. I originally planned to prime and paint the stand but due to time constraints I had to move to vinyl flooring. Bright and early Thursday I went to Home Depot (like the 10th time this week) to pick up the flooring. Luckily I remember from HGTV that you can buy self adhesive vinyl blocks. And the best part is that they are cheap, like $.29 each. I bought a whole box for little less than $14. Applying them to the stand was pretty easy on the top where the washer and dryer are, but the front is a completely different story. I had to keep putting them on and holding them there to later come back and find out the fell off. As of today I still don��t have them on well. I will have to go back and put new ones on and put something there to hold them in place for a little bit.

About an hour after I finished Best Buy was there to deliver the appliances. The stand worked out perfectly when they started both up (no wobbling)! Now on to the next home project.

We bought a house!!!

Many of you already know but Kirsten and I bought a house and Friday (2/15) we got the keys. So everything is now official. It was a very exciting and stressful time, but we made it through. For those of you that don't know we bought a 4 bedroom, 2.25 bathroom house in Duvall, WA. It is a very nice house on .33 acres.

As soon as we got the keys we bought a new washer, dryer and fridge (all LG) then went straight to the house. Once we got to the house we did a quick tour with Amy (Kirsten's good friend) and then started right to work. We had to prep for our paint party the next day. We got there a little after 9pm and left at 12:30am. We had all the rooms pretty much prep'd.

Saturday morning we headed to the house and started painting. We had a few folks over helping which was nice as it would have taken us forever to finish. Luckily with our friends we were all done by Sunday afternoon.

Next up is to build a stand for the washer & dryer.

Redmond Five's first win!

Last night the Redmond Five beat Boxwave Tidalwave 61-38. It was our first win in the Redmond Rec Men's Basketball League. It only took us 1 1/5 seasons. Congrats Team!

The MVP of the game was Jeff Armstrong who had at least 15 points, 15 rebounds and 3 blocked shots.

More pictures...again

I spent a good portion of yesterday uploading a bunch of new pictures. I probably added 1500 or so. You can see them all here: http://www.swapstudio.com/pictures.asp. Enjoy!

On another note, I finally finished porting over all my websites to my GoDaddy webhosting service. This has taking me way too long, mainly due to my lazyness. But yeah at least everything is done and I don't have to use my 9 year old web server anymore! Now that http://www.playballstats.com is ported over I will have the bandwidth to add more leagues to the site. Well that's about it for now. Later.

I have a work blog now...

For those of you that are IT people I have a new work blog for my System Center products I work on. You can find the blog here http://blogs.technet.com/jasonlewis. It is pretty technical, but very informational. Enjoy!

Summer trip visiting family and friends

Kirsten and I are taking next week off and visiting family. We are leaving shortly after the Huskies game (vs Ohio State) and heading down to Tri-Cities to visit Kirsten's Grandparents. We will be down there for 3-4 nights before heading over to my Dad's place in Hillsboro, OR. I'm hoping the weather is nice during the week so I can get a few rounds of golf in. I haven't played a whole lot this past month due to all the baseball and volleyball.

While at Dad's we will be playing The Reserve on Thursday. I'm really looking forward to playing golf with my Dad. Even though both of us are terrible golfers we still enjoy and compete against each other every time we play. And it's always a entertaining listing to my dad swear up a storm after each miss hit :-).

After visiting Dad for a couple of days we are heading back up to Ellensburg to go camping with Adam, Michell and Lilly. We went camping with them a few weeks ago and it was a blast. Specially with having Lilly (a puppy) there who is a riot. And the best part of taking the entire week off is finally spending some time with Kirsten. This summer has been hectic for both of us and we haven't had much time to just do things together. It will be a great to spend some time with her!

Now using GoDaddy.com web hosting

For the past 5 years I've been hosting my own websites on my very old (built 1999) machine. This machine has a Pentium III 400 Mhz processor with 1 GB of RAM. It is still running but it could really go down at any second. So on Friday I finally made the switch to use GoDaddy.com's web hosting. I've been planning for almost a year to move my PlayballStats.com website over to a production web server. The main reason was I wanted more bandwidth since running a web server on a cable modem doesn't scream performance. But a few things were holding me back. First was that GoDaddy Windows hosting only included 1 SQL Server Database (at a 100MB max size). Secondly, I could only host one website on the account. Meaning I would need to buy several accounts if I wanted to move all my websites. Needless to say that would be expensive. Luckily over the past year GoDaddy has raised the number of SQL Server databases plus they now allow you to host multiple websites from the same account. This was exactly what I needed to hear.

On Friday I opened the account and played around with all the settings and figured out how to upload files and create databases. Then Saturday I moved my SwapStudio.com and CheckInTheDark.com websites over to GoDaddy. I will wait until after the baseball season to move over PlayballStats since I don't want to screw up the data while the season is still in progress. And the best news... I will pay less than $200 for the 4 years of webhosting on GoDaddy.com. This is a very small fraction of the cost if I was to rebuild a new web server. And now I will be able to post more pictures since there is no need to worry about space and bandwidth.

Nine Baseball made the playoffs!

This week I found out my Redmond Nine team will be the #7 seed in the Redmond Wood Bat League postseason (link). This is the first time the Nine have made the playoffs. We also had the most wins we've ever had in a season (4). We impoved our team hitting to .300 (.181 last year) as well as our team ERA to 5.12 (7.94 last year). The best part about the improvement was that it was a complete team effort. We added some great guys to the team which really helped, but all of our returning player played great this year and improved greatly over last year as well. I'm really looking for to the postseason to get a few more games in before the rain starts. Even though we are a low seed, we still have a good chance to surprise a team or two! Good Luck Redmond Nine!

My Product is famous!

As you all know I work on the Systems Management Team at Microsoft. Well a company called Citrix has released a video talking about a product that I worked on about year ago. You can view it here. The product mentioned is Systems Management Server 2003 R2 along with the Inventory Tool for Custom Updates (ITCU) and Custom Updates Publishing Tool (CUPT). Also note in the video they actually show a person using Custom Updates Publishing Tool.

Finally some new pictures...took long enough...

I finally got some new pictures up. My grandpa has been trying to remind me for the last few months to get the Christmas pictures up and I finally have along with some others. Check them out Here!

Thanks for the reminder again Grandpa!

Big Summer Movies

For those of you movie fans out there here is a list of blockbuster movies opening this summer.
- May 4: Spider-Man 3
- May 18: Shrek the Third
- May 25: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
- June 8: Ocean's Thirteen
- June 15: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
- June 22: Evan Almighty
- June 29: Live Free or Die Hard; Disney-Pixar's Ratatouille
- July 4: Transformers
- July 13: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
- July 27: The Simpsons Movie
- Aug. 3: The Bourne Ultimatum
- Aug. 10: Rush Hour

Lasic Surgery Success!

I have new eyes! Well rather new and improved vision! This past Wednesday (11/15) I finally had Lasik surgery and all I can say is wow! This is truly amazing, my vision is already 20/20 and I feel so much better not having to use contacts or glasses. I've had a lot of people ask me about the procedure so I will give a somewhat detailed report and how it went.

Kirsten and I first arrived at Restore Vision Center at 9:30am for my 10:20am appointment. Once checked in we read some People magazines while I nervously fidgeted. We did this for about an hour and 1/2 as I didn't get called in until 11am. We were both allowed in for the first part of the appointment, the Post Operation Instructions. The nurse informed us of all the different types of drops I needed to put into my eyes and specially what to do the first day home. The main theme was rest the first day, as I could not read, watch tv or play on the computer.

After the post op care was given Kirsten had to return to the waiting room while I was escorted to the surgery waiting room. The room was filled with chairs for people pre and post surgery. When I first arrived there were two other patients waiting to have the surgery. We chatting about our nervousness for a few minutes until one of them was called in to have the surgery. Once the patient was done I was called to get my eyes examined by the surgeon before the surgery. It was a quick eye test to make sure my vision was the same as my pre-exam a few weeks back. At the end of the exam he gave me one Valium. I asked for two but he said one is fine. I then returned to the waiting room to be called for the surgery. After waiting about 20 minutes I was called in, hoping my Valium kicked in (and yes it did).

Once in the surgical room you lay on a table and the nurses give you a stuffed animal to squeeze if you are nervous, I squeeze relentlessly. After about a minute the surgeon comes in and puts some numbing drops in both eyes and then tapes my left eye closed and puts a patch over it. He continues with my right eye walking me through the procedure as he is doing it. The surgeon puts more drops in my eye to numb it and then tapes my eye lower and upper eye lashes out of the way. Following the tape he puts this speculum type device into my eye to spread the eye open, this amazingly doesn't hurt one bit. Once the eye is wide open he puts some more drops in and starts to put the Microkeratome on my eye to cut the cornea flab. Now I have to say this is the hardest part (but not that hard). Once the Microkeratome is on the eye it sucks all the air out of in front of the eye so that it can cut the cornea flap without any blood. This suction is slightly uncomfortable. During the suction you lose your vision for a few seconds while it is cutting the cornea flap. The Microkeratome is then removed and the surgeon take a thin metal tool and pulls back the cornia flab for the laser to have direct access to the rear cornea. He then does some more irrigation and aligns the laser to your eye.

After everything is aligned he starts the laser. You cannot feel or see the laser at all. You can hear a clicking sound of the laser as while as slight burning smell. Luckily for me it was only 30 seconds on my right eye and 38 on the left. After the laser is complete he puts the cornea flap back on and smoothes it out with a brush. He finishes the eye by having me close it and keep it closed for a few seconds then it's all complete for that eye. The left eye was exactly the same except it was a little more uncomfortable when cutting the cornea flap but nothing I couldn't handle.

Overall I was pretty worked up for nothing as the surgery wasn't painful at all and actually quite surreal as your eyes are numb during the procedure. When returning the waiting room I could already see an improvement in my vision. Ten minutes later (around 1pm) Kirsten drove me home where I kept my eyes closed for most of the day, calling as many people possible to talk since that was one of the few things I could do with my eyes closed. The next day I returned to Restore Vision Center for my first post op appointment where I was cleared to drive again. My vision in my left eye was 20/20 and my right eye almost 20/20. I expect my vision to be 20/15 once all said and done which will be great since that is where my vision was with my contacts.

Lasik Surgery

Well I have finally threw away my fears and decided to have Lasik surgery. Several times the past three years I've wanted to have the surgery to then back away from it after learning about the procedure. The problem has always been the cutting of the cornea flap, that just freaks me out.

The first time I was interested in the surgery I didn't know they cut your eye open and once I found out I completely stalled and decided to not have the surgery. And then every year I get interested in the surgery again and think can I handle this and the answer is usually no. Until this year.

This past summer Kirsten and I went to The Bite of Seattle to watch a buddy play a concert. After the show we walked around the various booths and ran into a Restore Vision Centers booth. This is the place I've always looked at to do the procedure, but this time the guy said something that made me think twice about doing the surgery. He said, "Don't worry they give you Valium." After him telling me that the Valium helps with the anxiety and seriously thought about having the surgery. It also helped that I would get a $400 discount if I signed up with him to at least get the pre-exam. A few weeks after The Bite I got a call from Restore Vision Center to schedule my pre-exam. Then for the next few months I waited and postponed the pre-exam a couple of times due to baseball and our Hawaiian vacation. Then in October I finally had my pre-exam and decided to have the surgery. So on Wednesday (11/15) I will be getting some new eyes.

New Pictures ... Lots of Them!

I have finally uploaded a bunch of pictures of Kirsten and I's trips in the last year. We have our Vegas trip in October 2005, my guys Vegas trip in July 2006, a few trips to my Moms, one to Kirsten's grandparents, my team Xmas party, our Xmas trip and last but not least our Hawaiian vacation just last week. All of the pictures can be found here: Pictures.

The NINE's first Win

Tonight our team, Redmond Nine, won its first career baseball game against Cobra Kia Dojo 7-4. That breaks our 18 game winless streak and The Curse of the Rockies at the same time. It was the best played game I've seen us play.

We were led by a stellar pitching performance by Adam. He pitched a complete game with giving up only 2 earned runs with 7 strike outs. A great defense led by shortstop Scott, center fielder Cameron and left fielder Chris that nullified every started rally by the Cobra Kai. And to top it all off we had some hitting led by Adrian.

It was a great game and now we have a big game against the Rebels who have a couple of players from our old Rockies team. If we win this one, we will have our first win streak! Wish us luck!

The Curse of Rockies

Earlier this week we finally diagnosed why we (Redmond Nine) haven't won a game yet in the past two seasons. Last year we managed to tie one game, but that is beside the point. We now believe the root cause of all our baseball problems is The Curse of the Rockies.

The Curse of the Rockies refers to the original Rockies coach (our first Redmond Men's Baseball team), who was an awful coach that didn't know the first thing about baseball and to make it worse thought he did. So when he left for a 3 week vacation right before the season Adam and I began to run practices. Everyone was happy again to finally have some structure to practice and not wasting time. So when the season started and when Mr. Coach returned we formed a coup and told him he is no longer the coach. He wasn't too happy about it but we had the backing of the entire team so there wasn't much he could do. The season went pretty smoothly for a first year team. We ended the season 2-8.

And to empower the curse even more, the following year Adam and I decided to form our own new team called the Redmond Nine. We invited a majority of the players from the Rockies but left off the former manager. Needless to say he wasn't happy about us taking his coaching status the first season then taking most of his players the second. And there is the story behind The Curse of the Rockies.

Now that we have identified the curse, hopefully we can break it. Wish us luck!

Best Seattle Mariner Blogs out there...

I just wanted to list off a couple of my favorite mariner blogs.

I finally have an RSS Feed...

My buddy Eric commented earlier why I didn't have an RSS feed. The main reason was that I didn't know much about RSS when I first started my blog. But now with Microsoft's Live.com website I have found the value in RSS feeds. Eric also made me realize that somebody, if only once or twice a year, looks at my website. So with great excitement I like to announce that I finally have an RSS feed to my blog, thanks to 4 Guys From Rolla. It lists the last 25 posts I've made on my site. The RSS can be found here. I will also add a link/icon to it on the site.

Busy August

August is going to be a busy month for Kirsten and I, specifically me. I have 14 baseball games scheduled this month, the most of any month. Along with all the baseball the second weekend of the month Kirsten and I will be heading over to Spokane for her Aunt Tilly's 98th birthday. Kirsten got us a really nice hotel room in downtown Spokane. I can't wait; it should be a nice drive over. At the end of the month we have my 10 year High School Reunion in Montesano, WA followed by a Tool concert at the Gorge (George, Washington) the next day. That will be a lot of driving, luckily we took Monday off to recover.

I'm sure this month will fly by, but hopefully not too fast. Once the month is over we will start visiting family that we haven't gotten to see all summer.

Company Picnic

Today Kirsten and I went to the company picnic for a while. It was my first time there since last year we were out of town. It was a cloudy but hot day down at Mountain Meadows Farm, North Bend. There were what seemed to be thousands of people at the picnic most with their kids. We walked around for about 20 minutes taking in the attractions before eating some BBQ ribs. They were pretty good. We also ran into a buddy from work and hung out with them for a little while before walking the rest of the picnic.

The picnic grounds where huge. There were lots of stuff to do for kids but not many things for the adults. We finished walking around the picnic area, got some free stuff then took off. Overall it was ok, not really meant for adults, but I could see how it would be a lot of fun with a family.

Redmond Men's Baseball League

Yesterday was the start of my Redmond Nine baseball season. The Redmond Nine are a 23 and older men's hardball team I manage with Adam. We are in the Redmond Wood Bat League in Redmond, WA. It is a great league for a couple of reason, one it is right down the road for Kirsten and I. And two, it is a wood bat league. There is nothing better than playing baseball with wood bats.

Our first game was against Milt's BBQ Express. This was the team I played for 3 years ago when I first got back into playing hardball. They are a pretty decent team. We ended up losing 0-9 but pretty well considering we didn't hit at all. This is the first year we actually have good pitching so I look forward to playing the rest of the season. Our goal this year is to make the playoffs. Wish us luck!

Playballstats.com V1 is complete

I have finally finished version 1 of my Playball Stats website. I currently have 3 teams using it in my Redmond Wood Bat League to keep track of stats. It has been a fun project that I very much enjoyed for the past 4 months. I have to give a special thanks to Kirsten for allowing me to sit in front of the computer for several hours at a time during week nights and weekends. If it wasn't for her support I would have been done next year :-). Also I also like to thank Adam for all the help he provided when I was stuck.

Now on to version 2. Luckily I don't have to rush on this one, so I will be taking some time off and working on small chucks as time allows.

Nose Surgery is done

For those of you that didn't know I had surgery last week to fix my deviated septum and adenoids removal. It has been a week and I'm finally starting to feel better. Yesterday was my last day on pain meds so I have a much clearer mind now and can drive. I can already feel a difference in my sleep with my nasal passages opened up. I should have more improvement during the next 3-4 weeks.

Playballstats

For the past two months I have been working on a new baseball stats program. The beginnings of this project started way back in my junior year (2000) at CWU in User Interface Design class. I have always loved baseball and found no good stats programs out there. So in class I wrote a program call Playball Stats that was a Windows based baseball stats program for teams.

The original program was pretty limited due to the fact it was designed for a single season of stats, thus no database was used. Throughout the years I've updated the program to add more stats but never changed the back end to a DB. It wasn't until I started playing hardball again (see Nine Baseball) that I found I really needed to re-write the program to allow for multiple season and career stats.

So a few months ago I decided to get started on the new version. At that time I also decided to make it a web based app so that I could make changes very easily and nobody would have to upgrade there product. I first started with all the end user pages. These pages are what display all the team and player info, including roster, schedule, offensive and pitching stats.

Well I've finally completed the first phase of development which you can see at www.playballstats.com. I'm now working on the admin section of the site which will include all the pages necessary to add teams, players and stats.

Please take a look at the site and let me know what you think.

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