I’m about sick of people from Owensboro bitching about their lack of 3G on the death star. It’s reached a fever pitch lately as the Messenger-Inquirer reported this week that AT&T has actually acquired the rights to the spectrum they need to deploy UMTS, and have applied for the necessary license with the FCC. GREAT! Now you’ll have service that sucks harder, faster!

I’m sot sure why people are still on AT&T here in town. They’ve been promising us 3G year after year since about 2006, and two contract terms have come and gone since then with no results so don’t even pull the “but I’m on contract!” argument. You have had your chance to get out of your prison and go on to greener pastures.

And then there’s the iPhone camp. You have to have your iPhone. You know, since it’s the only device on the planet that will allow you to check your email and surf the web. Let’s just forget that any respectable smartphone will allow you to… wait for it… surf the web and check your email. Some even let you surf the web with Adobe Flash Player on board, you know, that thing you use all the time on your desktop browser but Uncle Steve won’t let you have on your fancy iPhone. If the only reason you’re sticking with a clearly inferior mobile carrier is so you can have your fancy iPhone, then you have absolutely no right to complain, as it is your fault you’re in this predicament, and you could have gotten yourself out at any time. Like I said, two contract terms have passed since they’ve been promising you 3G.

I always knew this town was a little backwards. Why did everyone in it have to go and prove it to me?

* Silly people, Verizon has had 3G here since 2007 and, in fact, had it online way before they said they would, instead of lying to us for four years. But you have to have your iPhone…

“But Drew! Why don’t you take I-64?!”

Simple. If you go slower, you save gas. For example, when I drive to Henderson as I do rather frequently, if I take US 60 I’ll average 26 MPG. If I take the Audubon Parkway, I’ll average 19-20. Consequently, I usually go via US 60.

Maybe I’ll post some multimedia goodness from the gathering. Knowing me, I probably won’t. I’m lazy.

I have noticed there’s some confusion among the general public about what to call this thing upon first glance. Let’s get some right and wrong out of the way.

INCORRECT: “Is that one of them Droid phones?”

My response: “No, it runs the Android OS which is the same thing the Droid series of phones run. This is a Nexus One.” (and in my head) “Dumbass.”

CORRECT: “Am I to understand that you quite possibly currently possess a phone running the Android OS?”

My response: “Why yes! It’s a Nexus One and I am thrilled to have it. You should buy one if you’re on a GSM carrier.”

I’m well aware of the aggressive marketing campaign put on by Verizon and the subsequent runaway success of the Motorola DROID and its siblings, but a phone running the same OS is not automatically a “Droid”. I’ve come close to pulling what little hair I have, out. I saw someone ask about an iPhone app and specifically when the corresponding “Droid app” would come out. I died a little inside.

I figured I should say something before it becomes a real problem. Not that anyone listens to me.

Anyway, I’m going to start tasking myself with writing something in the mornings when I get up. I know it’s probably not as good as it would be at night before I go to bed, but I can’t write when I’m tired. Conversely, I tend to have a clear mind when I wake up, which is also not conducive to writing. What’s a guy to do? I KNOW, I’LL WRITE IN MY SLEEP… oh wait….

My birthday was last month. In fact, it was almost a month ago. So I’m 22 now. Double deuces. I still feel old, but people keep telling me I’m full of it. Okay then, if I’m not old, then why do I have to struggle to remember what I did yesterday? I know it probably has something to do with the fact I don’t get much sleep so that my short-term memory doesn’t go through that magical conversion to long-term memory. I’m trying to change that whole sleep thing. In the meantime, I still don’t remember everything I did two days ago.

I was just (seriously, like right now) followed by someone on Twitter whose bio says, “Your only purpose in this world is to find hotties.” What? I have to look for them? Am I not already enough of a chick magnet so that I don’t have to go through all that trouble? I can’t seem to win.

Hey, at least I don’t write about how sucky my life is and post lyrics and opine about the music I hate incessantly. My life, for the most part, very much does not suck, and I really don’t care all that much about music, so that leaves out the lyrics and the opinions. MY LIFE DOESN’T SUCK, LOL, SUCK ON THAT LOSER. Sorry. I’ll stop now. You know what, in retrospect, that sentence makes no sense.

Maybe I should write at night. I have way too much energy in the mornings and that makes for a really messed up read.

I keed. However, I’m managing to stay busy. Check this out:

During last year’s ice storm, Nathan and I started a little Twitter account we called TriStateAlerts. We mainly just used it to share information about shelters, emergency services, and the availability of generators. We covered a few other things, like a chemical leak and also handled severe weather alerts when we could devote some time to watching a Google Earth display for new polygons and manually typing the information into TweetDeck. Naturally, this got old rather quickly.

For the 2010 severe weather season, Nathan and I committed to having the feed automated, and I accomplished this feat on April 7. I would have had it done earlier, but a strange thing is that one has to test in a live environment when doing something like this. You can’t just make it happen. This new system was by no means perfect, it was just a shell script that ran a PHP script every 20 (and later, 10) seconds to check for new warnings, put them in a database, and tweet them. Pretty simple, right?

Our main problem with this system was that its data source was something the National Weather Service still deems experimental — the Common Alerting Protocol. It’s super awesome, though. It’s based on Atom/XML, which makes CAP a dream to work with. I seriously got working code after hacking at it for seven hours. All praise aside, CAP is still experimental. On the night of April 7, the feeds didn’t update for at least 30 minutes. After a chat with the science operations officer at the Paducah, Kentucky NWS office on the subject, I realized that I should really not be using CAP at this point. In fact, during the big April 24 severe outbreak, the CAP feeds never worked. Not once.

By that time, I had started work on the next step in the evolution of our fledgling service. I’ve been playing with a nice little piece of software called PerlEMWIN on and off for about four years now. This mainly consisted of installing it on a server, letting it run while trashing the filesystem all the while. (That writeFile plugin is nasty sometimes.) EMWIN, or the Emergency Managers Weather Information Network, is a tried-and-true method of dispersing weather information. It’s a continuous stream, priority-driven (meaning a warning will interrupt the transmission of something like a radar image), and it’s an automated push technology. This sounded like what I needed! However, I didn’t know a lick of Perl, and how the hell was I going to integrate this whole thing?

Around this time, I had been introduced to the directors of the local emergency management agency, who, from what I gathered, were desperately in need of a solution to disseminate emergency information via the internet, mainly through social networks like Facebook and Twitter. After my first meeting with the deputy director, he was thrilled that we had built something with such a following and told me we had essentially done his work for him. Oh, and please PLEASE sign them up for whatever we’re offering. (More on that later.)

More meetings further developed my plans, and an entirely new platform materialized in my mind. This wasn’t going to be just a service I run out of my bedroom with Nathan somewhere off to the side furiously researching information. My EMWIN integration had just gotten a lot easier, now that I had a perspective of what the whole thing would do.

I spent the better part of a week, mostly late at night, sitting at my kitchen table hacking away at a plugin for PerlEMWIN that would do what I needed. I had absolutely no experience with Perl, and didn’t have a clue where to start. I’ve been doing PHP for over six years, so you’d think that would help. Not with me. I started reading.

One of my biggest obstacles to learning Perl before I just dove into it with this project was that I just, for some reason, could not find out or just couldn’t understand what @_ was. Seriously. That was it. Maybe I’m just older and wiser now, or maybe all those years of doing PHP taught me a little something about programming in general, but when I found the answer to this simple question I couldn’t help but feel pretty stupid. (For the record, @_ is an array that holds the arguments you pass to a function. It’s a lot more flexible than PHP or probably most any other related language, but it’s really confusing.)

After finally learning just what the hell @_ was, and looking at other plugins bundled with PerlEMWIN, I got to work. Line by line, my plugin materialized. When I didn’t understand something or just straight up didn’t know how to do something in Perl, I resisted the urge to just give up and go back to PHP, and pressed on. Over the course of a week, I picked up enough Perl to finish this plugin and even have it drop data into the same MySQL database my old PHP script pointed to. This left out one thing– the social networking side.

I decided to run back to PHP for this one, for two big reasons. First of all, the design of the overall platform had to include a way to post some stuff to some places. For example, if a local emergency management agency subscribed to our platform, we obviously wouldn’t want to have tornado warnings for three counties away posting to their Twitter feed. This mechanism had to be separated from the data ingestion module. Secondly, I had just written the backends for a Twitter app and Facebook app in PHP, and I wasn’t about to learn a completely new client library to do something I had already written code for. I could just as easily have the PerlEMWIN plugin notify the message center that something new had come, and it could do the rest. That’s exactly what I did.

We also needed some dedicated hardware to run this on, with all the plans we had, the ragtag way things were going would just not cut it for a reputable emergency information service like we wanted. I called an old boss of mine and asked if he still had some servers sitting around for sale. I bought a Sun Microsystems SunFire V40z with four processors and 8GB of RAM to run everything on, and worked out hosting with him. It’s always good to not burn bridges– you never know when you’ll get the hook up.

The platform had its first real test during the severe weather event of April 24. I had barely touched our new server haardware, things were working fine the way they were and with a rare high risk area issued for western Kentucky, that was no time for something to go wrong. Nathan and I were working at the emergency operations center that day, fresh from a meeting with a prospective media partner and ready to tweet. As the warnings started going up for the area, all four endpoints we were pushing data to remained silent. I had finished the PerlEMWIN module (sans Twitter/Facebook support) that morning and wanted to make sure it caught all the warnings, and deposited the right information into the database in the correct format before using it. I hadn’t touched the old code since the last severe weather event, so the only logical explanation for the failure was that the CAP feeds weren’t updating at all. Great first impression, guys!

While we were in a controlled panic over our Twitter feed, I started scrambling to get the EMWIN module linked up and running. This was complicated by what could be generously described as an intermittent internet connection at the courthouse. After sticking my SIM card from my phone (which remained disassembled on the table) in my computer, I whipped up a quick script that posted to our sandbox account to test things, and I ran it manually to make sure it would pull the relevant information from the database and post it. It worked! I pointed the script at the right channels and made one final edit to the PerlEMWIN plugin.

More warnings came in, and still the Twitter and Facebook pages were silent. The logfiles showed all the information coming in just fine, and there were numerous warnings in the database. The Perl plugin wasn’t launching this PHP script I had just written. The panic continued. Nathan resorted to posting warnings manually while I worked, slowly but furiously, on the problem at hand. I found the problem (current working directory confusion) and fixed it in time to post the last two severe thunderstorm warnings of the outbreak.

Since then, we’ve moved everything onto our new server and it’s currently colocated in Evansville. The outbreak this past weekend has a few great moments for us; but those warrant another blog entry sometime in the future.

Of course, that’s not to say that work in the accounting world isn’t a completely different ballgame anyway. We’re slammed to the max from January to mid-April, stress runs high and you tend to spend some late nights in the office.

I, thus far, have been spared this death sentence. In fact, today is quite a slow one in my department, which is a shame given that I’m essentially a one-man department. Few people pick up their tax returns on days they don’t get paid, and I’m a good enough tech that the network hasn’t been acting up. I could probably get away with not being in the office, but the bills wouldn’t get paid so here I am.

I’ve always learned a lot by the work I’ve done. When building a web site for a wheel and tire store, I learned more about rims than anyone probably could care. When building a dealer portal for a distributor of cabinetry, I learned a lot about cabinets. This time around, as a staff member at an accounting firm, I can finally learn about something that affects everyone and that everyone generally thinks about a lot – accounting and taxation. Not that I aspire to be the next big-shot tax and accounting master or anything (I am just fine behind the scenes where I am), but it helps to know a little something about everything you handle on a daily basis. I am fortunate to work with seven CPAs who are knowledgeable and can help me help them. Sometimes, I’m the only communication link between them and the software vendors.

I ramble a lot…

This didn’t sit well with the bossman, to say the least. He gave me the contact info for our sales rep, whom I promptly told, “bullshit”. Here’s the email I wrote– names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Good afternoon SALES REP, here’s what we have going on.

One of the main forms we use in APPLICATION is “KY Owensboro NP-1″, which is the Net Profit License Fee return for the City of Owensboro and Daviess County Fiscal Court. This is available online at http://www.owensboro.org/sites/default/files/finance/Net_Profit_Return.pdf. In APPLICATION, this is just one page, but the version available on the City’s web site also has several worksheet pages attached before the instructions section meant to be linked back to the first page.

If you take a look at “KY Owensboro NP-1A” (Amended Net License Fee), you will find that it is the same as the worksheets after the first page of KY Owensboro NP-1, with the word “Amended” added where necessary.

I have called APPLICATION support twice over the past couple of weeks and everyone I have spoken to has been very helpful. The editors insist these additional pages are not part of the return, but rather the instructions, and the one page already in APPLICATION is current and correct. No one at this firm disagrees with that, but the return form is nigh useless without these additional sheets. The impression I get from the editors’ response forwarded to me by SUPPORT REP this morning is not what I would expect from professionals who are there to help us and make our jobs easier. A lack of an update to this form is negatively impacting our firm’s productivity and greatly diminishing the value we see in APPLICATION.

If you could help us get an updated form into the software, I and many of my colleagues here would appreciate it very much.

Today I received an email telling me the form would be updated next week. Moral of the story: if you’re unhappy with something, talk to your sales rep. It’s their ass on the line and they will get shit DONE.

This is pretty much all you get. You can see your News Feed, your own wall, and you can upload photos from your phone. I hate to say it, but Android users once again get the short end of the stick. (Compare Facebook for iPhone.) That said, there are some features thrown in there that I do like.

Home screen widget

I will admit, this is very nice. It updates ever so often and lets you scroll through recent status updates. You can post new statuses yourself from here, and visit other walls, comment, et cetera.

Phonebook live folder

This is probably the coolest feature of the app. You can place a link to a live folder on your home screen of all your friends who have phone numbers saved on the site. Open this folder, tap a contact, and you get a choice of phone numbers to call or text.

I’ve been waiting for a Facebook app for a long time. Now that I finally have it, I feel like Facebook is not paying as much attention to the Android sector as it should be. They’re leaving the door open for a potentially poorly-implemented third-party app to take away all the glory. Even the most horrible trainwreck of a social networking site has a decent, actively-developed, and above all usable Android app. I’ll be waiting for the next version. I can only hope that Facebook changes my opinion.