Braggfamily Blog and Tips

Update: MixWit has since gone down. 1/18/2009 Billy and Nick started taking music lessons last fall (Guitar and Bass, respectively). Billy has decided to just practice on his own from now on instead of continuing lessons. Tho, he's gotten way better over time. Nick's still taking lesson's for his Bass and enjoying it. His teacher Doug Manring (who's brother is Michael Manring ) who started "The Real Schol of Rock" here in Virginia. Doug has decided it's finally time for Nick to have a "set list" of song's he can play. So he went through all the song structures he's learned and compiled a list. He also had to pick a Beatles song on his own. of course he picked "Yellow Submarine". I've put together a MixWit mix you can listen to and see the list. I also burned Nick a CD of his song's so he can play along with the music and get a better feal of the beat and how long he has to play for a full song.

Hey there! If your into AI (Artificial Intelligence) or distributed projects. You should consider joining the Artificial Intelligence System project. It's a distributed processing project that is working on reverse engineering the brain to build a large scale AI System. Give it a check out.

Well, it's finally time for a cool site to check out. I ran across this PONG LED table somebody created. I'd love to have one of these. I wonder what other games could be adapted using this kinda technology? Air-hockey maybe? Anyhow I saw it on Hack-A-Day . Why not go check it out.

Here is another personality quiz you can take. It's Short and simple. Find out what Superhero you are! Your results: You are Green Lantern Green Lantern 70% Spider-Man 65% Robin 65% Supergirl 63% Superman 60% Hulk 60% Catwoman 55% The Flash 55% Wonder Woman 53% Batman 40% Iron Man 35% Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination. Click here to take the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz...

On Sunday, I took the older boys (Nicky, 12 and Billy, 17) to AirsoftCQB for a day of shooting. I must admit that I did not expect much. But, it was a fantastic time. If you live in the DC Area and like the idea of paintball, or playing FPS (first-person shooters), like half-life and such. AirsoftCQB is the place for you. They have a 17,000 sq/foot warehouse that they have transformed into a ballistics training facility that you can manuever with team-mates in a friendly competitions of deathmatch and various FPS games, like Alien, Capture the Flag (CTF), Predator, etc... Both Billy and Nick had a great time. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of our adventure. I may post some photo's of my wounds (bruises) from the pellets. I have a feeling we'll be going back again soon. .. Note to self: Bring and wear protective gear next time ;p

As I posted in the previous entry, the pool season is about to begin. I just got confirmation that the pool is being loaded on the truck and en route to Virginia later today. The picture to the right is the start of Phase 1, leveling of the ground. I estimate another week and a half or two before it's really level. The tiller isn't working this year, so it's going to be a manual process with shovels and rakes. { Owwww, my back, I can feel it now } BTW, Again, notice the MEEBO Chat on the right also. If it says I'm online, chances are you can type right into the chat box and get a hold of me live. I just found out today you can also change the "guest" name by clicking the guest name box. Why not give it a try. In other news, I just ordered an EVDO Router and SPRINT Wireless Internet card (USB). I'll be posting all the details in the days to come. I expect it to show up tomorrow. What does this mean? It means the end of NON-BROADBAND access to the Bragg fa...

Just a little heads up. It's that time again for the Bragg Family to buy or setup another above-ground pool. It all started years ago when we first moved to Virginia. I found a good deal on one of those giant Condom pool (as we called it). It's the big blue round ones that you blow up the top and just fill it up. It was a pretty large size when we got it. Anyhow, my first attempt failed miserably. It became a HUGE running joke at work when I explained it to the guys it was time to setup the pool each year after that. See, I decided the best place was to put it in the back yard. Our back yard though, is on a fairly steep slope. The pool MUST be setup on LEVEL ground. Anyhow, I proceeded to dig out the hill in the back yard to make an area large enough for the pool as level as I could. I didn't bother using a level to verify, eying it seemed good enough to me. The first setup ended up with the water gathering all on one end and the entire pool ended up collapsing and sending...

I've been fairly lucky in my choice of jobs for the past 10 years that I haven't had to update my resume and change jobs as frequent as most in my field. Though, I found a couple of interesting articles that may prove helpful if the time does arise. The tech industry moves very fast and it's easy to get out-of-touch with reality in the job market. There are a couple nice articles over at NetworkWorld.com related to resumes. The first is " 5 IT Skills That Won't Boost Your Salary ." The other is " Wanted: 10 IT skills employers need today ." I personally, will be doing a thorough over-haul of my resume and even touch up on some training and research to make sure I'm still viably relevant to the market.

I noticed a few people have been finding my Blog via the Original Jenny Turpish Personality Quiz Blog Entry from July 2004. Well... I looked around last year and tried to find the original source for the quiz, but not real hard with no luck. Well, well, well ... today, have I got news for you ... Tory over at The Tory Party has it posted on her blog. You can find it HERE . ( Enjoy and Blessings to all. Just for fun I retook the test and got a scary similar result, 4 years later with some minor changes: (You can see my old results on the "Original" link above) Wackiness: 72/100 Rationality: 30/100 Constructiveness: 34/100 Leadership: 22/100 WEDF -- Wacky Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you a Menace to Society. Or an Asset to Society - depending on how you channel your energies. You chew your fingers and have an addictive personality. Properly guided, you can be enormously productive--otherwise you run amok, stir up trouble, and generally have a hell of a good ti...

Here is a link to RepRap , which is a project to create a self-replicating fabrication robot. I see this as the beginning of future replicators, just like we saw in the television series "Star Trek". I hope to get to try to build one of these .. they say it's "... like having a China on your desktop...". Imagine just requesting your computer to make a replacement glass or plate if you break one. Man, I love technology!

This is so cool! If you need a temporary e-mail address to sign up for something, so your regular e-mail doesn't get spammed??? You gotta visit: http://www.fakemailgenerator.com All you have to do is put whatever you want after the last / and it will generate and activate that e-mail. As long as you keep that window open, any e-mail sent to that fake email will pop-up. They also have: http://www.fakenamegenerator.com That will generate a random name, address, phone number, etc to use.

I'm finally getting around to posting some recent photos of the Boys. Enjoy.

THIS IS NOT AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE: I'm sure some of you have seen the "Free Xbox" or "Free Ipod" advertisements on the internet. Most of those programs require you to sign up for 3 trial deals, and get 5 of your friends (or more) to join and sign-up for 3 trial deals as well. WELL, Blingo is NOT like that. You join Blingo.com and just search using Blingo.com instead of Ask.com, Google.com, Yahoo.com, etc. Approximately every 5 minutes throughout the day, a random searcher wins a prize. (Most seem to be free movie tickets, but there are tons of cash and other prizes too!). I REALLY did win some free movie tickets the first week I started using Blingo.com . The best thing about Blingo , is that any friends that sign up through your referal, and win, you win the same prize they do. So the more friends you have Blingo'ing , the better chances you have to win. So, Please join Blingo.com using my referal link . You can win too!

Getting tired of running and remembering all your Instant Messaging? Check out http://www.meebo.com . It's an all-in-one portable IM. You can log in on any web-browser and be in contact with all your IM pals. Also see on the SIDEBAR >>>>> If I'm logged in, you can instantly IM me from my web page. Give it a try. You can consolidate all your AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Gmail (Or any other XMPP/Jabber) Instant Message accounts into ONE.