I was just reading on MetaFilter that someone was told while in the peace corps if you are ever in trouble you can get a cab to the embassy and they will pay for it. Can anyone confirm or deny this? That would be extremely helpful in a lot of situations.

I finally remembered to look up the 2007 gas deduction and I discovered the deduction is up from 44.5¢ to 48.5¢, which is great news. I am in the 25% tax bracket and with the mileage per gallon I currently get I am more than breaking even on my gas. So to any consultants not writing off their standard mileage you better start, it really adds up.

On Monday I received word that I was selected to work on a government project. As of right now I am not sure how much I can talk about it, it isn’t classified or DoD, but blogging about my experiences may have to wait until I am finished. It is a large project though, based on Joomla and the numbers I am hearing are at least a 3 month deal possibly to the end of the year. Then I am going to live out of a van for 5 years to regain my sanity, just kidding. I’m pretty excited; it is a large project, but the best part is that I will be working with a great group of people. One is a published Java expert and another guy is a award winning designer. The great thing about team I am working with is that they are very organized from what I see. Joomla is in subversion along with a dump of the database ready for me to tear into. I am also able to run the entire thing locally which is a HUGE help; to me at least.

One thing I hate about new projects is that short period of time where you don’t know what you have gotten yourself into and the unknown is just scary. I have skills, but there are always knowledge you lack in some area. I had this huge panic attack earlier when I was looking through the reports that are available in Eventum, which are sorta complicated as it jumps around from file to file and I started thinking about this project. I have my meeting with the PM tomorrow morning to go over expectations and deadlines, and I believe I will feel much better once I know how much sleep I should expect to lose
I also have work that I pick up from a local company that will line my pockets with a little more cash. All in all I think this year is going to be fairly profitable.

If anyone on the project is reading I look forward to working with you.

I need a good time tracking application. I do not want a web based timer, the management of projects can be web based but not the actual timer. The timer must be able to cache any time I work on a project and make use of time rounding billable time. What I mean by that is that if a project is billed in 15 minute blocks the timer must work with that.

I have known Firefox allowed multiple profiles, but until today I never looked up the command to get to the profile manager. I seem to have forgotten to search for it until I was not by a computer to do so. I am running 113 extensions, with about 1/3 disabled right now. Seems like a lot, but I use a lot of extensions for various things and with the load time increased with so many extensions it isn’t worth it to disable some of the small ones.

I have since looking it up decided to change my entire dealings with Firefox. I recommend moving your Firefox profile to another partition to prevent data loss. Here is my C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini

Note: IsRelative=0 is only used when the profile is located in a directory other than C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\. Set it to IsRelative=1 if you are keeping that profile in the directory.

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=0
Path=D:\\Firefox\\default
Default=1

[Profile1]
Name=lite
IsRelative=0
Path=D:\\Firefox\\lite

[Profile2]
Name=developer
IsRelative=0
Path=D:\\Firefox\\developer

To create the additional profiles you can edit manually, but I would use the profile manager to make it easier.

"C:\\Program Files\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe" -ProfileManager

After that starts up create as many profiles as you need and exit. We then want to make it so that you can run multiple profiles at the same time. For me this is good because with as many extensions as I have installed any popup windows take forever to load so I used an extension to make them open in a new tab instead; now I can run a lite version instead.

Create a shortcut with the following command:

"C:\\Program Files\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe" -P profile -no-remote

Replace profile with the name of the profile you are using, if it contains spaces wrap it in quotes. For example, the developer profile.

"C:\\Program Files\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe" -P developer -no-remote

You can now run each shortcut with a different profile and each one will have a different set of extensions, history, etc. This is huge for me, I can now dump all my stupid development shit into a profile and not have to screw with having it there when I don’t need it.

I just tried building a custom version of dojo and I am getting an error, can someone help me out.

ant -DprofileFile=testing clean release intern-setings

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Files\Java\jre1/5/0_08\lib\ext\QTJava/zip -DprofileFile testing clean release intern-setings

I have JAVA_HOME pointing to my JDK (not JRE) and I have the ANT_HOME set and ant is in my path. I know shit about java and I can’t find an answer, help would be greatly appreciated.