Archive of posts from 2014
One word to describe my 2014? Fabulous! Really, I don’t think that I’ve had a better year. Why? Well let’s take a look at my plans for 2014 and see how they turned out.
Dec 27, 2014 Making Xmas Gifts FunThis year I wanted to do something different for Xmas gifts. I hate just buying gifts to buy someone a gift. I want my gifts to be unique and hopefully liked. I decided that I was going to make my own gifts this year. And after watching this video, I decided that I was going to make stationery for people.
Dec 18, 2014 Forms and TablesI had a very weird situation today where a simple form I had created in rails would not work for the edit action. It would work ok for the new action. But if I tried to edit an entry, the submit button wouldn’t do anything.
Dec 15, 2014 Compiling BootstrapI’m using bootstrap a lot these days for a couple of websites I’m setting up. In addition to bootstrap, I had been using a css file for my own changes that I wanted to make. However, now I’m starting to make more than just a couple of changes, so I want to learn how to recompile my own bootstrap file. Here’s all I’ve done.
Dec 13, 2014 SloppyI bought computer parts for my nephew to assemble his own computer. We got it all together and it didn’t work. After taking out lots of parts, it looks like I bent some pins in the cpu socket when I put it in. This was after I specifically told my nephew that you had to be careful doing this. I’m an idiot. Tomorrow, I think I’m going to take it to work to see if I can perhaps straighten the pins using our microscope. If that doesn’t work (and I have a feeling it won’t), I’ll probably just have to buy a new motherboard.
Dec 12, 2014 BootstrapI’ve been playing around with Bootstrap for the past few days and have grown to like it. I just switched over one of my work webpages to it and have to do the other one. Once I have those done, I’ll probably redesign coldandheartless with it as well. It is nice to be able to easily read and navigate my sites on my phone.
Dec 11, 2014 Talk Too MuchI have picked up some bad habits of late. The biggest one being I’m talking too much. I don’t like myself very much when I talk a lot, especially when I’m just talking to make myself look good. And that’s what I’m doing, no matter what I might think. So the first thing I need to start doing is talking less and listening more. The other thing I’ve noticed is that I’m being very rude and judgmental with people. This is ridiculous. What right do I have to judge other people? That needs to stop. For some reason, I’ve recently gotten a rather large ego. Here’s the thing, I know I haven’t done anything to earn that. And I also dislike other people who have huge egos and have a sense of entitlement. Thus, another reason to not like myself. So before I do anything else, I need to quit thinking I’m so important and start seeing how I can be more helpful to others.
Dec 10, 2014 PHP NotesMainly I use Rails for stuff on the web. But now I’m making a simple website and I’m using php for it. One of the things I really like about Rails is the use of a layout to keep pages consistent. I’m sure there’s a php framework I can use for this. But all I’m really want to do on my current site is have some static html pages loaded. I’m mainly using php to load the navigation bar. The one difference here is that I want the site to be responsive. So I’m using bootstrap for this. I want to make a function that lays everything out and then loads a specific page in the right place. Basically, I’m looking to recreate the Rails yield function.
Dec 7, 2014 Holiday WorkMy original plan for today was to go and cut down a Christmas tree. But since my nephew (who wanted to actually cut the tree down), has not yet finished his homework for tomorrow, this plan is now on hold. So last night, I started looking at the hosting for this website. I was on Rackspace (since they bought Slicehost years ago) and was paying around $44/month. It was ok, but I my virtual server was running Centos 5.5. I know that Centos 7 is out now and I figured I should upgrade. Since this was going to mean basically making a new server and copying everything over, I looked around at my other options. Paying another $44 to Rackspace for another server seemed pricey. So instead, I set up a new server on Linode and have been moving everything there. I’m hoping Linode is going to cost me less than $20/month, but I’ll see after a few months how it’s looking. Right now, I’m copying all of my old data from my laptop to the new host. This will take a few more hours, but then I think I can delete the old Rackspace host, as I have everything set up on the new one.
Dec 2, 2014 Is it selfish?For Christmas this year, I’m making gifts for some people. Yes, handmade gifts are all the thing. However, normally I think people mean that when they get something really nice as a gift. If I, as an adult, were to color them a picture, I don’t think it would be received as well as if I child did it. However, I like to try to learn new things. So I’m using Christmas as an excuse to build a contraption (can’t go into any more detail in case anyone who I might give a gift to might be reading) to make gifts. Here’s the thing, so far, my results are about the equivalent of a crayon drawing done by a five year old. Personally speaking though, working on my contraption has made me as happy as a five year old. So can I give my horrible drawings to people? Making them has made me really happy, giddy in fact. I’m grinning and giggling to myself as I write this. And in looking at my results so far, I’m laughing out loud because they’re so bad. I want to give them out because they’ve just made me so happy. But seriously, they’re crap and no one is going to want them. Is it selfish of me to give people a gift that makes me way happier than the person I’m trying to make happy with my gift? I have to think about this. Ok, yes it is selfish. But I’m ok with being selfish. 🙂
I have never considered myself a blogger or writer. Yes you are reading this post on a blog right now, but I still wouldn’t label myself a blogger. (I tend not to like labeling myself or others, but that’s a post for another day.) For the most part, I post here for myself. Usually, it’s because I spent some time looking up how to do something or just thinking about some topic and I want to organize my thoughts. When I was in school, I remember a teacher telling me to write things to down to help me remember them. I might never look at the paper again, but the act of writing it down would help me remember. Posting to this blog is a lot like that. Every so often, I will come back here to look up how I did something. But it’s pretty rare.
Nov 24, 2014 Responsive WebpagesI’ve started using the twitter-bootstrap gem to get responsive webpages. It worked fine on my laptop and resized things correctly as I changed the size of the browser window. However, when I checked it on my phone, it was showing the full-size page. To fix this, I needed to add the following to the head in my layout.
Nov 19, 2014 WordPress UpdatesI had a very old computer (running FC3), hosting some very old wordpress blogs that got broken into. The good news is that I had backups of all the blogs. But since the computer was still working, though not allowed to be online, I could also copy the data directly from that computer. I ended up copying data from both places to get the blogs back up. Here’s what I did.
Nov 10, 2014 Favorite MemoryRecently, I saw a website where people were asked to tell their favorite memory. I was a little bummed because I didn’t have an immediate favorite come to mind. But after I thought about it, I had a few come to me. One that holds a very special place in my heart is from grade school. My Mom was very involved in our school and at times she would be the room mother for my class. Basically, she would come in during lunch to give the teacher a break from the students and vice versa. When she would watch my class, she would sometimes bring me a grilled cheese sandwich. I remember eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in school and I liked them a lot. I’ll admit to still eating one every now and then. However, I remember being really happy when my Mom brought me a hot sandwich. It made me feel very special. So much so, that to this day, I tend to equate hot food with love.
Nov 5, 2014 ChangesI deleted this post. I wrote it earlier today when I was mad at myself. I just realized how stupid it was.
Nov 2, 2014 My Oatmeal RecipeAfter many, many attempts, I have finally come up with a recipe for oatmeal that I like.
Nov 1, 2014 A RoastI cannot recall having ever cooked a big piece of red meat. I’ve made burgers (from ground beef) and chicken (breasts only), but not a roast or other thick steak. Since I may have possibly set myself up to invite people over for dinner, I thought I should probably find something to cook. I found a recipe for Pot Roast for Two and figured I’d give that a try. It’s currently in the oven and has about 3 more hours to go, so we’ll see how it turns out. I can say that it smells good so far.
Oct 29, 2014 Kickstart Changes from RHEL6 to RHEL7I’ve just started installing RHEL7 on some systems at work. I usually use a kickstart script to set everything up, but the syntax of the command has changed with RHEL7. Here’s the way to get the kickstart file from our satellite server using both RHEL6 and RHEL7.
Oct 22, 2014 Maybe UnstuckA few days ago I ordered the book, “The Art of Electronics”. Today, it arrived. I’ve heard that it’s a great book for learning practical electronics. I’ve been meaning to do some serious study of electronics for a while. With my job, I should know more than I actually do. So, I think I finally have my plan. I’m going to try to work my way through the book. Nothing drastic and I have no real time table. But I’m going to try to study like an hour a day. And to limit distractions, I think I’ll work in the library at work. I’m thinking this is also how I got started in learning Rails programming. I want to say it took me a few years before I could do anything usable. I’ll have to check my old notebooks for the exact dates. But there’s no deadline or anything that I need to hit. So I can take my time. And when I get a decent feel for things, hopefully, I’ll be able to make the game that’s been floating around in my head for a while. And once I start working on this, it will hopefully kick me in the butt to get moving on the rest of the stuff in my kitchen. Tomorrow I’m going to see a ballet. So perhaps I’ll start at the library on Friday. Or I’ll just wait until next week and start off on Monday.
Oct 21, 2014 StuckThe good news is that my kitchen is almost done. The bad news is that my kitchen is almost done. What’s left to do? I have to caulk around the windows, finish painting the trim around the big window and finish installing floor trim. Nope, not a lot to do. Why haven’t I done it? I don’t know. I did go to the store to try to buy the trim for the floor and I can’t find the same stuff that the contractor put in. That’s annoying. I was also thinking of installing another cabinet for storage. And I just found out that Ikea is discontinuing my kitchen cabinets. So if I want to buy it, I need to do it now. Already the first cabinet that I had picked out is no longer available. You’d think that would make me jump up and drive out to Ikea, but no, I haven’t done that.
Oct 18, 2014 Latest EventsEven though my cousin Annie’s birthday is in July, we celebrated in September with a hike at Starved Rock. It was a lovely day and I got some great pictures here.
Sep 12, 2014 To All Who Have Ever Received Email From MeI’m sorry. I’m sorry for my apostrophes being turned into question marks because of a stupid setting of Apple’s. I finally got a little time today and had a chance to figure out what was going on. If you go to System Settings – Keyboard – Text, there’s a selection called “Use smart quotes and dashes”. In my opinion, this should always default to off. But due to Apple’s arrogance, they had it on by default. So if you ever read my email on a non-Apple computer, all of my apostrophes would show as question marks. This bugged the heck out of me when I’d get a reply from someone and see all those question marks. So I finally took some time today to get rid of them. Yay!
Sep 2, 2014 Long Bike RideAs is quickly becoming a tradition for me, I took a long bike ride on Labor Day. I biked down to my Mom’s house with my brother Paul. We stuck around for a barbeque and then biked back in the early afternoon. The only bad part was Paul got a flat about five or six miles from our house. Aside from that, they were pretty good rides.
Aug 30, 2014 Calumet Bike Trail by Indiana DunesOne of the trails on my list to ride this summer was the Calumet Bike Trail, which is a 9 mile gravel trail by the Indiana Dunes. As I had nothing planned for this three-day weekend, I thought that I’d get up early and get out there to ride it. Part of my concern was that the only parking lot I saw was pretty small. I wanted to be sure that I’d get a space, so I figured I’d be better off with an early ride. I ended up getting there before 8am and was the only person there. I got on the trail and only did about 1/2 mile when I had to turn back. The trail was still very, very wet and completely submerged in places. While I really don’t mind getting muddy on bike rides, I actually felt that I was doing damage to the trail and just wasn’t enjoying it. And, as you can tell from the pictures below, I hesitate to even call it a trail. To me, it looked like tire tracks. As far as I can tell, this was not a well-maintained trail. It had no drainage, which is why there was all the standing water. And I think that gravel trails probably need to be groomed every so often. It didn’t look like much had been done to this trail in a while. So I think that I’m going to cross this one off my list. Now I’m also a little concerned about my plan to bike a gravel trail from Kankakee on my birthday. I may have to take a test ride and see what kind of shape that trail is in.
Aug 26, 2014 Deleting Autorun.inf FilesI don’t know why Windows 7 or the antivirus software I have, doesn’t let me delete autorun.inf files. To delete the file, do the following:
Aug 6, 2014 Wrapping It UpI need to get my kitchen finished because I want to move on to some other things. Over the past couple of days I’ve been:
Aug 3, 2014 SamplesI’ve spent the weekend reading all about letterpress printing. I’m not sure why this is suddenly fascinating to me, but it is. I think I like that it has big machinery associated with it, but you can also do it yourself on a much smaller scale. In the course of my reading and watching videos, I discovered that I also don’t really know much about paper. It’s everywhere, so I pretty much just take it for granted. Going off on that tangent led me to reading all about different papers. I finally came to this company French Paper, which is a family-owned company in Michigan that makes paper. While it’s cool that it’s been family-owned for six generations, what I really like about them is what they sell. Specifically, they sell sample packages of paper and a little booklet describing all their papers. To me, this is brilliant. I wish more companies would do this, explain what they sell or at least offer an inexpensive sample so I could see if it would work on one of my projects. Anyway, I’m now waiting for my arrival of:
Jul 21, 2014 Mavericks Terminal Copy/Paste Rich Text FormatAfter upgrading to OS X 10.9, I found that whenever I copy/pasted text from a terminal window to TextEdit or an email message, it would paste using the same colors/background as was in the terminal. In my case, this meant that the text was white on a gray background. This was annoying, since I just wanted to see the text. To fix this, enter the following into a terminal.
Jul 15, 2014 NFS and Files Owned by NobodyAfter upgrading a server to RHEL6, I found that if other RHEL6 computers tried to NFS-mount a shared directory, all files were owned by nobody:nobody. To fix this, edit the file /etc/idmapd.conf and add a Domain line, something like this:
Jul 12, 2014 Birthday PlanMy birthday is a few months away and I’m trying to plan what I would like to do. I like to do something different each year. Though for a few years, I went to a museum and a movie. Since the museum and movie were different each year, I let that count. This year I wanted to do something a little more different. First I thought about going on a trip someplace. But then I figured that spending the day by myself in a town where I didn’t know anyone would be depressing. Then I was reading a blog post about overnight bike trips and thought that maybe I’d do that. I looked at the stations served by Amtrak and found one that was about 62 miles from my house and another that was around 100. A little later I was reading another blog where they mentioned the century being the target ride of bikers. Sort of like many runners want to do a marathon in their lifetime, a lot of bikers would like to ride 100 miles. I was looking into training for a century and found that I don’t really have enough time before my birthday. So I let that go until I read something else about a metric century. That’s only around 62 miles. Remembering that the one Amtrak station was around 62 miles from my house, I thought this seemed like a good plan. A little more research and I found that there’s about 40 miles of bike path that I could use for the trip, which made it sound like a great plan. So I’ve decided that this year, I’m going to try to bike from Kankakee to Chicago, using the Wauponsee Glacial Trail and the Old Plank Trail. Of course, when I actually get into Chicago, I’ll be riding on the street, hopefully in bike lanes. But I think this could be a little challenge and quite a bit of fun. I rode around 57 miles one day last summer, though the last few miles were painful. I believe I have enough time before my birthday to get into better riding shape, so that the ride will be ok. And the thought of doing the ride by myself is slightly scary enough that I think it would be good for me. So while the exact details of the ride still need to be worked out, I basically have a plan. First training ride tomorrow!
Jul 7, 2014 BlanketsIn general, I’m not a great gift-giver. I’m probably not much of a gift-receiver either. I just think that if there’s something that I want, I’d go out and buy it. And if I don’t, then I probably don’t want it. If I’m giving someone a gift, I don’t want to give them more junk that they have to store. So my go-to gift of late has been flowers. They look pretty for a while and then you can just throw them away. Totally biodegradable. At times though, I might like to give a longer lasting gift. So I’ve been thinking about things that I have that I enjoy. The one thing that comes to mind for me is a blanket. I know it’s weird, but I really like a blanket. How would I describe the feeling of being wrapped in a blanket? I wouldn’t say it’s like getting a hug, because that’s sort of corny. However, I do think it’s just a feeling of being completely comfortable. Like how you feel when you’re hanging out with good friends or family members.
Jul 6, 2014 Tour de South SideSince I have cable (for six more days), I was able to get up early yesterday and this morning to watch the Tour de France. It’s always very pretty to see the countryside and villages they ride through. And this year, the first couple of stages are in England, so that was neat too. However, after about four hours of watching today, I decided that I had spent enough time on the couch and I needed to get out. First I thought about riding the lakefront trail up to the north side, but quickly realized it would be crowded and not fun to ride. So instead, I headed south, down to the new Lake Shore Drive path. My plan was to ride down at a pretty fast pace and then take my time returning, stopping to take pictures on the way. I dubbed my ride the Tour de South Side, in honor of the Tour de France which inspired it. The other great thing was that I ran into two people I knew on the tour. Near Hyde Park, I saw my old boss biking, which was great to see. We had a very short chat. And then as I was close to home, my brother rode by. All in all, it was a great ride.
Jul 4, 2014 Windows Disk Mounting Across SubnetsI have some windows computers at work that I use for backups. I recently moved one to another building that’s on a different subnet. Trying to mount the disk using the name of the computer didn’t work. The fix was to use the ip address instead of the name of the computer. For example, mounting \eshop\backups didn’t work. But mounting \192.168.2.30\backups, worked just fine.
Jun 26, 2014 Scrolling Graph in ProcessingI want to create a graph where the old data scrolls off the left side of the window while the newest data is plotted on the right side of the window. Eventually, I’m going to use this for a display to plot the readings of a temperature probe. But for now, I just want to see if I can make it work using Processing. So instead of trying to read from the serial port, I’m just going to plot a bunch of random points.
Jun 25, 2014 Arduino and ProcessingI’m getting started with collecting data using an Arduino board, but displaying it using Processing. Eventually, I want do collect the data from a Raspberry PI board, but I’m starting with an Arduino because I think it will be easier.
Jun 23, 2014 Cabinets InSpent a couple of hours finishing my cabinet installation last week. The last ones went in on Sunday morning. The Ikea directions were a bit of a pain, but once I got the hang of it, it was easy. My biggest problem was the blister that I got on my hand from using the screwdriver so much.
Jun 23, 2014 Testing PyROOT is WorkingIf you’ve compiled ROOT to use python, you need to find out if it’s working correctly. The following code will do that:
Jun 15, 2014 Another Cabinet DownI went to Home Depot with Julie today. She wanted to buy paint, I needed to get an assortment of wood screws and a board to put behind the sink cabinet. With that board, I was able to install the cabinet. I also put the fronts on and it looks ok.
Jun 15, 2014 A MistakeLast weekend, I wanted to install the new track lighting I bought to go over the sink. When I went to attach the bit that gets hooked up to the electrical box, I realized that I used a regular box in the ceiling when I should have used a ceiling box. This just seems dumb to me and I remember installing the box and not thinking much about it. I basically just bought a bunch of deep, square boxes and put one wherever I wanted outlets or switches. But the part of the light that attaches to the ceiling is designed to go onto a smaller box. When I discovered this, I just assumed that I’d be able to get an adapter of some type to allow me to hook things up. I looked at both Ace and Home Depot and couldn’t find anything like this. So then I tried to come up with something else that would work. The problem was, anything I came up with required me to remove the drywall ring (I don’t know what it’s really called) that was already installed. This meant that I also screwed up the drywall around the box, as everything had already been taped. After much messing around I finally got things up and working. Unfortunately, I also have to fix the drywall around the box.
Jun 10, 2014 Changing Password EncryptionPer my earlier post about changing the encryption methods of passwords, I had a chance to test out the directions I had to see if they really worked. In fact, they worked perfectly. And to check that things actually changed, I took a look at the crypted password before and after I logged in.
May 30, 2014 Centennial Trail in RomeovilleI decided to go for a ride after work today since the weather was so nice. I also thought that I’d try a new trail, since I was doing a solo ride. After a little research, I decided to do part of the Centennial Trail in the Lemont/Romeoville area. I think this is part of the I & M trails, but I’m not sure. Anyway, my intention was to part at Schneider’s Passage and ride from there. My first bust was that there were only four parking spaces there and they were all taken. So I drove back to something called the Isle a la Cache Museum. No idea what this is, but there was plenty of parking and it was only about a two block ride to the first place I was going to park. The only drawback was that I had to cross Romeo Road, which is a pretty busy street where people drive pretty fast. Fortunately, it was around 7pm and traffic wasn’t that bad.
May 29, 2014 Rails Program UpgradesI had a computer that was hosting a number of simple rails programs that I needed to upgrade. So, I updated everything and reloaded the mysql data and everything was good. That is, until I tried to login. I had a number of unsuccessful attempts and just assumed it was because I forgot the password. There were actually three programs that I had to reinstall and after the third one, I realized that I hadn’t forgotten the password but that something had changed.
May 26, 2014 Oven HoodSpent the last weekend working on the installation of the hood over the oven. This turned out to be much more difficult than I anticipated. First off, I wasn’t sure exactly how high it should have been installed. There seem to be a number of different opinions out there. I thought I had measured this all out before the drywall went up, but I stupidly didn’t write this information down. In the (very poorly written) instructions for the hood, there was no mention of how high it should go. All I found was on a sticker inside the hood that said it should be more than 24″ from the cooktop. So I put it in a little higher than that.
May 15, 2014 Fixing Carriage Return/New Line ProblemsSometimes if I open a text file in vi, the text shows up like this:
May 14, 2014 Must Plan or It Won’t HappenI’ve been doing really good this summer with biking. The 30daysofbiking in April started things off well and my trips have been tons of fun. Unfortunately, Bike the Drive at the end of the month is my last planned ride I have. I am old enough to know that if I don’t plan things, they aren’t going to happen. So here is a list of rides I’d like to do this summer. They’re just about all in the midwest, so I should have no problem getting to them.
May 12, 2014 And it’s overSo much for saying that I was having a good month. I thought I’d finish off the electrical work today and hook up the last outlets. All was going well until I turned the power back on. I’ve set things up so that in each box, the outlets on the left were on one circuit and the outlets on the right were in another. I have gcfi outlets in the first box where the power comes up through the basement. So it’s easy for me to turn off one circuit or another.
May 11, 2014 Good Month!I started this month with my trip to New York City for the Five Boro Bike Tour. I posted the pictures that I took here:
Apr 22, 2014 Ruby/Rails UpgradesI have a few apps running on rails 3.2.12 and ruby 1.9.2. Since I need to make some changes to them, I thought I’d update them to rails 4.1 and ruby 2.1. I first upgraded the apps to rails 4.0 and ruby 2.0. That worked fine. Now I want to upgrade to ruby 2.1. First I’m doing it on my laptop. Here is how I compiled and installed it.
Apr 15, 2014 MistakeSince I came back a day before I planned, I had some time to work on my house on Monday. So I decided to paint my kitchen. After a little hiccup where the paint I bought was yellow and not white (said white on the can), I got started. It didn’t take too long, but I did find a rather large mistake I made when we installed the window. I think I should have raised it up a little because there’s about a 1/2″ gap along the top edge.
Apr 15, 2014 Road Trip!Took another mini vacation over the weekend and drove to Washington DC. Why? First reason was the State of the Map US conference. They had an “Intro to Using OpenStreetMap” tutorial that I wanted to attend. Then I found out that it was going to be peak cherry blossoms during the same weekend. I’ve always wanted to see that, so I made the crazy drive. I drove to Perrysburg Ohio (close to Toledo) after work on Thursday and spent the night in a hotel. Then did the rest of the drive on Friday. Since it rained from the time I started until about an hour outside of DC, it wasn’t the best ride. However, once I got to DC, the weather was fantastic, around 80 degrees. I checked in to my hotel and jumped on my bike to find the cherry blossoms. They did not disappoint. My pictures are here.
Apr 6, 2014 Vacation!Drove out to Cape Cod and Boston with my sister this past week. She attended the National Science Teachers Association conference and I just went to hang out. We drove so we could take our bikes and do a little biking while we were out there. We both also signed up for 30 Days of Biking, so we had to ride each day. The drive out was very long, but we had really great weather, which was nice. We were also in Cape Cod in the off season, so there weren’t very many people around. The disadvantages were that most things were still closed, but that was ok.
Mar 29, 2014 Hood VentOne thing I had to finish before my awesome drywalling party was to install the vent in the wall for my oven hood. I had to drill a 6″ hole in my brick house.
Mar 29, 2014 DrywallFinally got the pictures up from the drywalling party. They are here. I owe my niece Abby a movie for being a fabulous photographer. Words cannot express my gratitude to everyone who came and helped out. I love you all more than you can possibly know. I got most of you to sign the back of one of my cabinets to be a part of my kitchen forever. I’ll try to catch those who didn’t sign it before I hang the cabinet, but if I don’t it’s ok. You all are the people who mean the most to me in the world.
Mar 27, 2014 InsaneIt’s been a while since I posted, but not for lack of activity. In fact, I can’t remember a time when I have been so busy. Things got so much out of control that I think it contributed to me getting sick earlier in the week. So I decided to take some action and start saying no to some things.
Mar 13, 2014 InjuryI don’t know what I did to my thumb, but yesterday when I woke up, it was very sore. And as of today, it was definitely swollen. The picture below sort of shows my issue. Though, after a day of advil and keeping it cool with snow from outside, it has gotten a little better. At least it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it hurt this morning. I can move it a bit more and I think it’s a little less swollen. It’ll be interesting to see how it reacts to all the drilling through brick that I’ll be doing tomorrow.
Mar 12, 2014 Open DNS with Windows 7I had a problem with a windows 7 computer that was resolving dns.
Feb 23, 2014 Onward!I got a late start yesterday, but got a few tasks that needed to be done taken care of. First, I went to Menards and found that they had the piece to finish the vent in the kitchen. So I went from this:
Feb 18, 2014 Quebec and Montréal TripWent to Quebec City and Montréal with my sister Julie and Mom. Pictures are here:
Feb 7, 2014 Rails Constantize MethodI learned a new inflector method the other day, constantize. Here’s the method I used it in.
Feb 7, 2014 Paperclip and Nested AttributesI have an app that has a model (called cases) that has_many documents associated with it. I have had no problems in creating the case and the associated documents. I had quite a bit of trouble when I was trying to replace one of the documents with and updated one. But I finally got that straightened out. Not sure if this is how a real programmer would do it, but it works for me.
Feb 5, 2014 Hate Things that Depend on WhitespaceI’m writing a rails app and was trying to use a scope with a variable. My code looked like this:
Jan 30, 2014 My Day OffMy employer has deemed that I can no longer accumulate any more vacation days until I use some. So, I’m off today and tomorrow. Today was a pretty good day. I filled my entire recycling bin with paper that I shredded. And still have a couple of more bags to put out. I even bought a new shredder to help me since this is a job that I had been putting off for years. And by getting rid of the paper, I made a dent in cleaning up my bedroom. Now I just need to start going through old computer equipment and recycling that.
Jan 25, 2014 Back At ItBack to work on my kitchen today. The hood that I ordered came in so I could try to determine where the outlet for it should go. I’m glad I bought it because I had it way too low. I found this out by eyeballing it, since the hood did not come with any installation instructions. I looked online and found that a hood should be 30″-36″ above the stove. Then, I measured where the power on the hood was and it was about 10″ above the bottom of the hood. I had to move my power outlet about 10″ higher. Next I put in a board so I’d have something to screw into to hold the hood up. I’m pretty happy that except for the hole for the vent, I think I have everything done for the hood. I also bought some insulation to put between the 2x4s in the wall. And I finished the wall on the back of the house. All I have to do now is put in an outlet for the dishwasher, which I completely forgot to do. Install the insulation. And cut the breakfast bar area to the right height and I’m READY FOR DRYWALL! Barring any more disasters, I’m thinking this will happen next month. Yay! Here’s how things look now.
Jan 2, 2014 Using TileMillNeed to go to http://metro.teczno.com/ and download the osm.pbf file for Chicago. Then import it:
Jan 2, 2014 TilemillI’m trying to make a map for a conference and thought I’d use TileMill. As far as I can tell, the first step (after installing TileMill) is to install postgresql. Here’s where I am with that.
Jan 1, 2014 Getting StartedAt this rate, I’ll read 365 books this year. 🙂 Anyway, had a lovely New Year’s Day, where I watched some hockey and just sat and read. I finished Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I don’t really understand why, but I liked this book a lot. I guess it’s because I liked the characters and the weird things that happened to them, but I can’t really say for sure. This is now the second book by Murakami that I’ve read. I read 1Q84 a couple of years ago and liked that one as well. So I guess I’m going to add Murakami to William Gibson and Isabel Allende as authors that I really like.
Jan 1, 2014 Xmas with the FamilyJust got the Xmas photo from my bro. We look pretty good.
Jan 1, 2014 To 2014I’m hoping that 2014 will be as good of a year as 2013 was. But I like to set specific goals/resolutions/whatever you want to call them. So here are some things I’d like to accomplish in the coming year.
Jan 1, 2014 My Yearly Wrapup2013 was a pretty good year for me. My health is good, I bought a new car and I’m pretty happy overall. So I have no real complaints. I set some goals for the year, let’s take a look at how I did.