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Centennial Trail in Romeoville
I 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.
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Rails Program Upgrades
I 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.
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Oven Hood
Spent 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.
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Fixing Carriage Return/New Line Problems
Sometimes if I open a text file in vi, the text shows up like this:
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Must Plan or It Won’t Happen
I’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.
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And it’s over
So 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.
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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:
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Ruby/Rails Upgrades
I 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.
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Mistake
Since 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.
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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.
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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.
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Hood Vent
One 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.
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Drywall
Finally 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.
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Insane
It’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.
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Injury
I 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.
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Open DNS with Windows 7
I had a problem with a windows 7 computer that was resolving dns.
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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:
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Quebec and Montréal Trip
Went to Quebec City and Montréal with my sister Julie and Mom. Pictures are here:
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Rails Constantize Method
I learned a new inflector method the other day, constantize. Here’s the method I used it in.
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Paperclip and Nested Attributes
I 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.
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Hate Things that Depend on Whitespace
I’m writing a rails app and was trying to use a scope with a variable. My code looked like this:
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My Day Off
My 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.
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Back At It
Back 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.
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Using TileMill
Need to go to http://metro.teczno.com/ and download the osm.pbf file for Chicago. Then import it:
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Tilemill
I’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.