-
Board Repairs
I thought I should try to fix the holes in the one board I made the other day. My idea was to mix up a bunch of glue and sawdust. Then try to fill and cover all the holes with this mixture. Here’s how the board looked after I filled them all in. I wasn’t too careful about making it smooth because I knew that I’d have to run it through the planer again to smooth it.
-
Board #3
Here are all the boards I’ve made. The first is at the top, second in the middle and the last one at the bottom.
-
Early Lesson
I’ve now completed two boards out of old lathe. The picture below shows part of both of them.
-
Recycling Begins
I saved a ton of wood (mainly lathe) when remodeling my house and finally decided to get started on doing something with it. My first issue came last week when I tried to run both my planer and wet/dry vac on the same circuit. I kept blowing it. So on Friday, I ran a new 20 amp circuit to right above the planer. After that, things ran smoothly.
-
The Magic of Thinking Big
The title of this blog post is the name of a book that I just finished reading. It was recommended by a blog I read, though I no longer remember which one. It’s a basic self-help book by David Schwartz about believing in yourself. However, it’s clearly written for people in business and especially for salespeople. Note how I said salespeople there. One of the first things I noticed in the book was how it was pretty much geared toward men. In reading the first few chapters, I noticed that women were only talked about as wives for business men. This made me look at the publication date and unsurprisingly, it was 1959. I decided to continue to read and just made a mental note remember that date when I found little things that bugged me.
-
Alpine on a Mac
I have just installed alpine on two different macs. On one, I used macports and on the other homebrew. Both seem to work just fine. I was also able to set up imap to our mail server without any problems. I did run into a couple of issues, but fortunately, have been able to find solutions to all of them.
-
Time Machine Transfer Issues with Office
I bought a new imac and wanted to transfer an account from an old imac. I created a new admin account and then used the migration assistant to transfer the old account. The old imac was running office 2008. We now are using office 2011. I installed office 2011 using the admin account and it seemed to work fine. When the user logged in to her account and tried to start Excel, it would just continually crash. I tried reinstalling Office 2011 as the user, but that didn’t help.
-
Starting Off
My 2015 has started pretty well. I’ve already built myself a new workbench, which makes me very happy. And since I was about to buy one, I saved myself a couple hundred dollars as well. This has also inspired me to get started on another cabinet for my kitchen and the kitchen table.
-
To 2015
Happy New Year!
-
A Closer Look at Finances
As part of my year in review and upcoming year plans, I like to take a hard look at my finances and see how things are going. This year, instead of just looking at the past year, I’ve decided to take a look at the past decade…really the past eight years or so. Why? Because that’s when I started doing all my finances on my computer and they’re all in my banking software. And, of late, I’ve discovered the Mr. Money Mustache blog that does a really good job of talking about the way I’ve been trying to live my life.
-
2014 Wrapup
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.
-
Making Xmas Gifts Fun
This 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.
-
Forms and Tables
I 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.
-
Compiling Bootstrap
I’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.
-
Sloppy
I 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.
-
Bootstrap
I’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.
-
Talk Too Much
I 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.
-
PHP Notes
Mainly 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.
-
Holiday Work
My 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.
-
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. 🙂 -
Why Do I write
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.
-
Responsive Webpages
I’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.
-
WordPress Updates
I 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.
-
Favorite Memory
Recently, 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.
-
Changes
I deleted this post. I wrote it earlier today when I was mad at myself. I just realized how stupid it was.