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blog

Hi

by Jonathan 4 September 2008 Outdoors

Hi. Sorry that I haven’t had any updates here for a while. I’ve been somewhat busy lately and have been letting this slide. I still have to get the vacation pictures off of my camera and consolidated.

Jenny and I have been taking sailing lessons at Moraine Sailing Club at Moraine State Park. They’re good people. I have one skill left to demonstrate, and that is the man overboard (MOB) response drill. We don’t actually have to pick up a person–the instructor along for the drill tosses a cushion out at some point and calls out "man overboard!" The skipper then must enter into a broad reach to pick up speed and get a stable course. He or she then comes-about in a 270-degree "chicken jibe", aiming to put the boat downwind of the MOB by two to three boat lengths. Once there, he or she luffs-up toward the MOB, finally letting all sails luff as the MOB is approached on the windward side of the boat. Why the windward? Well, for one thing, if the MOB was approached on the leeward side, the boat may be blown on top of the MOB.

We’ve been having a good time with that stuff. A couple of weeks ago was the last session that I could make it to this season. I only had the MOB and the capsize recovery drills to complete. Unfortunately, due to some delays doing the capsize recovery drills, I didn’t get a chance to do the MOB drills.

Capsize recovery, you say? Yes. We went out in pairs on Sunfish (small dinghy-style lateen-rigged sailboat), then had to intentionally capsize the boat, recover the boat, and resume sailing. We each had to do this twice–once as the crew and once as the helmsman. By the time I got out, it was me and another bigger guy, and we had a boat that already had its hull structure partially flooded from previous drills. Let me just say that it was an adventure doing our two drills. It was a good skill to practice, though, so I think it was well worth it.

Since then, Jenny and I have been busy with all sorts of things. We had some family obligations to attend to, and spent some time doing some bike riding up at Presque Isle and on the Yough River Trail. Last weekend, we finally did our annual Connellsville -> Ohiopyle round-trip ride. We hadn’t done a long ride in a little while, and our knees were killing us by the time we got home, but it was a great ride.

Now we’re getting ready to depart for a little journey–I’ll have pictures posted of that when we return. It should be fun!

In other news, I think that it is time to drop the DirecTV service. I love it, but I don’t think that we use it nearly enough anymore. We’ve used it only a little over the past eight months or so. We’ve used it more to watch stuff on local channels than we have to watch network TV, so I think it’s time. We probably use it most often to listen to XM Radio in the house, so I think we might get an XM Radio subscription–we’ll see.

Well, that’s about all for now.

jonathan

Tagged as: blog, sailing

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I did it!

by Jonathan 9 June 2008 Technology

So, I finally did it. Here it is–Blog V3. Let me know if you have any problems. I’ll be adding some stuff in the near future, too. There are a few missing things right now (links, a few old pages didn’t migrate correctly, and the twitter status block is not there yet). Also, if you had an account on the old blog, you’ll probably need to create another one here. Sorry about that. I promise that I’ll try to stop jumping among software packages.

jonathan

Tagged as: blog, programming, sysadmin

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Blog Version 3 Almost Ready

by Jonathan 8 June 2008 Technology

Well, Blog V3 is almost ready. I will probably make the switch soon. I’ve been using Movable Type on here for a number of months, and it has worked well. It hasn’t been as easy for me to extend as I thought it would be, though. It also hasn’t proven able to handle other websites as easily as it handles this blog. I don’t like having to maintain multiple packages all aimed at doing essentially the same thing (content management), so I think I’m going to bid adieu to Movable Type. I’ve already moved one other site that I maintain over to the new software (Drupal), and it has been running well. Drupal is well-suited for that particular site, and it looks like it will also handle a general blog/informational site well, too. I’ve been having some fun learning more about CSS as I work on the theme for the new site. Check it out at the link above, or just wait until it gets posted here. It should be fun, in any case.

jonathan

Tagged as: blog, programming, sysadmin

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Blog Version 3!

by Jonathan 31 May 2008 Technology

For the techie types out there, I’ve been working on Blog Version 3. I’m playing with a software package called Drupal to host it. If you’re interested in clicking-around on it and taking a look at how it works, here’s the URL to the test site: Blog Sandbox.

Tagged as: blog, php, programming, Technology

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Busy!

by Jonathan 24 April 2008 House and Home

Wow. It’s been a busy week! Last weekend, we moved our blog to a new hosting company from my old servers. Self-management has a lot of advantages, but some pretty significant ones for a site that is starting to get some more traffic (lack of backups, restrictions on bandwidth, etc.).

This week I’ve been working sound for a local high school production of Beauty and the Beast. They’re doing a great job with the show, but it has been a lot of work stuffed into a pretty short amount of time. The show opens tonight. I expect that it will be pretty good. I hope that they draw some good crowds.

I’m working at home today, which is a great thing when one has an old house like we do. I removed the pin that I had keeping the front window from riding up in its track and opened it, brought my stuff out onto the porch, turned on a little bit of music inside, and now I’m working from the comfort of our porch. This is another reason why I like our neighborhood–I am sitting here working, watching the world go by, saying hello to neighbors, and just getting a chance to enjoy the sun and the fresh air while doing actual work. This makes me wish that we had a rooftop deck on our building. I’d work outside as much as I possibly could if we did.

Spring is a great time for having an old house. There are old plantings that are coming back to life again, old trees that are putting out leaves, new flowers that are coming up for the first time after being planted over six months ago, and so much more. I took Jenny to work today, and I got home just in time to see the street sweeper heading up our side of the street. I parked my car on the opposite side so that the driver could get all the way up our side of the street without obstructions. Our neighbor Rob heard him coming, too, so he moved his cars out of the way. Now we have a nice, clean curb. Yay! It took a while to get the city to start doing this again at all–now we just need to convince them to come up with some sort of schedule. Though it might be informal, many of us would be hapy to park on the other side of the street one day every month so that we can have the street sweeper come through and get as much of the curb as possible. And speaking of interesting sights, my Babcia and our family friend Mrs. Krol just drove past the house here. I waved, but I don’t think that they saw me. Then I saw our friend Nancy walking home after dropping off their car at the local garage. Now I see some other neighbors coming home from Shop’n'Save with their little folding grocery cart thing. I like living here.

Well, I need to get some lunch. I’m going to try a little hot dog shop run by some other family acquaintances out on 366 in Kinloch, then I need to pick up some more Rymer’s Lemon Blennd (yes, there are two n’s in there). I had a real craving for some after an event last weekend, and now I’ve been enjoying it during the rehearsals for this show. We just ran out, so I want to grab some more. If I have enough time, I’m also going to do a quick run around the yard with the mower–it is supposed to rain this Saturday, which would be the only day I’d have available to do it this weekend.

Off to lunch.

jonathan

Tagged as: blog, house, neighborhood

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Moved to a new host for the blog here

by Jonathan 19 April 2008 Technology

Some readers might find this even more boring than the rest of this blog (I recently had a co-worker find the blog and, after a mind-bending session of reading it, tells me that, “it must be the most g-rated thing I’ve ever read!”), but we’ve just completed the move to a new host for the blog and image gallery. We’re now hosted with Pair, a Pittsburgh company that happens to host some quite large customers. They have great packages and good pricing, and the feature set allows me to do just about everything that I need or want to do. There are some things that I’ve had to change to make things work, but they’re mostly from the administrative side.

This relieves our little server here at home from the traffic that this site generates, and also provides enterprise-class service and backups, which I just couldn’t do on my own. I think that this will be a good move in the long run.

If you notice anything going strange, please email me and I’ll get to work on it quickly. I know that there is a problem with the “random image” block on the main blog page–I am working on that now.

Good stuff….

jonathan

Tagged as: blog, sysadmin

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Blog software updated!

by Jonathan 16 April 2008 Technology

I updated the blog software here today. I’m getting everything rev’ed-up in order to install a plugin called “Custom Fields.” I’ve been thinking about and working on a site to hold reviews of products and services that Jenny and I use, and I wanted the functionality that the Custom Fields plugin provides. Yes, I probably could write one myself, but then I need to worry about maintenance and everything else, and I’d have to take time away from other things to work on it. It does cost a few bucks, but I think it is worth it. We’ll have to see how it works.

jonathan

Tagged as: blog

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Twitter and you

by Jonathan 14 March 2008 Technology

I’ve started to play a bit with a service called Twitter. The basic premise is that the service keeps track of short (<160 characters or so), one-line updates on what one is doing at the time. They intentionally make it trivial to update, allowing updates from text messages from cell phones, many different chat clients, and (of course) through a web interface. The text message update system seemed most intriguing to me, since I almost always have my phone on me. This seemed like an interesting way to provide some sort of “status” that multiple people could see. Twitter supports “following” people. A follower gets updates (text message, email, chat, or manually through the web interface) on the followed person’s status in near-real-time. I thought this was all pretty neat, so I decided to give it a shot and see whether I can keep it up long enough to make it useful. We’ll see how that goes. For the moment, you can find my status in the right-hand sidebar here. If Jenny joins up with this at some point, I’ll add one for her, too.

jonathan

Tagged as: blog, twitter

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Broken blog stuff at houseblogs.net

by Jonathan 2 December 2007 Technology

Argh. I wondered why traffic from houseblogs.net had dropped-off recently. It turns out that, while adding a link to a feed that only shows new house-related entries to their site, there was a bit of a typo that caused them to not receive any entries at all. I noticed and fixed this today.

For the record, the folks over at houseblogs.net are good people, and I love using that resource. Check it out if you’re interested in reading about other house-working people. Some houses there are old, some are new(er), and some are not even finished yet. It’s a neat site.

jonathan

Tagged as: blog, misc

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Having far too much fun

by Jonathan 22 November 2007 Technology

I’m liking this software a lot. I’m having far too much fun playing with it and adding features.

I fixed some of the image placement issues that were bugging me in the “Cool!” post. Now I’m working on seeing if I can add the formatting fix as a plugin, which would make it a lot easier to add images from our gallery with formatting that I like.