I put off upgrading to Snow Leopard because I didn't want to risk my web apps. Last week, I decided it was about time.
I checked on my backups (check), then Thursday morning, I started the process.
The basics went well.
When I started to check my web apps, things weren't so rosy. The database wasn't there. Oops. Or so I thought.
I then charged in with every random thought that came to me. The result was reinstalling MySQL, php, phpMyAdmin, retrieving my databases from Time Capsule (not straightforward, but thank God for Internet help pages), downloading a new version of CodeIgniter, and then laboriously updating every CI app. But only as I need them.
Back to normal. But a circuitous route to just where I was.
Has anyone found an online financial software package that allows you to add your own accounts and transactions?
I've tried three of them; mint, wesabe, and quicken online. These all depend on handing your security credentials to them and they will pull the data for you. I want a piece of software that doesn't violate the basic rules of security and lets me add accounts that I want... importing my old information would also be a plus.
All of this brought on by the fact that Intuit hasn't put out a new version of Quicken for Mac in almost three years.
There's a Street Fighter 4 machine near work. I went and played.During one best of 5 contest, I won a match, then lost one, then won one, then lost one, then lost the tie breaker. On a hunch, I asked my challenger if he was letting me win. I was losing big, but also winning big, and something smelled fishy."Are you letting me win, or am I getting lucky?""Hm?""Are you letting me win, or am I getting lucky?""I-"I realized he probably didn't speak English and dropped it.The next match began and I think he understood what I was asking. He said, haltingly."I, uh, am letting, uh, you win, yes."I knew it.
Things I like about vox:
Integration with 3rd party sites when posting is really great.
The community is great.
The concept of the neighborhood is great.
I really like the people that started it, and where they've gone with it.
I love the idea of the vox question of the day.
I love how it makes blogging less about the technology and more about actually connecting you to others.
What I'm not digging:
Vox is the one site I don't own. I've been making websites since 1995, blogging since 1998, and I tried to do it alone wherever I could. I wrote my own CMS, I started my own team blog that I was really proud of, I design every last pixel of my sites (a recent notable exception being those neat famfamfam silk icons that the entire internet uses because they're just so perfect), and on and on.
And it's sort of bugged me that this site wasn't my own. I find myself not writing as openly and as proudly as I used to on my own domains, which is nothing against vox, it's my own deal. For whatever reason, I've been daydreaming about bringing it in-house again.
I'll miss everything about vox except this nagging feeling that it's time for me to go.
I don't care that Obama is black, I'm just excited that the country is behind him. Seen those approval ratings?
I'm about to watch The Wrestler. Hear it's good.
I didn't spend much time on the web this weekend and it's been a great weekend. This is not a coincidence.
Spring is coming.
Sighted this last night. Can't say for sure they were originally made for the movie, but this predates Firefly by at least 5 years. Joss Whedon wrote the screenplay for Alien: Resurrection, by the way.
I have just begun reading/listening-to William Least Heat-Moon's book Roads to Quoz. I picked it up because I had so enjoyed his first book, Blue Highways. My mom gave it to me in the early 1980's. That book tickled my fancy because the premise is the author's circumnavigating the United States. And using the smaller roads, the ones marked in blue on road maps. Starting from Missouri, he first had to get to the coast, visiting his Scottish ancestor's grave in South Carolina. Native American that seeks his European heritage.
When I saw Roads to Quoz, I added to my basket. Didn't know the word quoz, but I figured all would be revealed. And in the opening section, he talked about his fascination with the 17th letter of the alphabet (Q), his wife with a similar obsession (so much that he calls her "Q"), and finally quoz. It is to him a curious wonder, one unexpected and not sought after as much as noticed. With this preamble, he and Q set off towards the Arkansas mountains and I traveled along.
The next day, I decided to check for multiple meanings of quoz, and possibly for its etymology. Google is as good a choice as any. The first six entries recapitulated Least Heat-Moon's definition. The seventh was a link to an economics site. It was Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds from 1848. Economics? 1848? So I linked over and ended up in chapter 13. While the book is best known for the economic bubbles (the South Seas bubble and tulipomania), chapter 13 talks about the catch-phrases of mid-century London.
Quoz! was a sure fire laugh riot.
Following that was "What a shocking bad hat!" [Ed. Anyone watch the credits after House, M.D.? "That's some bad hat, Harry!"] This one derived from a hatter seeking election in Southwark, who courted voters by saying "What a shocking bad hat you have got; call at my warehouse, and you shall have a new one!" It is unreported whether he won or not.
The next all-purpose line was "Hookey Walker," from a song lyric, later shortened to "Walker!"
After Walker! lost popularity came the anonymously created "There he goes with his eye out" or ".... her eye out."
And a host of others, trailing along
- "Has your mother sold her mangle?"
- "Flare up!", an exceptionally long-lived favorite. The newspaper named Flare Up! folded when the phrase lost favor.
- "Does you mother know you're out?" Good for young men with a high opinion of themselves.
- Then there was "WHO are YOU?," a phrase that could arise naturally, to much merriment.
- "Cherry ripe!" from a song.
- "Tom and Jerry."
- The poetic "The sea, the sea!"
- "Jim Crow" from a vaudeville minstrel song.
Whatever. Our age isn't afflicted with such limited powers of expression. We're cool and have been since the '40's. Ish. Wassup, anyways? You know? Snap! Totally! Talk to the hand. Dyno-mite!
Help, I'm drowning.............
Deer hunting this year was my second and my niece Rebecca's first. Last year, I got the only deer. A lowly spike horn.
This year, brother-in-law Mike offered me the use of his 10-foot stand. Last month, we'd moved it to behind the shack/lodge, about 100 yards. Compared to last year, the deer hunting experience was much different. Rather than looking through a 100-yard tunnel through the trees, I was up in the air (cooled by same) with a 350 degree viewpoint.
Saturday morning, I headed out alone at 6:30 AM. Central Standard Time. Talk about cold. Minus 2 degrees. I climbed the tripod and settled in. I stayed till just after 9:00, my toes starting to lose feeling. I had seen nothing but heard one nearby shot.
Back at the shack, everyone else was already in. Brother Mike was the shooter and we had the job of bringing his 8-point buck in. My niece Megan (planning to pursue a job as a physician's assistant) began learning how to field dress.
[Ed. I don't know for sure, but I suspect field dressing a moose is just like field dressing a deer. Just on a grander scale. Might take more skill not to screw up in a smaller work space. Just sayin'.]
At 2:30, we were out the door. It was up from minus-2, but under 10. I sat in the tree about 40 minutes. I was watching NW from my stand, right where the bait was on the road, right where the deer path was visible in the light snow. I glanced over NE to see a deer looking straight at me. At least straight toward my stand. I was higher than a deer would normally look.
Took me a while to confirm that the deer had antlers and to move verrrrrry slooooooowly to my right and raise the rifle to my shoulder. In turning right, I changed my angle just enough that I aligned the two trees near the deer with another tree fairly close to me. Most of the deer was behind the trees. So I aimed like my father-in-law had told me: right where the deer probably would emerge. When it did, I shot. I looked out and saw nothing. But the deer had gone about 10 yards further away from me and expired.
There I was without a hunting knife and without the expertise to use one. But the good news was that I had a good reason to get in out of the cold.
Opening day, two deer and the rest of the season, nothing.
Just before we headed south back to civilization, my father-in-law told me that if I kept up (two seasons, one shot each, two deer), everyone would start calling me "One-Shot Jack." High praise.
I'm doing a little modest woodworking. One project, for example, is extending the molding around the opening for the clothes washer and dryer. When we replaced our dead dryer, we found that the smallest full-size dryer is larger than our 7-year old one, just enough bigger that the bifold door scrapes the dryer door when it is opened.
While the full-credit solution would be to tear out the (non-load-bearing wall) with the door and move it out a couple of inches, we're not going to do that. It's too big a job for me to do well, and too small to deal with finding someone competent and oversee them to do the work.
Two solutions occurred to me: one is rounding the edge of the existing doors so that the doors wouldn't touch each other; the other is removing the molding, installing 3/4 " wood around the door frame, then putting the molding back on. Best of all, would be to combine the methods: molding extender and rounded doors.
So, what do I need to do? The wood I found is the right thickness, but a little too wide. And too long. So the order of events is this:
- rip the extender wood to the right width
- prime and paint the extender wood so that it will match the existing moulding
- miter the ends of the extender wood
- nail up the top piece of extender wood
- cut the vertical pieces of extender wood to length
- nail up the vertical extenders
- nail back up the original moulding.
What could be simpler? And I have table saw for ripping, a work table for painting and priming, a miter saw for mitering and cutting to length, and a router (with router table) for rounding door edges and extender pieces that don't fit neatly over the existing mop board. Virtual workshop to the rescue.
The problem is swapping out the unused equipment to make room for what I'm doing. First I haul out my excellent work table. Table saw and extension cord out and set up. Rip like crazy. Put up table saw, sweep, and put out drop cloths for priming and painting. Set the painted pieces aside, remove the drop cloths, and set up the miter saw. Get out the shop vacuum to clean up the sawdust. Miter ends. Utter foul imprecations when I find I've cut the pieces too short. Back to Lowe's to get more wood. Swap out the miter saw and swap in the table saw. Swap out table saw, swap in the painting workspace. Wait the requisite time. Swap out painting context, swap in miter saw. Install top piece. Discover, unpleasantly, that the vertical pieces will have to be routed to fit over the mop board; or I'll have to remove the mop board (and the quarter round cover the hard-wood edges), install the vertical, then trim the mop board to fit. Choose Plan A, and ratiocinate a plan to get the routing right the first time. So I don't have to buy even more extender wood and start over.......
Compare this thrashing to a real workshop with the various tools in their places (with bright shiny faces), me just walking place to place, all the equipment attached to a central dust collection system.
Bliss.
And a dream, never to be realized. Sigh.
Guys. Guys. Can I- Guys, hang on a sec. Can I just-
Every- everyone settle down. Guys. Listen, I-
I understand-
Please, can I just say-
Guys-
Can I just say one thing? Please, settle down.
I have two things to say, if you'll let me.
1. Relax.
2. Get used to it.
3. It was the right call.
First, it's not the end of the world. Relax. Lieberman said mean things and yet still holds power in the Senate. Fine. We agree.
Second, get used to it. Obama is keeping his word and trying to be a unifying voice, and kicking Lieberman just doesn't square with how he operates. Obama is not going to be left enough for you, he's not going to be aggressive enough for you, but get used to it. He didn't get elected to be the left's version of Dick Cheney. He has a mandate to rise above this nonsense and bring people together. If the netroots wants to freak out on the far left, that's fine. But Obama is working for the middle, not the left.
Third, this is actually a great strategy, politically. But that's not why he did it. He did it because it shows strong character. A dash of "keep your enemies closer" on a base of "turn the other cheek".
Relax. Get used to it. It was the right call.
