The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Author: eajhnsn1

  • Happy Birthday Ana!

    Today is Ana’s birthday! Wooo!

    We celebrated with her family in a large party held for her, her grandparens’ 60th wedding anniversary, and her cousin’s graduation from high school. Now we’re sitting on the porch relaxing from the long day.

    Last night was Melinda’s graduation and following that Ana and I went and saw the new Harry Potter movie. We arrived at the theater just over an hour early, and it was a good thing because it was packed. Overall, I enjoyed this movie a lot more than the prior two.

  • Photo Blog

    Thanks to a script from David and a little work figuring out exim, I can send pictures from my phone and they get uploaded into my photo gallery! Forget Sprint and their $5/month for essentially the same thing.

    Anyway, it’s here.

  • Sprint Bill and Julie

    I logged into Sprint’s website yesterday and discovered they are still mischarging me for Sprint PCS Vision usage. In short, their computer system doesn’t recognize me as having a Vision plan, so all of my data traffic from the phone is being charged at a pretty high rate. This time around it was for $118. Not too shabby. A quick call to customer service (who have been great, btw) got my account credited once again. I guess I’ll keep checking the bill every month until I know I’m recognized properly in their system.

    This morning when I woke up there was a truck out front with a couple guys sitting in the cab. The truck looked as if it belonged to some utility company and after a few minutes it drove away. I first thought it had something to do with the moron who cut our power on Friday so I didn’t think much of it. When I was leaving for work I went out and noticed they had placed a little green flag in the yard marked “Sewer”. Hmmm, ok..whatever. When I arrived home after work I took a walk around our wonderful trench and noticed some brand new spray paint on the grass, indicating where the power line is! So it looks like Contrux may have actually called Julie before digging but forgot the little detail of actually waiting for the utilities to be marked before starting to work. I couldn’t help but chuckle at that.

  • Comfortable Seating

    I am writing this as we sit out on our porch in a pair of new chairs. We picked them up at Lowes today, along with a small table (also for out front) and a bench for our deck on the back of the house.

    Other than that, today has been pretty uneventful. Assembling the bench took a little while and after that I mowed the grass, watered it, and grilled dinner.

  • The Saga Continues

    Son of a bitch. For those who haven’t talked to me in the past week, Construx scheduled a couple guys and a trenching machine to dig and bury a new sump line – giving up on finding and repairing the existing faulty one. Ana took today off to be here at noon when they were supposed to arrive. 12:30 came and went so Ana called to find out what the deal was, she was told he was waiting outside for the trencher to show up (which is a lie because Ana was outside while she made the phone call). Anyway, the trencer didn’t show up until 2:30 or so.

    So we thought our sump line was FINALLY going to be taken care of. Yeah right. Ana calls me at 3:30 saying all the power just shut off at the house. The moron cut through the power line (and telephone line, discovered later).

    A few calls flew back and forth between myself, Ana, and Construx. They called City Water, Light & Power to come out and repair it. It’s a known rule/law in Illinois that before you dig, you have to Call Julie and they mark the locations of pipes, wires, etc. Apparently they didn’t do this, so they are going to be fined and charged heftily for the 4(!) electrical employees it took to repair it.

    After about an hour of working on the line they had it fixed and all was better. Our trench is HUGE now, more damage to the grass than ever before, and the Construx guy still didn’t finish digging. So the progress for today was nil. There was also a mishap with the replacement doorknob but I’ll save that rant for another day. Pics can be seen here.

  • Productive Evening

    Tonight turned out to be a very productive evening. First off was downloading the UltraVNC source, making a quick change to a constant and recompiling. This was for work where we are wanting to allow one user at a time to hit a pc via VNC. Apparently this configuration option is/was available in the original version of vnc but is absent from its derivative.

    Next up was configuring exim to use my ISP’s smtp server for outgoing mail. I only use it for a couple mailman mailing lists and was having problems with subscribers having aol.com email addresses. A common problem, just had to slog through some docs on how to get around it.

    And finally, a new version of MythTV was released yesterday which I installed. The program listings had broken a couple (probably more, just hadn’t noticed) days ago which I also fixed by changing to the new method MythTV is using for getting listings in the new version.

  • Third Photo

    Tonight I was barely able to get my third necessary picture of the moon. Check out the Waxing Crescent. This was difficult to get because without the moon filter it was very bright and with the filter it was too dim. The wind was also pretty strong tonight so a lot of the pictures I took had a slight blur to them. Hopefully the one linked to above will fit in with the others nicely.

  • Furniture

    We placed our order for a couch and loveseat today. At the store they only have three colors on hand (two shades of brown and a green) and we decided on the red, so it will be 8-10 weeks before they arrive. I was pretty disappointed when I learned about the long delay, but we think the red is going to look very good in our family room. It’s definitely going to be a change from what we are used to, but it should contrast the beige walls and light carpet quite nicely.

    I think this is the model we purchased, so picture it in red.

    The Construx guy unexpectedly showed up today. He finished up the work he started in the bathroom and also painted over a couple smudges on the walls from when we were moving in.

  • Ana is Home

    Ana was able to get all of her work done yesterday in NY so today was able to get on a plane earlier than expected for her return home. Instead of getting here at 9:30pm she arrived around 5:30pm. Her trip went well and the goals accomplished.

    After dinner at Smokey Bones, we went to Lowes and bought some Ortho Weed b Gon to spray on our yard. There have been a bunch of small weeds pop up in the last two weeks that were getting on my nerves. You’re supposed to be able to see results within 24 hours, so I’m curious if it will work or not.

    test

  • More Chef Web

    So here’s what it looks like on the Treo. These screenshots also show the new functionality I just hooked up tonight, the ability to just search for recipes that can be made with ingredients onhand in the inventory. Next up at some point will be to show in the recipe how much of a given ingredient you need to buy before being able to make it.