The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Category: Uncategorized

  • CAPSLOCK…. BEGONE!

    I’ve had enough, and after being inspired by anticAPSLOCK.com I have ripped my Capslock key from my Microsoft Natural Keyboard at work.

    No More!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Chef Web

    ChefWeb is up! Right now it’s just providing the ability to search and display recipes. Tomorrow night I’m going to hook up the ‘what can I make’ code to the web, should be a piece of cake since it looks/works just like the regular search.

    Chef Web is just a web interface on the larger project Chef. Its goal is to allow us to be at a grocery store and lookup the ingredients for a recipe we want to make. It’ll also show which ingredients we actually need to buy, based on the inventory kept in the Chef database. Overall, Chef has been a pretty large effort but it’s all starting to come together now.

    If you look at that page in IE, it looks like crap but I really don’t care since 1) it looks great on my Treo 600‘s browser and 2) I don’t use IE on the PC.

    Continue reading “Chef Web”

  • One Year

    Ana and I celebrated our 1 year anniversary tonight. I’m still astonished that she deemed me good enough to want to be around for the rest of her life. Thank goodness though, I don’t know what I’d do without her.

    On an unrelated note, well hopefully anyway… Ana’s heading out of town on business to New York. Hmmm, spend one year with me… get the urge to flee the state… hmmm, maybe it isn’t so unrelated ;) Anyhow, it’s a short trip and she’ll be back on Thursday. Looks like it’s back to my college training of eating TAPR and Ramen until then.