The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Art, Furniture

    It has been a busy day for us today. It started with us visiting The Old Capital Art Fair in downtown Springfield. Ana has gone numerous times in the past but it was my first visit. We both saw several pieces that would look great in our dining room and reading room but our upcoming furniture purchase is taking precedence. Even without buying anything, it was nice walking around and viewing the wide variety of art.

    Next on our agenda was furniture shopping. I have no idea how many couches and chairs we sat in today, but it’s a lot more tiring than either of us expected. So far we think we know where we will be purchasing from and, suprisingly, we are leaning towards a very bold red set for the family room. The biggest problem we are having is figuring out how we want to set the room up: one couch, two chairs, no end table? one couch, one loveseat, end tables; would an ottoman fit?

    A relaxing evening at home with a movie is planned, probably with a side of C#.

  • Unexpected Day Off

    This morning someone from Construx was to show up and repair the chipping paint above the shower. He showed up ontime this time, and said he was also going to be working on the sump line.

    Because Construx can’t communicate for squat, I had to tell him what needed to be done. Easy enough, right? I call into work and say that I’ll probably be in at around noon. Noon has come and gone, there are quite a few holes in the yard due to the approach used to find the end of the line (dig hole, look for pvc, dig another hole, …), and I have called into work to take the rest of the day off.

    Here’s a nice arial view of the worker’s ‘debugging’:)

    If you want a detailed description of what has transpired today, feel free to ask. I’ll spare everyone else.