January « 2008 « The Holt Blog

Archive for January, 2008

Working Out the Easy Way

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

I could never understand working out in a gym or lifting weights. You pay a lot of money to a place so you can go and do something repetitive and boring so you can stay in shape. Being in shape is great, but I like to do something FUN while achieving this goal.

Jill and I used to do karate, but it was expensive and quite a time commitment. So for a while we were doing nothing physical at all. Recently we signed up for volleyball through the community ed program in our town. Last night was our first time. Jill couldn’t go because she had a medical procedure today (I’m in the waiting room right now on her new laptop). I went and met lots of people and had a really fun time. I played goalie for a couple years in high school so I naturally fall all over the place trying to hit the volleyball. On a hard floor this produces bruises, and I’m also very sore. But it feels good at the same time

Anyway I recommend casual sports as a great way to work out, you have fun at the same time you’re getting in shape.

Posted in Hobbies | 1 Comment »

Church

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

I’ve been really blessed by attending church this month. We have been doing a series on resolutions, talking about anger, taming our tongues, and addictions. The sermons are available online at the Harbor of Hope website, and I highly recommended them!

This is such an answer to prayer for me because a year ago I was struggling to get excited for Sunday services. This has been a big deal for us for the past year. I had visited some other churches and wondered if it was time for a change. In the last 2 months some things have changed and really made a difference.

The messages have been hitting upon very important topics lately. I love this. There are many topics the the Christian community tends to avoid discussing, yet are also the topics that deeply imbedded into out lives.

My attitude has also changed. With the help of some wise people I meet with I’ve been able to examine my motives and beliefs around Sunday church. One friend said that she goes to church not necessarily for the music or the messages, but for the interactions with other in the family of believers. She often prays that God will direct her to interact with and chat with the right people whom she can encourage or be of a help to. This was very inspiring. Also, I felt encouraged that even people who have been part of a church body for years and years still have times where they don’t like the music or the messages or something. Yet, they are faithful to going and God blesses that and uses them.

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Hi-Tech Pizza Box

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

I had a hot date tonight. Jill and I got pizza and ate on the floor (since my geek stuff is all over the table). To my utter amazement, I saw this on the box:

I was SO relieved that my pizza box was engineered with thermal exhaust ports. Far from being just normal slits that provide no purpose whatsoever, these “ports” are the newest technology in pizza boxes and represent the future of cardboard-based sustenance transportation!

Next time you have pizza delivered, accept nothing less than the best. Demand that your pizza box have thermal exhaust ports!

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Words of Affirmation

Friday, January 25th, 2008

I recently reread the book “The Five Love Languages” and was reminded why I enjoyed it so much the first time. It was really helpful to take another look at the way I communicate and receive love. If you’re unfamiliar with the love languages, the author Gary Chapman puts them into 5 categories

Acts of Service
Physical Touch
Gift Giving
Words of Affirmation
Quality Time

I’ve always been able to identify my top ones (acts of service & words of affirmation), but have never really identify and outstanding winner.

Today, I had my meeting with the Executive Director at work. I wanted to talk library with him and discuss ideas I have had for making our Library a better one. It went pretty much as I expected it to. We spent some time just catching up and discussing my division at work. Then I had the floor to share my professional goals and talk about the school library. Friends and co-workers who met with him before had said that he’ll “say such good things about you that you want to cry”. Well…. Those who are closest to me know that I’m an easy crier. Looking back, I guess it was just nice to hear those things and be affirmed. I can think one thing, but hearing feedback from others really makes a difference. I have had this experience with others from work and supervisors who have given me encouraging words about the work I do, and it really means a lot to me. On the occasion when my mom, husband, sister, friend has written me an affirming note… it’s the best thing!

So, there it is, I think words of affirmation might just be my primary love language. But you can still give me gifts if you want to

What’s your love language?

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More Geekiness

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

More coding this week! Since the last time I bored you all with my geeky pursuits, I’ve uploaded everything to the new server, fixed all of my important scripts, upgraded/installed/configured the newest version of Gallery (and embedded it in our site), migrated my other domains (name servers, files, CGI scripts), and researched my backup approach. I have 600 GB of theoretical space on the server, so I figure I might as well use it. Fortunately, the server has rsync installed, so I just modified my current backup script to use SSH.

Still to do: Clean out and sell my server (Jill’s iMac), set up Jill’s new laptop, Gallery upload scheme for easily importing pictures from iPhoto, finish uploading backup files.

Last night I met with Nate Daman, who’s getting married in a hundred some days (I get to be in his wedding!). He gave me his old, broken laptops to work on! One is an iBook I gave him about a year ago, which was given to me by my friend Scott Pittman, which was given to him by his friend who left the country. The battery/power supply is busted on this one. It booted up fine but if I unplug the wire it dies immediately. So it’s not going anywhere.The other computer is Nate’s old Powerbook G4, which is still a great machine. The power supply in this one caused the hard drive to die. I remember Nate coming over and I miraculously recovered 90% of his data before it was gone for good by a combination of Disk Warrior, tilting the computer on its end (really), and target disk mode. Anyway last night I drove by Nate’s parents house and picked these two up and worked on them. I felt uber nerdy as I was updating/uploading/working the processors of all three computers in one room at the same time. The Powerbook’s disk is still in trouble:

This is not a good sign – it means failure is imminent! I did get 10.3 installed and even updated and it seems to be working fine, but I bet it konks on me soon. So I bought a new hard drive and will try to install that myself. Hopefully this will fix it, but there’s still a possibility of the power supply needing replacement. Some pix:

Updating two laptops…

…while Sarah watches

All three on my desk! Amazing that they all “work”.

Posted in Geek Talk, Hobbies | No Comments »

Nerf Wars

Monday, January 21st, 2008

I recently got some modified nerf guns on ebay (meaning you replace the innards of the toy gun to make it far more powerful than originally intended). This makes for a fun game of shoot-each-other, as long as you can find someone willing to play with you. Fortunately, Jill is just that awesome.

We both had off today so we made forts and played a bit. I recorded some on my webcam and took some pictures. Since I had so much material I decided to put together a little movie!

Download it below, sorry it’s so big but the compression wasn’t working well and I didn’t want to spend hours on it (I’ve been coding all week, remember).

NERF WARS (36.2MB)

PS You’ll also notice our “new” futon in the movie, which previous to this week was a couch only. Steve came over and modified the heck out of it with his carpentry skills to make it convertible to a futon. It works great!

Posted in Hobbies | No Comments »

Coding Like a Monkey

Saturday, January 19th, 2008

I’ve been coding like crazy the past two days since I started the migration. My CPU has been working very hard copying thousands of emails to the new IMAP server, FTP’ing hundreds of megabytes over several connections, and of course running all my coding programs. I even maxed out the server processor a few times today and it shuts down your entire site for a few minutes every time you do this.

Today I fixed more of theholtsite including DrBuck (was up until 3 AM last night doing this) and gallery (importing the albums into Gallery 2 met with complications). DrBuck is a huge Perl script that needed lots of configuration and about five modules downloaded from CPAN and installed. Then I had to download Ploticus (open source graphing program DrBuck uses) for the Linux OS and install that. Then hours of debugging and I finally got it working. I fixed the contact page by modifying the PHP mail() command to the new server specs.

I also transferred my other current domains to the new server today. I had to change name servers to point to the new server, then set up accounts for addon domains, and finally copy all the files via FTP. This will take more configuration/debugging due to CGI scripts or PHPBB forums not working or permission issues etc.

I’ve been doing this stuff so much, I haven’t even played Warcraft the past two days. Yep, you read that correctly. My processor is needed for other tasks and my brain is spinning with code. This stuff is very fun, don’t get me wrong. It’s just a different kind of fun. It’s geek fun.

I did have a nice date with Jill tonight. We watched a British mystery show set in the WWII era. I made her a candy cane cosmo, a drink she loves.

Click here for a picture of my desktop at 2 AM this morning!

Posted in Geek Talk, Hobbies | No Comments »

It’s Live

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

This site is no longer hosted by me See below for a lengthy explanation. I worked all day today modifying scripts, on the phone with tech support, and uploading stuff via SFTP. I also set up an IMAP mail account and that’s copying now too.

You may notice some things not working until I can fix them. The contact page doesn’t work for now, and the picture page will be up shortly. Jill’s craft page is working as well as this blog.

Posted in Geek Talk | No Comments »

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