Car First Aid Kits — Assessment

Posted on by Jordan

I am no doubt jumping the gun a little posting this, but I have at least started the process of rebuilding the first aid kids in our cars.

It’s been one of those things I have meant to do for over a year now, after having attempted to use a bandage out of the car last spring only to discover that it was incredibly cheap and deteriorated from years in a hot car that it would not stick to anything.

So, a year later… I unpacked the kit to look at what all would need replaced:

IMG_20170303_100020182.jpg

Nothing in that picture looks too amazing. The “instant cold pack” seems to have failed sometime in the past, and much like the bandage I tried before… every single adhesive item in the kit seems questionable.

With some careful reading, I eventually found a label with an expiration date… January 2001. Suddenly it seems perhaps the blame for poor performance falls more on me for using a kit that is 16 years expired rather than deficiencies in the initial quality of the kit!

I have ordered an assortment of items to restock with… the final value of the refill is going to exceed what just replacing the whole thing would cost, but if we end up needing even so much as a band-aid, having the nice stuff will start to seem worth it.

Does this feel at all like a repeat? Turns out I did a good sized post about our in-home kit before

-Jordan

Photo Sync… Again

Posted on by Jordan

Back in the early days of this blog, shortly after the wedding in fact, I talked about the problem of keeping picture collections in sync. At the time I settled on SyncToy, a little utility released by Microsoft. It has worked fairly well over the years, but not without some shortcomings.

The two that have continually tripped me up are first the fact that it needs to be run as a scheduled task, and some how the power management on the laptop always walks on my schedule, and two, Picasa gets a little cute with hidden files and “unsaved changes” being tucked away in different folders.

The first problem is fixable, except I have fought with it off and on for years, and find it tedious at this point.

The second could perhaps be solved by letting SyncToy grab the hidden files along with the remaining pictures, but after a few really messy “edit on both machines then wipe out one set of changes” problems I don’t think letting those kinds of things resolve in an overnight batch environment is a good idea.

With that in mind, I was rather excited to hear a discussion of BitTorrent Sync in a recent Security Now podcast. It may not actually be the ideal solution, but I don’t feel that I have time to really research my options right now, and it has been really fun to setup and play with! The tool is built to keep folders in sync anywhere on the web, but works just fine inside a local network.

The configuration is perhaps a little more technical than I would like, but after a few missteps I think I have something that will work, and work within seconds of changes happening on one machine. Given the “magic” that Picasa does using hidden files and folders, what I appear to have created is an instance where Picasa acts like a single installation across both machines. Albums, favorites, and edits are mirrored immediately to the second machine. It may lead to a terrible disaster were we ever to attempt to use the application in both places at the same time, but I don’t see that as a significant risk.

Preparation

Posted on by Jordan

I don’t know if it’s having a new addition to our family or some other combination of life events, but I have been thinking a lot as of late about how would we handle a minor disaster and whatnot.

I remember hearing adds from the Red Cross advising people to have two weeks worth of food and water on hand. A quick check confirms that this is still their advice. The Red Cross isn’t exactly doomsday prepper propaganda, so I was starting to think maybe they had a good goal. The problem was I had no idea how to access if we were close to that. We try to keep our pantry, such as it is, more or less stocked, making me think we might be close but I wasn’t sure.

Then, a few weeks ago I saw this article in Popular Mechanics and realized something that should have been obvious a long time ago! Two things actually… One everything in our pantry has the caloric content posted on it, and two thanks to the fitness push we did last year we have a pretty good idea how many calories we consume per day. Fudging the numbers up a little to account for Hannah, and we basically arrive at 4000 calories per day.

A few minutes with a pen and paper digging through the cupboards and then a few more minutes working up an Excel spreadsheet (no project is complete without one!) and I can happily say that we have sufficient stores to  eat for two weeks! Granted, the menu might be a bit bland, but post blizzard or whatever other scenario one could dream up I don’t imagine we would complain much.

What attentive readers may have noticed is that I didn’t address water at all. The Red Cross guidelines call for one gallon per day per person, putting us near 50 gallons if you wanted to round up a little. I have some ideas how one might address that challenge, but really no solution as of yet… its just an overwhelming amount of bulk to store.

I guess we will hope it’s a blizzard and we have snow to melt 😉

-Jordan

 

Pulling Out The Stops

Posted on by Jordan

We are now under 50 days until the expected arrival of “Baby N”!

 

So far we have:

  • Prepared a room
  • Found and reconditioned baby furniture
  • Ordered and assembled a new crib
  • Decorated the room, complete with large hand made initials
  • packed enough clothes into the room that I suspect “Baby N” will never wear the same outfit twice until well after age 2
  • Performed extensive tune-up maintenance on our designated baby hauling vehicle.

What could be left you ask?

A photography studio! Not to fear though, pintrest has guided us to a whole host of ideas to build one right here in our living room!

As you can kind of see, the design is fairly simple. Just some 2×4 stands over some hardwood flooring, a piece of nice wide trim and a fabric backdrop and you have your very own mock room!

We found the flooring (Real bamboo!) at the local Habitat for Humanity “restore.” We were looking for, and found, a partial box of flooring to use, rather than having to pick up an entire case of something. We also found some scrap wood with neat texture to it that may end up in the background if we manage to get it cleaned up a little before it gets too cold.

Now, you may also be wondering, why this was all setup in our living room? Well because Heather had a friend with a two-week old baby who was willing to let her take some pictures. Sadly I forgot to clear it with Heather and the mom so… just to be on the safe side I will avoid posting anything from their session except to say I think you can look forward to some very nice pictures of our daughter in the near future!

-Jordan

 

 

Initials, Part One

Posted on by Jordan

Every time I think the baby’s room is done, Heather reminds me of something else we had talked about doing…

Case in point, the unadorned wall over by the changing table. Heather was saving that space for the baby’s initials!

Technically I suppose this should be part two, as initial one won’t be revealed here for quite some time…

 

Anyway, after an extensive font search, and then some tracing (did you know that the easiest way to print an image across multiple pages is Microsoft Paint!?) We had some letters on plywood ready to cut out.

This wound up being the first time I have used my jigsaw, despite having been really excited to get it and try it out. The initial project I had in mind is still waiting for me to resolve some of the planning gaps. The letter cut out nicely, and Heather was happy with the results.

She had tried to describe her plans for the letters a few times and I just couldn’t envision what she had in mind. A few hours after I handed it off to her, and it was much easier to see the plan.

For obvious reasons we won’t be showing any pictures of the first initial for another eight weeks, but the baby’s room is one step closer to being completely ready!

-Jordan

 

Nightstand

Posted on by Jordan

About the same time I was deep into the frame project, I started getting really frustrated with the little table thing that I was using for a nightstand.It was basically six boards screwed together, painted and then scuffed up enough to make it seem antique. It wasn’t particularly well made, and didn’t hold up well when Heather dealt with the issue of it being a bit short by piling seven or eight large books on top of it. Wobbly and too small more or less sums up the problems.

At that point I thought, “hey, I have a saw, and at least six boards, I should try making a better one!”

So I cut some boards:

Cutting the groves for the bottom shelf was considerably trickier than I was expecting, but the results were serviceable at least. What I had there was a table that was structurally sound, but wasn’t ever going to pass inspection with Heather to gain entry into our bedroom.

Step two, use some of this extra trim to make the table a little fancier:

A little trim, a little putty, and a lot of sanding and my little table was starting to look promising! All it needed now was a coat of “Heather and Jordan standard black” and it will blend right in! I got somewhat lucky in that it was an incredibly nice weekend, and Heather was away being the guest of honor at her (our?) first baby shower. This left me plenty of time to sand and paint.

There it is, ready for inspection… and it passed! 🙂

After moving a few large stacks of books, there was even a place for it:

As you can see, it even matches the other items in our bedroom! I came to appreciate again the brilliance of Heather’s “buy second hand stuff and repaint it” system, because if I had needed to stain that piece… well there is a lot of putty involved in making that look finished that wouldn’t have really stained correctly. Paint however, paint is forgiving as long as you are willing to do enough sanding. 🙂

 

-Jordan

 

The Frame

Posted on by Jordan

This post is purely shop-project focused, so if you aren’t interested in that, perhaps you would enjoy an essay Heather found. I have spent a lot of time thinking about it as of late, maybe you will find it interesting too: I Don’t Wait Anymore

Ok, on to the project!

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had managed to sell the idea of buying a saw in order to frame something for the baby’s room. Well I got the saw:

But that means I had to actually try making this frame. To be honest I started feeling rather intimidated the more I thought about it. Intimidation or no, I had this fancy new saw on my bench, and knew I needed to give the frame a shot. Things did not get off to an encouraging start when I flipped a piece of casing end-for-end thinking it would be easier to cut right handed that way… only to realize that it made my cut completely backwards… after I completed the cut.

On the bright side, we had picked out some inexpensive casing, so the replacement board wasn’t a significant portion of the budget 🙂

eight painstakingly double-checked cuts later, and I was ready for the scary part: glue

You can kind of see the guide I made to help keep things square. It didn’t work out as well as I had hoped, but did at least give me something to brace against. I quickly realized that I need some clamps. Wouldn’t need to be anything fancy, but gluing doesn’t work too well when you can’t hold things together with a little pressure.

To that end, I carefully drilled some pilot holes in from the top and bottom sections to let me draw the corners together with a trim screw. My first two corners worked ok, but really should have been counter-sunk. The second two I stepped up to a larger pilot bit, and then free-handed a pseudo-countersink to finish it off, and had really good results. It really helped that the casing was blurring the lines between cardboard and wood, but I was producing respectable corners that were somewhat solid.

The picture above shows right before the last corner, where I may have become a little over-confident and let my screw pull the corner out of alignment at a critical moment. In the end however, it wasn’t so far off, and some putty, sandpaper, and black spray-paint  were next in the plan anyway.

After a few coats of paint, all that was left to do was add some hooks to the top, and double-sided poster hanging strips to the lower edges and we have a fairly nice looking map if I can be so bold:

I won’t say that I found a new hobby in frame-making, but it was a nice change of pace from my normal digital project! 🙂

 

-Jordan

 

Java!

Posted on by Jordan

I have a personal goal to not post with apologies regarding my lack of posting, sadly this may veer distressingly close to that line…

Interesting things have been happening in our lives, I just haven’t had a lot of time to pull together posts on such.

Things eating into my time include the fact that our church is in the process of moving to a new location. The new location just needs a near total demolition and remodel before we can move! I have had the opportunity to smash drywall and disassemble an industrial grade HVAC system that has been hanging from the ceiling for several decades 🙂

Most recently I spent the weekend at a Java developers conference here in Des Moines commonly referred to as “No Fluff”

The event lets you pack about  eleven 90-minute sessions plus a keynote and some breakout time into a single weekend. The majority of the sessions I attended were what you could call information dense. I learned a lot about subjects as specific as Spring configuration, as “hey look how cool this is” as a tech-demo of Spock or Ratpack, or as theoretical as a talk entitled “The complexity of complexity.” I can honestly say every single session was worth my time to attend.

While I can’t begin to pass along what I gleaned from the sessions, I can share a video made by a speaker and MC of the event. I don’t know how much context will help this make sense, but “Maven” is a tool used by programmers to automate the process of taking all the little pieces of code and “building” them into an actual program. It’s a useful tool, but like most tools in this space it has it’s detractors.

 

-Jordan

Running Django On Godaddy

Posted on by Jordan

Don’t, just don’t

/sigh

So I really really didn’t want to give up on this, but frankly after killing most of my weekend trying to hammer out the MySQL versioning issues and getting more or less nowhere I think I am going to just give up.

One option would be to just use another database for my backend, but considering the systems I normally work on are backed by DB2 and Oracle databases… I can’t bring myself to shift to an option even less substantial than MySQL

The other obvious option is to just migrate this site to another hosting company. A proposition that is looking more attractive by the day, but still gives me headaches thinking about the potential disasters along the way. Just tweaking some settings last weekend wiped out a post here, and I can imagine loosing all images, comments or some other substantial chunk of the site.

Readers of this blog will be among the first to know if and when I decide to make some sort of leap I suppose 🙂

-Jordan

Household Projects

Posted on by Jordan

A couple of projects to talk about today, one more urgent than the other:

First up, our oven suffered a burned out heating element:

After a little research I found out this isn’t unheard of, and replacing the element is very simple. The big news here is just that Heather was standing right there when it happened and could shut the oven down before anything too drastic happened. Even then there was more molten metal involved than I like to have in my house.

The next item up I won’t go into much detail about just yet, but I am working up a simple database driven web app to solve a problem for Heather. It will be interesting to see if I can produce something fully featured enough for her to consider using it, but if nothing else it’s an interesting project and I don’t feel like I am reinventing the wheel.

How interesting? Well, it’s build on a Django, Python and MySQL. I have experience in none of those, so step one was just to get them working. My initial plan had been to run my dev environment inside a VMWare player, but I wasted a week trying to get a VM I was happy with and then decided to just run the whole dev environment on my PC. Fun fact, Python guys aren’t that into Windows. I wound up having to manually compile a few things… and then ran smack into the error in this post.

Hopefully I will have an actual demo site up in a few more weeks now that I have the tech stack configured and running.

-Jordan