A Little Fact Checking

Posted on by Jordan

A few days ago I received an e-mail with the subject:

” WHAT PILOTS SEE WHEN LANDING AT OFFIT AIRFORCE BASE SAC”


The e-mail had the following images attached:

I am very skeptical of anything I get in an e-mail forward. Skeptical to the point that I assume it is 100% faked unless I can go find a few independent sources to verify whatever the forward is telling me. The fact that they misspelled “Offutt” didn’t lend any credibility to the e-mail.

So… I looked around. The hard part about this e-mail is that there wasn’t much text to work with. Typically you can just plug the first sentence of the e-mail into a Google search and get a lot of information about the origins of the urban legend. (I am skeptical for a reason… maybe 1 in the last 100 forwards turned out to be true)

After not finding anything that looked particularly reputable, I realized: “Hey, I know where Offutt AFB is, and I know a great source for aerial photography!”

Google Maps

I checked a few other sources and the field appears to be blank, and as you can see from the Google image, the message isn’t the same, but I think we at least see that it is apparently true that somebody carves some really neat messages into the fall stubble at the end of the runway.

-Jordan

Web Work

Posted on by Jordan

Wow, you blink and another week goes by.

So, what happened this week?

Heather’s parents came to visit. The occasion was the Huskers playing against Iowa State University. We only managed to obtain two tickets, as it turns out Husker fans suck up all the tickets far quicker than our planning could account for. That may have been ok though, as much as it pains me to say it, Heather is not a football fan. She would not have her moneys worth out of a ticket.

The game was… intense to put it gently, but in the end, the Huskers won it, if only by the smallest of margins.

Sunday afternoon Heather had the opportunity to take family pictures for a coworker. She was on cloud nine for hours, both during the actual picture taking, and the culling and cleanup stages on the pictures.

I would love to show off some of her work, but I don’t know that it is really proper to be throwing up pictures of other peoples kids here.

In less dramatic news, I played around with PHP and javascript to produce these. They are really rough, but I have grand plans for doing a super stripped down version of a gallery, after the program “Gallery” messed up my picture links. We shall see how long that motivation holds out 🙂

Up next week:

Nebraska Deer Season, and  The “Cake Boss” visits Des Moines. I will let you guess as to who is attending what event.

-Jordan

Gallery

Posted on by Jordan

Ok, so hopefully nobody even ran into a problem with this, but I let my hosting run an upgrade script on gallery last night.

Gallery is the program I use to manage the pictures linked from the blog etc.

It looks like all the linked pictures are now broken /sigh

I fixed the newest linked picture, and well… we shall see if I get the others fixed in a timely manner 🙂

-Jordan

RSS Hax!

Posted on by Jordan

Well… to be honest, not really hacks, I installed a plugin that (in theory) will seamlessly migrate the RSS feed to the blog through a feedburner feed.

If you don’t know what that is don’t worry about it. I just like to play with addons for the site once in a while, although this one shouldn’t really be visible.

While I am thinking of technical things, have I mentioned Lastpass?

It is a password management tool, that is frankly amazing. I was getting really uncomfortable with the number of passwords I was trying to remember, and getting more and more lazy about using the same password for “unimportant” logins. I knew that was a bad situation but I didn’t really trust a plugin to deal with that kind of thing.

Then the Security Now podcast that I try and keep up with, did an episode on Lastpass. I was really excited. I installed it, really with the idea that I could offer to to Heather as a way to help her beef up her password system. (side note, Heather HATES the Security Now podcast. Her life usually gets more complicated after I learn something new and terrifying on the podcast) So far I love Lastpass, but I don’t know if it is really something Heather is going to put up with. The fiddle-factor seems just a tiny bit too high. Also from what I can tell it would be a little hard to share a computer with the plugin running, unless I suppose you both knew the master password… I am not saying I wouldn’t tell Heather what mine is, I just don’t think she would be crazy about a 15 character password. 🙂

-Jordan

oh! I almost forgot, if you happen to be interested, the plugin I used is here:  http://flagrantdisregard.com/feedburner/

And a big hat tip to my sister, who actually told me about this four months ago, and I never got around to setting it up.

Changes!

Posted on by Jordan

I mentioned a few weeks back that I had worked on cloning the existing front page, and supporting pages, to an archive area.

Today I finally sat down and put together a new main page.

It isn’t anything fancy really, but I am kind of proud of it considering I coded it up from scratch.

The old wedding page was a free template I hacked up to meet our needs. Not to say that there is anything wrong with hacking up templates and tutorials, but I still wanted to force myself to approach the new site like a programmer. I didn’t use any canned code, and I didn’t use any graphical tools, just Eclipse and an FTP client.

Heather thinks it needs a picture of us on it…. expect some changes down the road I suppose 🙂

-Jordan

Website Work!

Posted on by Jordan

I think I mentioned quite a while back that I was hoping to get a chance to revamp the main heatherandjordan.com site.

I have finally completed step one of that process by setting up an archive of the site in its current state. Not the most exciting thing ever, but I wanted to preserve the old wedding site. Anyone wanting to look is free to check it out here, but I should warn you that, unless something is broken, it will look exactly like the main site. I guess if you find a broken page let me know… I know the RSVP page is a little goofy, but I didn’t want to bother re-writing the php right now.

Sadly that was the easy part, as now I have to figure out what to replace the wedding pages with on the homepage. Hopefully I can come up with something soon.

-Jordan

Small Steps To The Revamp

Posted on by Jordan

Well, it took me 45 minutes of digging around to get this done… and you probably haven’t even noticed the difference yet, but I actually made some changes to the site!

If you look off to the right, you should see a little site meter bar (unless you are reading this via RSS…. and then well pff)

I used to run site meter on the blog, but I had hacked it into the side bar code. During a WordPress upgrade somewhere along the way, my *ahem* edits got lost. I really wanted to do something closer to respectable this time around.

I undertook to write a side-bar widget, and ended up gutting a hello world tutorial as my foundation: Tutorial: WordPress 2.8 Widget API. My changes only caused the entire blog to display as an error message for about two minutes. I suppose I shouldn’t test on the live blog, but what fun would that be?

It’s kind of sad that my finished product does considerably less than the “hello world” example 🙂

If I can stay motivated maybe I will clean it up a little and set it up such that you could drop in another site meter key, but I haven’t had much luck sticking with hobby programming projects as of late.

Speaking of hobby programming, I found A slick little setup for doing local source control called Mercurial.  I guess I could setup a full blown revision control system, considering I already run a server, but this is a nice local method for tracking changes to source code. It does a whole lot more than that, but that is beyond the scope of this blog.

One final note on website changes, I opened the blog up so Google / Bing / Yahoo / whatever else can see it. It isn’t like the blog was hidden before it just wasn’t indexed, and it seems silly to hide it from search engines. (especially when I want to be able to search the page for things using something more powerful than the built-in search).

-Jordan

Website Thoughts

Posted on by Jordan

I am setting here, watching it snow again. I think it’s time to re-vamp the website here.

I will move the current wedding site off to some sort of archive area, so it can still be viewed. I just haven’t figured out what to do with the base domain.

My most recent project was a website for friends of ours Casey and Carson.

That site was basically just massaging WordPress, using a theme somebody else put together and just tweaking it. I would like to do something more ambitious for my site. I just haven’t figured out what yet.

I am also really tempted to change the robots.txt settings so that google can index the blog. Not that I really desire more traffic, it just seems silly to hide from search engines.

-Jordan

High-Miles September So Far

Posted on by Jordan

Wow, you would not believe how quickly the last 3 weeks have gone!

I am sure that is in part to the time we spend on the road each day, but still… I am still trying to get used to the idea that fall is coming.

I don’t know what all to cover, so I will just give some snap-shots of life in Atlantic.

We have *LOVED* being able to just roll our bikes outside! It may sound trivial, but not having to carry them down three flights of stairs makes the idea of a quick little evening ride so much less imposing. Also, living in a neighborhood makes rides a lot nicer. We have really enjoyed getting to explore Atlantic on bicycles.

The drive every day is tiring, but I think Heather and I have both found ways to make it easier. Heather has a whole stack of books on “tape” (CD) and I picked up a Zune, and have it loaded up with podcasts. Those things may not be our first choice of a way to use time, but at least you get to feel like you are doing something instead of just wasting your life driving and listening to top 40 radio.  I might throw up some of the better podcasts, once I have figured out what I like… There is an overwhelming selection out there.

News as of today is that Heather and I may have found a church we like in Atlantic. We visited one three weeks ago and it just wasn’t somewhere we wanted to be going. Two weeks ago we drove to Des Moines, and liked the Vineyard we checked out there. Unfortunately the fatigue from driving yet another day was pretty substantial, and we decided we just couldn’t do that on our day of rest. Today we tried another church in Atlantic (There are a lot of them here, sometimes using annoyingly similar names) and I think it is going to be a good place for us while we are here.

In more “wow time is going fast” news I had to renew the web-hosting for this site. I paid for a year when I started the site not too long after Heather and I were engaged. I was kind of surprised to have that come due again already.

-Jordan