The short of the short is I started experimenting with Amazon's Web Services. Particularly their Simple Storage Service and their Simple Database. Really easy. Lots of fun.
So the new pictures will be located on the pictures page from now on. Not sure what kind of organization there will be if any. As time permits possibly.
While we're sitting here waiting for baby Nora to make her appearance I thought it was at least time to throw a new picture out. This was taken using good old Photobooth while Sam and I were just hanging out in front of the computer one lazy afternoon.
Dad, I'm going to need my old double barrel 20 gauge back if you don't mind. Thanks.
Mowing the lawn with Sam.
Further evidence located on my flickr photo page
Most of us in this neck of the woods drive over that bridge at least once a week. Many people daily. Not much else to say.
In 17 minutes I was able to post an ad on craig's list, send out a W9, take 2 phone call, and put this little Sam clip together. It demonstrates the various stages of the being known as Sam all taking place within several minutes of each other. I'm a terrible editor when it comes to video of the little guy. Should probably be a lot shorter than 2 minutes, but I can't seem to cut out any more. You'll just have to suffer.
Now if only all my 17 minuteses could be that productive!
After many hours of hand wringing and tooth gnashing I finally managed to cobble together some form of a working mail server. It should be mostly working now. Receiving messages should most definitely be working. Sending might be a little hairy and scary right now.
The problem all started yesterday morning while trying to upgrade the spam filtering system on our Virtual Private Server. It was already a bit of a hack - qmail, spamhaus rbl, and spamassassin. Somewhere along the way stopping spam stopped stopping, so I had the bright idea "Hey, just upgrade everything" as if that would fix it all. bzzzzzzt wrong answer. Ended up making things way worse. So bad in fact qmail would no longer give any helpful error messages. Since being on the VPS I haven't been a huge fan of qmail. Too many pieces. Too many things to break. Too hard to track down. So I ended up installing my old standby Postfix. There's something to that name.
The installation went smooth enough. A few minor problems dealing with all of my virtual domains and users, but nothing a little google help and a whole lot of trial and error couldn't figure out. The biggest problem with smtp has always been authenticated relaying of email. So that people at Cryogas can freely send email through my server to anywhere and still not open it up so spammers can blast their warez out to the universe. In the end I was able to get dovecot and it's SASL implementation working. It's a bit of bubble gum and bailing wire right now, but that will improve shortly.
If people are having any problems whatsoever with their email - and they are hosted on this server - get in touch with me through appropriate means. Sorry for the headaches. That's why we love technology. Right?
I forgot how much I don't like Internet Explorer. In fact, I dislike it so much I rarely even test my own site with IE. So, as many of you probably know - and I just found out, IE7 doesn't really care for what I've done with my YUI menus and all the javascript.
Have to give credit to the engineers at Microsoft for the great and descriptive Internet Explorer cannot open site operation aborted error message. That really helps a person figure things out. Thanks!
Google to the rescue - http://www.technovelty.org/code/web/yui-rendering.html - For me it turned out that I had activated the menu in a way that IE doesn't like. I had
YAHOO.util.Event.onContentReady("mainmenu", YAHOO.thesergents.loadmenu);
I thought that would be really cool to use the onContentReady, but IE doesn't like how that modifies
the DOM while the page is rendering. Or something. What I actually needed to do was
YAHOO.util.Event.addListener(window, "load", YAHOO.thesergents.loadmenu);which waits until the window load function is triggered after the page has loaded. That's cool. So at least that cleared up the annoying error. Now the submenus stopped working, but I'll live with that. That was enough personal hacktime for one day. Time to get back to work.
Oh - and this kid likes turtles - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMNry4PE93Y
Had to end on a happy note.
It's rule 3471 in Dana's handbook of life. Do something you enjoy every day.
Yesterday was full of things I enjoy. First and foremost Kate and Sam returned from visiting Nana in Cedar Rapids. Hanging out with the beautiful Kate and Sam I am is always top on my list of things I enjoy. I would like it here or there. I would like it anywhere! Yes.. more new pictures...
Then I had the chance to sit down and tear into a guitar I recently picked up from eBay. It is a Benjamin Garcia, and a pretty nice guitar in my opinion. The craftsmanship isn't top notch, but that was the main reason I made the purchase. Gives me a chance to fiddle and fuss without feeling too bad for the guitar. So last night I began work on replacing the tuners, nut, and saddle. Next on the agenda is the finish on the top. Props to Katie for letting me set up shop in the house wherever I happened to be when the thought to start this project crossed my itinerant mind. I try not to make too much of a mess. Here are some pictures of the work in progress. My fingers are still recovering from sanding.
I know everyone loves the post that says Sorry, haven't blogged forever - been busy. I won't put you through that. I'll only apologize because things have been hectic.
And without further ado! Sam pictures. He's such a little boy now. Kate and I can hardly believe it! Go on over to our Flickr page to see all of them.
Now back to our regularly scheduled non-web related activities. If there is such a thing these days.
Been a bit since we took new pictures of the Sam man. He's a few steps away from walking. Always on the move lately, so it's hard. Managed to capture a few here. Sticking with my flickr photo page for now. Been enjoying the service enough. Might have to get a pro account if we keep it up. Still so many choices out there between Picasa and .Mac I'm still not sure where we'll end up.
Ended up shooting a few pictures of the big snow we received here in Minnesota. Poor Zoe was up to her belly. That can't be a lot of fun. Taking pictures of it can be though.
A few years back this video was all the rage. For some reason we've played it quite often in the office over the last year or so. If you've never heard the Numa Numa song or seen the video now you can to both in one shot. This was one of those poor souls like the lightsaber kid who become famous for fairly innocuous pieces of video. Still, the song is catchy. And if you hear me singing it you'll at least know where it comes from.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc9EC1sLehA
About once a year I take the time to troll through my applications looking for things I'm not using in hopes that I can bring myself to delete them. Once in a rare while I run across a gem of a program I had no idea was even there. This is just an occasion. Not the biggest waste of time there has ever been, that honor still belongs to Line Rider, but a time waste nonetheless. This silly creation took about 5 minutes. The program is called Comic Life and was one of the rotating stable of little bonus programs Apple installs on all their new computers. This could be the start of something silly.











