Ry4an's Un-Blog

UnBlog/2008-05-31

2008-05-31T21:53:05Z

== Home Carbonator ==

Last year I [http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001818.php read about home carbonation],
and looking at the amount of club soda Kate and I buy it made sense.  The only unknown
was where to put the ugly tank that would be out of sight yet still convenient to use.

Months later coworkers and I were at the [http://www.redstagsupperclub.com Red Stag],
which carbonates their own sparkling water, and talked about doing the same at the office.
I still didn't act until a friend got a [http://www.sodaclub.com soda club] machine as
a gift.

This weekend I (or actually Kate since I was running late) went to
[http://www.northernbrewer.com Northern Brewer] and picked up
parts {{{K003}}}, {{{KX03}}}, and {{{K026}}} to build the setup below.  It really
does work as easy as the first article promises, and the price including the purchase
of a tank came to $200 total.  So far the best thing we've carbonated was orange juice,
but I'm looking to try some fruit purees soon.

attachment:carbonator.jpg

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UnBlog/2008-01-18

2008-01-18T07:35:08Z

== Misc. Projects Including A Baby ==

To look at this long neglected unblog one would thing I've stopped doing
things, but quite the contrary there's been so very much doing of things
that there's been no time for posting.  In no particular order we
have:

 * ''Installed a home security system'' -- No particular need, but I've always enjoyed alarms and now our home has an RSS feed
 * ''Installed an electric garage door opener'' -- No more brushing off the car in the morning after a snow.  Granted it's still powered by an extension cord running from the basement, but hey so goes it.
 * ''Installed nifty [http://ibuttonlock.com iButton electronic locks]'' -- Now the same key opens every door to which I've got access including the Swarmcast offices.  
 * ''Un-finshed the basement'' -- wool insulation and moisture: a winning combination.  The project included a fun trip to the city trash transfer station.
 * ''Remodeled the kitchen'' -- I did almost no actual labor on this excepting some tile installation with Kate, the adding of rolley shelves in the pantry, and having to eat out for four straight months.

Add to those minor projects some time spent on general upkeep of an 85 year old
home, scouts and a decidedly non-zero number of hours spent at work, and it
becomes clear that what Kate and I need is a baby.

Kate's due on July 28th, and we're very excited.

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UnBlog/2007-06-19

2007-06-19T16:46:32Z

== Autobahn Accelerator for iTunes ==

My company, [http://swarmcast.com Swarmcast], announced one of our first public releases today.  Previously we've been primary selling to content providers, but now we're putting out a user facing free release.  If you download our [http://getautobahn.com Autobahn Accelerator for iTunes] you'll find your purchases from the iTunes music store come down three to ten times faster than they did before.  We'll be adding support for lots of other sites (you tube, etc.) in upcoming weeks.

Sadly we've got a MacOS version done, but the installation was deemed too clumsy for the polished Mac experience, so we'll have to wait a few weeks to get that out.  Windows only for now (says this Linux user).

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UnBlog/2007-02-22

2007-02-23T04:36:35Z

== Customer Service Call Log ==

Between telecom troubles, warranty repairs, botched on line orders,
and marriage related changes in insurance, mortgage, and bank accounts
I've spent a lot of time on the phone with customer service
representatives lately.  Few issues get resolved in a single call and
even fewer without a transfer to another office.

I put together a sheet to keep track of who I spoke to, when, how to
get back to them, and what they promised me.  Now I grab one whenever
I'm about to dial a 1-800 number to talk to the almost-friendly,
nearly-helpful people on the other end.  Besides the convenience of
being able to say "On January 21st at 3pm Janice, CSR number JA5692,
told me she'd ship the replacement !FedEx overnight," representatives
seem on their best behavior when you start out every interaction asking
for their name and customer representative number.

[attachment:customer-service-log.pdf printable form]

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UnBlog/2007-02-14

2007-02-14T06:33:55Z

== View Any Simon Delivers Order ==

I forwarded a Simon Delivers order receipt email on to a friend, and
he was able to view the order without being logged in as me.  Turns
out that if you have a Simon Delivers account at all they let you view
any order.  I created a [http:/simon/view quick web form] to let
anyone view any order using my account.  Here's my favorite order so
far:

|| Qty|| Item Name|| Each||
|| 1|| Cetaphil Moisturizing Lotion|| $10.99||
|| 2|| Coke Diet - 24/12 oz. Cans|| $7.49||
|| 2|| Dr Pepper Diet - 24/12 oz. Cans|| $7.49||
|| 2|| Hershey's Milk Chocolate Candy Bars - 6 ct.|| $3.49||
|| 2|| Life Savers Wintergreen Flavored - Individually Wrapped - Bag|| $1.89||
|| 1|| Nabisco Nutter Butter Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies|| $3.79||
|| 1|| Nestea Cool Lemon Iced Tea Fridge Pack - 12/12 oz. Cans|| $4.19||
|| 2|| Pepsi - 24/12 oz. Cans|| $7.49||
|| 2|| Pepsi 8/12 oz. Bottles|| $3.69||
|| 1|| Seven-Up - 12/12 oz. Cans|| $4.19||
|| 2|| Seven-Up Diet - 12/12 oz. Cans|| $4.19||
||<-3)> Sale amount: $87.62||
||<-3)> Sales tax: $6.81||
||<-3)> Total: $101.43||

I'm sure fixing this problem is simple as adding whatever the .asp
equivalent of this is:

{{{
if (currentUser != order.user) {
    return;
}
}}}

Funny, though.

If you [http:/simon/view try you own] and stumble across any funny ones
put the order number in the comments.

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UnBlog/2007-02-11

2007-02-12T06:09:07Z

== Alarm System ==

My favorite book in the Wren Hollow Elementary school library was
''The Gadget Book'' by Harvey Weiss.  I must have checked it out a
hundred times during the second and third grade and tried to build
most of the half-practical projects it detailed.  The best among them
was the burglar alarm.  It used wooden blocks, a door hinge, and a
strip of metal to make a simple normally-open contact switch.  It was
the first electrical work I ever did and almost certainly shaped my
interests and career path.

As a winter (read: indoor) project I decided to install a security
system.  Our system at the office uses [http://dsc.com DSC] components
and works well enough, so I used the same.  I bought a Power 632 panel
[http://homesecuritystore.com/ on line] along with some wired and
wireless contact switches, and keypad.  The only difficultly during
installation was routing the wire for the keypad from upstairs to
downstairs where it couldn't be seen.  Programming was nothing like
modern computer programming.  Bits and bytes were entered directly
into numbered memory registers by toggling boolean flags and entering
hex characters on the keypad.  It was oddly fun.

Everything's working quite well.  We've got a bevy of contact, motion,
and temperature sensors.  We can arm/disarm from the keypad or using
the wireless remote keys on our key chains.  For monitoring I went with
[http://nextalarm.com next alarm] and they even make an RSS feed
available (though only through yahoo, so I had to fake the User-Agent:
HTTP header);

attachment:alarm-rss.png

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UnBlog/2007-01-22

2007-01-23T04:15:35Z

== Trash Can Snorkel ==

This one's dumb.  We've got the same trash can that everyone who shops
at Target has.  The inner removable pail is handy for keeping spills
from pouring out the foot pedal hole, but its air-tight nature creates
quite the vacuum when you're trying to pull the bag out.

[http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/sr=1-11/qid=1169524414/ref=sr_1_11/602-0868447-3796659?ie=UTF8&asin=B000JT7N7A http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000JT7N7A.16._SCLZZZZZZZ_SS260_V38540904_.jpg]

After ripping the handles off yet another Glad bag trying to get it out
of the pail I went to get a drill to poke an air hole in the bottom --
leak proof be damned.  Next to the drill I saw a piece of 3/4" plastic
tubing, which I ran from the top of the inner pail to the bottom.

[http://ry4an.org/pictures/web/cimg0280 http://ry4an.org/photos/web/cimg0280.thumb.jpg]

After a trash day that left the bag handles intact I can report that the
hose allows air in without requiring new holes.  Future trash pails
should have top to bottom air ducts molded into them.  Trashcan
manufacturers please to be getting on that right now.

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UnBlog/2006-12-07

2006-12-08T06:24:29Z

== The Death of the Har Mar Theater ==

Years ago I had a bad movie viewing experience I can't actually recall
at Har Mar Theater in Roseville.  As an experiment in how rumors spread
and as mild revenge I decided that every time someone mentioned the Har
Mar Theater I was going to let them know that once a rat ran across my
foot while I was watching a movie there.  It's not true, but I figured
it was a story that people would pass on to friends.

In six years of spreading that story at least fifty times I'm sad to say
that I never once heard about rats at the Har Mar Theater from anyone,
nor did I ever tell someone my story and have them mention they'd heard
a similar story elsewhere.

Still, in the end I'm victorious.  As [http://mcgoose.com Sarah] let me
know yesterday,
[http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/entertainment/16171478.htm the Har Mar Theater is closing].
I'm pretty sure that I (and not the new megaplex opening across the
highway) am singularly responsible for this happy turn of events.

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UnBlog/2006-11-28

2006-11-29T01:32:05Z

== Whole House Humidifier ==

This weekend I put in a Honeywell 360A whole house humidifier.  The
instructions said it should take an hour, and it only took me four.
Nothing went wrong, which what you hope for when a project means
cutting holes in your duct work, tapping into your water, and some
wiring.  Now when we wake up our throats don't hurt.

attachment:IMG_1153.jpg

attachment:IMG_1154.jpg

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UnBlog/2006-10-27

2006-10-27T22:21:33Z

fixed links

== The Wedding Planned With Bugzilla ==

If things have been a little sparse around here over the last year or
so it's because outside of work the bulk of my organizational and
creative energies have been going into the planning of our wedding.

The wedding was this weekend, and everything was spectacular. Photos
and details can be found on the
[http://kateandry4an.org wedding website].

I've come away from the wedding planning experience with this advice
for guys: Don't bother helping; no one but your finance/wife will
believe you've done anything, and she's already in love with you.

Kate and I got no end of comments and jokes predicated on the notion
that the guy never does anything to help with the wedding, and despite
her earnest protestations to the contrary, you could tell that people
came away with a belief that at most I probably helped pick the cake
or something.

That assumption was all the more maddening because, in fact, my
tendency to over plan events was perfect for a wedding. I'd been
waiting for just this sort of opportunity to plan a large event and in
doing so to put a record keeping theory to the test. -- By now it
should be obvious that Kate, my wife, is a very patient woman.

For years I'd watched an event planner who worked out of the same
coffee shop I did practice her trade. So nearly as I could tell she
lived entirely in a world of post-it notes and phone calls. On any
given day I'd watch 500 different pieces of information flit before
her mental windshield with no discernible organizational system I could
recognize. It drove me crazy. I wanted to offer to help her come up
with a computer based solution that would patch all the holes in her
process I was sure had to plague her on every project.

Meanwhile, I was sitting next to her working on computer software,
which for any project of reasonable size includes tracking thousands
of details. Among those details are defects, bugs, and any team with
any hope of success uses a bug tracker system to keep them documented.
The most popular, but certainly not the most user-friendly, bug
tracker is [http://www.bugzilla.org/ Bugzilla]. I like it a great
deal.

I became certain that more than a spreadsheet or calendar or MS
project, event planning required a bug tracker. I was pretty sure that
Bugzilla could be put to work to keep good logs of tasks, dependences,
and details in exactly the right fashion.

As alluded to previously, Bugzilla has a user-interface that only a
software developer could love. Kate's not a software developer, so
there was some initial resistance, but she's a trouper and took to it
eventually. File attachments held contracts, and comments included
phone logs. We were planning the wedding long distance so most
communications were electronic.

In the end it worked well -- no details fell through the cracks --,
but it was probably overkill for a two-person project. Something like
[http://www.basecamphq.com/ basecamp] is probably a much better fit.
Bugzilla does have some nearly useless charts that allowed me to
produce the horrible dependency graph below:

[http://ry4an.org/unblog/UnBlog/2006-10-27?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=wedding-dependencies.png http://ry4an.org/unblog/UnBlog/2006-10-27?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=wedding-dependencies-thumb.png]

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  Bugzilla does have some nearly useless charts that allowed me to
  produce the horrible dependency graph below:
  
- attachment:wedding-dependencies.png attachment:wedding-dependencies-thumb.png
+ [http://ry4an.org/unblog/UnBlog/2006-10-27?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=wedding-dependencies.png http://ry4an.org/unblog/UnBlog/2006-10-27?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=wedding-dependencies-thumb.png]
  
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UnBlog/2006-09-04

2006-09-05T04:21:31Z

== Motion Lights and Silliness ==

We've got an old lighting fixture for our front porch, which we didn't
want to replace with an ugly motion light.  I tried putting a socket
adapter in-line with the bulb, but it wouldn't fit in the globe.

More time spent staring at the lighting offerings at Home Depot turned
up a workable, if convoluted, solution.  An external motion detector
sends a wireless signal to a replacement indoor light switch, which
then turn on the external light.  To make what should have been a ten
minute project even sillier, I should be able to control the remote
switch from the
[http://www.acura.com/index.aspx?initPath=RL_Learn_FeaturesOptions_SafetySecurity_Security_HomeLink home link]
button in my car.  Heh.

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UnBlog/2006-08-05

2006-08-06T01:45:08Z

== Home Repair and Misc. ==

When I don't post here in a while it either means I'm not building
anything new or that I'm too busy to write about what I am doing.  This
time it's the later.  Not that any of it's been exciting, but almost all
of it involved using a saw, which totally counts.

Gwin, our eldest cat, has always kicked toys into the basement sump for
the joy of watching humans pick them out later.  Milo, on the other
hand, likes running into the muddy sump and then running up stairs.  To
keep the cats and their toys out I built a little wooden frame to fit
and covered it with chicken wire.  It's ugly but functional.

[http://ry4an.org/pictures/web/Sump http://ry4an.org/photos/web/Sump.thumb.jpg]

At some point during Monday night's storm a 20' branch fell from the sky
and broke our fence gate.  Neither of us woke up.  Sometimes I park my
car right where it landed, and I'm glad Monday wasn't one of those
times.  Repair was just a matter of replacing a few pickets and fixing
the latch.  The latch has never worked well and still doesn't, but it's
slightly better, which I keep telling Kate counts as fixing it.

[http://ry4an.org/pictures/web/Gate http://ry4an.org/photos/web/Gate.thumb.jpg]

Meager construction efforts aside I've been working on some big things
at work and on our [http://kateandry4an.org/gallery/invitation wedding
invitations], which we hope to mail in the next week or two.

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UnBlog/2006-04-14

2006-06-17T03:48:02Z

== Display Google Calendars with PHP iCalendar ==

Google has a [http://google.com/calendar new calendar service], and
it's great.  I really try to avoid hosted data solutions, but this
one's just too good to pass up.  My one gripe is that there's no easy
way for non google calendar users to view the calendars.  They're
available live as both ical and rss/xml files, but the average home
web user doesn't know what to do with either of those.

There are plenty of services out there that will display an ical file
as a web page, but none of them I tested rendered the google ical
output well, and all of them were packed with ads.  Previously, I'd
used software called
[http://sf.net/projects/phpicalendar phpicalendar] to display ical
files created by my [wiki:UnBlog/2003-10-09 old calendaring solution]
on the web, so I started there.  It didn't parse the google output
well either.  However, with a little tweaking (see the patch in the
zip file below) and some Apache trickery (see the README in the
zip file) I can now get
[http://ry4an.org/calendar/ good phpicalendar output from google].

attachment:google-calendar-phpicalendar-2.22.zip

/!\ Update:  Looks like now google offers [http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/event_publisher_guide.html#site a good way to do this].

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  attachment:google-calendar-phpicalendar-2.22.zip
  
+ /!\ Update:  Looks like now google offers [http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/event_publisher_guide.html#site a good way to do this].
+ 
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UnBlog/2006-06-04

2006-06-05T02:32:51Z

== Ivy and Stucco ==

This weekend was full of discoveries involving ivy and stucco and
removing the former from the later.  Summarizing them we have:

 1. '''Don't'''.  Keep them away from one another.  If you have a stucco home and your neighbor plants ivy secretly poison it.
 1. If there is ivy on your stucco, just leave it there.  Removing it is not worth the pain.
 1. If you do remove the ivy, remove it completely.  If you pull it off and plan on getting the residual debris later, you're going to find it's dried to a state where it can no longer be pulled off in strands like it can be when green.
 1. If you've let residual ivy dry to the point where it's brittle, plan on a day full of power washers, long handled brushes, and ladders.  Try to drink a lot.  Expect to repaint.

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UnBlog/2006-05-16

2006-05-16T19:27:40Z

whoops, wrong month

== Caching In My Moving Karma ==

There's a purchase agreement in place for the condo, and it's
time to organize the moving extravaganza.  Saturday, June 17th
at 11am moving helpers generous with their time will find everything
pre-boxed, wrapped, stacked, and ready.  Half the stuff will be
going to Salvation Army down the street and half will be moving
from 580 N 2nd St. #120 to 330 E 50th St.  I'm renting a large
truck (and possibly selling off a good fraction of the furniture in
advance), so with luck we'll be on to the beer and lots of food
portion of the afternoon after just one short trip.

Please let me know if you think you can make it so I can plan food
supply and figure out if I need to start trying to call up
moving karma chits by name.

Thanks,

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  == Caching In My Moving Karma ==
  
  There's a purchase agreement in place for the condo, and it's
- time to organize the moving extravaganza.  Saturday, July 17th
+ time to organize the moving extravaganza.  Saturday, June 17th
  at 11am moving helpers generous with their time will find everything
  pre-boxed, wrapped, stacked, and ready.  Half the stuff will be
  going to Salvation Army down the street and half will be moving