Me

15 seconds of fame…

by Alderete on 5/5/2007 · 1 comment

I accidentally got into the San Francisco Chronicle this week. The Sipping News includes a couple of photos, including one of the lovely Rebecca Chappa demonstrating perfect tequila drinking technique:

And there I am, directly beneath the wristwatch on the pouring arm.

{ 1 comment }

RailsConf 2006

by Alderete on 6/29/2006 · 0 comments

RailsConf 2006Last weekend I was in Chicago for the first ever RailsConf, a gathering of about 600 people focused on developing web applications using the Ruby on Rails application framework. Other people are posting lots of details and thoughts (try clicking the RailsConf tag below), so I’ll just add a few deltas:

[click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

What else has been slowing me down

by Alderete on 5/9/2006 · 0 comments

A picture is worth a thousand words…

A broken and immobilized left wrist

And it comes off tomorrow morning in an hour!

{ 0 comments }

Up and down, up and down…

by Alderete on 4/18/2006 · 1 comment

That’s been my DSL connection over the last few weeks. And since I self-host this site, on a cheap PC sitting on a shelf, Aldoblog has been up and down, too. Very irritating.

The problem is the wiring. Our house is a 100+ year old Victorian, and all of our phone wiring (except for the actual phone jacks) is on the outside of the house. And it’s old, and it’s been abused, and so on. So with all the rain we’ve been having, apparently water is getting into the wiring.

We’ve had PacBell out, more than once, and about the only thing they’re consistent about is that it’s our problem, not theirs. Even thought it’s on the outside of the house, it’s “inside” wiring because it’s past the junction box, and so our responsibility.

Anyway, it’s sunny and working now, and it looks like we might be done with the rain for a while. In the meantime, I’m calling wiring contractors, because I can’t take it when we don’t have internet access. I must be a junkie…or then again, maybe I need to have internet access to, like, work and earn a living…

{ 1 comment }

Quotation of the year candidate

by Alderete on 5/27/2005

Regarding the budget overruns of the kitchen remodel:

“Yeah. We spent into the grocery money.”

“Worse. We spent into the booze money.”

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

A while back I took advantage of a special running at Dell, to get one of these 20.1” flat panel LCD displays. It arrived a week later, and I’ve been using it as a second monitor off my laptop since then.

The quality of the display is terrific. I dunno about doing color-calibrated print work, but as just extra screen space (which I’ve found I absolutely need to do web development productively), it’s spectacular, and makes the built-in screen on my laptop seem dingy by comparison.

[click to continue…]

{ 6 comments }

Desk chairs

by Alderete on 4/25/2005 · 6 comments

Alex asks for recommendations for desk chairs. I was going to answer in his comments, but it got to be long, so I thought I’d post here instead. I have three data points about desk chairs:

[click to continue…]

{ 6 comments }

Neat Stuff: Sigalert

by Alderete on 4/8/2005 · 1 comment

I’ve been a subscriber to the Sigalert service for a while. It’s a real-time traffic monitoring service that aggregates information from the sensors embedded in highways and major thoroughfares and CHP and CalTrans information about incidents like accidents, and combines it with mapping and routing functions, to give you a very complete picture of just how ugly traffic in your region is.

[click to continue…]

{ 1 comment }

The tragic consequences of reasonable decisions

March 13, 2005

There is no doubt that I should have seen this coming. Should have been ready, mentally, financially, for this to get really complicated, really fast. But it really did seem simple to me, back when we first started.

I am writing, of course, of our apparent decision to rip the kitchen out to the studs.

Read the full article →

Get back to work!

February 19, 2005

OK, the new version of WordPress is going to get me into trouble. I need to get back to work, instead of continuing to fuss.

Read the full article →

90% upgraded

February 18, 2005

I found myself unable to resist the draw of the cool. I had to go and upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.

Read the full article →

Must. Not. Remodel.

February 7, 2005

It started innocently enough. Rochelle’s mother very generously offered to buy us a new stove, after we complained about our current oven during Thanksgiving. And, if we could have just done that, it would have been a great kitchen improvement that would have cost us almost nothing.

Read the full article →