Category: Me

Personal news about Michael Alderete.

Writing Again

It’s been a while since I published much here (visibly), but to answer a popular question, yes, I’m still here. I’m taking this three-day weekend to restart some efforts, including writing here on the blog, and also answering mail that has piled up. It’s going to take a while, but I’m slogging through it.

What’s unfortunate, and ironic, about my break from writing is that I never published a post explaining that I’d updated every single page in Aldo on Audiobooks, bringing it up to date, both with the (then) current version of iTunes and with a few new tricks I’d learned. It also includes a greatly expanded selection of audiobook recommendations.

Of course, a month or two after I finished all those updates, Apple announced all new hardware, both iPhones and iPods, and previewed iTunes 11. I “took a pause” to wait for iTunes 11 before updating everything, and then Apple took a while to actually ship it.

Anyway, the goal is to sweep through everything this weekend, and if it’s not completely revised, to at least add a blog post explaining differences.

RailsConf 2006

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:

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Up and Down, Up and Down…

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…

Dell 20″ Flat Panel Under $500 $400

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.

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.

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Desk chairs

“Alex asks”:http://www.alexking.org/blog/2005/04/25/desk-chair/ 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.

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:

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Neat Stuff: Sigalert

I’ve been a subscriber to the “Sigalert service”:http://www.sigalert.com/ 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.

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.

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The Tragic Consequences of Reasonable Decisions

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.

There is no doubt that I should have seen this coming. Should have been ready, mentally and financially, for this to get really complicated, really fast. But it truly 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.

Continue reading “The Tragic Consequences of Reasonable Decisions”

Get Back to Work!

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.

OK, the new version of WordPress is going to get me into trouble. I’m having entirely too much fun playing with the new features, and finishing out the last few things that hadn’t made the transition. (I think on the public side, I’m 100% done. Still a couple of tweaks on the admin side, to make writing posts a little easier by bumping up the font size and so on for the editing form.)

At any rate, I need to get back to work, instead of continuing to fuss. Bye!

90% Upgraded

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

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

Took me a little over an hour to do the majority of the work. I think most things work now, even if it’s not exactly completely the same as the 1.2 version. I still have a few plug-ins to add and test, and then add to the templates, to get everything back to where it should be. But all the hard stuff is behind me.

Let me know if anything seems wrong…