2015.03.14 – Happy Pi Day or Half Tau Day!

I woke up to a rainy day and what a pleasant change that was. It’s Pi or Half Tau Day depending upon your beliefs. I celebrate both! I got up early to make the meringue for one of the pies we were taking to the party. Unfortunately I was so busy doing other things during my pie making marathon the night before that I didn’t completely read the instructions. It seemed the pie would have to bake and then cool for several hours before being served. I was going to have to leave it behind. Luckily I had made two chocolate cream pies so it would probably be fine.

I gathered everyone, Natale, Jayde, Estelle, and Andrew and we headed over to Portland Code School. Paige was the only one there and it seemed the Holligan crew was running late. We rang in the moment at 09:26:53 without them. Paige had brought an old computer tower and oversaw Estelle, Jayde, and Natale as they disassembled and reassembled it. They were so excited to learn about the insides of a computer and then to actually build it so that it booted into Windows XP. We ate pie, the kids had a computer speed building contest(Natale won at ~8 minutes), had a contest to see who could recite the most digits of Pi (me! 40 digits), ate more pie, talked about nerdy stuff, ate pizza and more pie and then cleaned up and came back home.

The Holligan’s came over and Dave worked on something with Andrew while Alena, the kids and I watched some movies. It was a great day 🙂

Today I learned that it’s totally possible to make vegan meringue that tastes just like egg based meringue!

2015.02.16 – Fighting With Sprites

It was another beautiful, sunny day but it was kind of windy. I stayed inside and worked on getting a star icon to toggle back and forth from gold to grey. I got it to work using two image files, CSS and jQuery. I still don’t quite understand it all but it works. I wanted to try getting it work with a sprite though. A sprite is a single image file with multiple image objects. Only a certain portion of the image file is revealed at any given time. I understand the concept and think I understand how to configure things but it doesn’t work. Frustrating!

We also watched the sixth Harry Potter movie but I kept falling asleep. After the movie I started working on dinner. We had chick’n pot pie patties, mashed potatoes, gravy, sauteed asparagus and mushrooms, salad and bread. Alice and Jason joined us. It was SO good! I tried not to eat too much though because I made some chocolate rice pudding for dessert.

After dinner I asked Andrew if he would look at my code for the sprite. He looked for 2.5 seconds and asked why I didn’t have a comma at the end of a particular line. Uh, I dunno. I added the comma and BAM! It worked. Gah! I should have bothered him sooner because I would never have figured that one out on my own. Now I’m going to find a better sprite file to use and mess with that. What a relief to have it working.

Today I learned how to make my sprite work. Sweet!

2015.02.14 – Valentine’s Day

I pretty much spent the entire day working on Mozilla stuff. It’s the weekend and I really should have just gone outside. We are having the most beautiful weather! I was able to make progress on the template though.

I added back in, one by one, the three important lines I had to delete in order to get it working before. Andrew helped me figure out the first issue. I was looking and looking and trying all sorts of things. He glanced at it for about 30 seconds and gave me a tip that got me moving forward again. I can’t even explain how much just a tiny bit of help is such a big deal to a new programmer. It’s kind of like being spotted doing an exercise. You try and try and try to do a pull-up but you can’t. If someone would give just a little help you can complete the pull-up and your body gets to feel the complete motion. It feels the same when I get the slightest point in the right direction.

Anyway, I got the next issue fixed pretty easily. I had to add some more code to my view and all was well. The last one I can’t figure out though. My events need to have a placeholder image so they can display a thumbnail but I don’t know how they are generated. Some module I am unfamiliar with is imported and used. I’ll have to bug Peter about that one.

We don’t normally do much for Valentine’s Day but this year we went out to dinner with Alice and Jason. We went to a really good Indian Buffet, Namaste. We all ate a lot and then went back home to watch a movie at their house. Jason added some red LED lights behind the tv and made some nice shelves for drinks. They have such a sweet home theater and he keeps improving it. We watched John Wick. Keanu Reeves killing a LOT of people. Meh.

Today I learned that there is such a thing as cashew milk ice cream. Yum!

2015.01.19 – Thank You Martin Luther King Jr.

I wasn’t sure if I was expected to work today since it’s a day of remembrance and celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.  I got up and showered early just in case though but it happily turned out to be a day off for Air Mozilla. Peter had emailed everyone about some changes to the repository though and I figured it would be a good time to work on getting mine synchronized.

The email said to delete the virtual environment, recreate it and install the requirements. Simple! Except not really. Not for me anyway. I did everything I was supposed to but now I couldn’t get the server to run. The error seemed to be related to my setup.py file so naturally I just deleted it and recreated it. That didn’t help at all. His instructions also said to delete some vendor directories if they were still around so perhaps that was my issue. Delete! Well now stuff was even more broken. Faaaaantastic. The directories were gone. They weren’t pushed up to my repo since they are ignored so that made me think they must be created locally or something. I was switching back and forth between the master branch and my feature branch trying to make stuff work and finally remembered that I had a copy of the old repo.

I copied over the directory I needed and the server started right up on my master branch but none of the new files I had created on my feature branch were available so I got errors. I switched to my feature branch where I had the files but then the server wouldn’t run. Sheesh! I scratched my head for a bit on that one and then realized I needed to rebase master onto my feature branch. Once that was done everything worked just fine but what a pain anyway!

Bob, the wallpaper remover, came back for day two of removal. He said he was going to have to also come back Friday or Saturday too in order to finish. It’s a lot of wallpaper. I also ordered a dumpster since Wayne is going to start the kitchen demo this week. It should be a big mess. This house definitely needs to get worse before it gets better.

Today I spent a lot of time reflecting on Dr. King and what an extraordinary man he was. He has been gone longer than he lived and it saddens me to think his fight is still necessary. I wish humanity were better than that but we prove time and again that we are not. I’m thankful that although he was gone too soon his words are living on. I don’t have anything profound to say. Each day I’m both pleased and disappointed in humanity. We’ve got a lot of shit to figure out.

So lycra for camels is a thing. You’re welcome.

2014.12.24 – Christmas Eve

I don’t often dream but when I do it’s exciting! It’s not really exciting. I dreamed a lot about how to make the UA Python library compatible with Python 2 and 3. I totally solved it in my dream but upon waking I realized it would never work. Oh well.

Andrew was going to work for half of the day and then we were going to go get a last minute gift and hit the grocery store. I did a little bill paying and it felt nice to have that out of the way. I grabbed my tea and headed across the street to Joanne’s house. She’s another wonderful neighbor who is going through a really rough time managing her husband who has dementia. I’ve been a terrible friend and neighbor and haven’t really seen her much. She had just finished baking some pie and cheesecake so we sat in the kitchen and caught up. I stayed until it was lunch time and promised I wouldn’t be such a stranger.

I watched the second episode of season one of Grimm and wow, some of the acting is just awful! Luckily the terrible actor’s characters get killed off. Kronda says it gets better so I’m going to keep watching, besides it’s lots of fun to see Portland in a tv show.

Andrew finished up so he, Wayne, and I headed downtown to get a gift certificate for one of our children. I had a difficult time shopping for him this year but I think he will like the store we picked and he will be able to choose something unique. We tried to eat at a Mexican place I had passed several times but it was closed. Oh well, guess it’s Los Gorditos again. We drove over there and saw the open sign so quickly found parking, walked up and they were closed 🙂

Most everyone was closed as they should be on Christmas Eve. We needed stuff from the store so I suggested we just head to Whole Foods and get stuff from the hot bar and then grab the groceries we needed. That worked out really well. The store was busy but not ridiculous by any means. As we were heading home, Andrew messaged Alice to see if they were up for watching Die Hard, our traditional Christmas movie, and she said they were so we came home and wrapped all of the presents so that would be out of the way. Natale came home with Delaney. They had been to the pet store so he could pick out another frog. That was his gift from Taylor and her. He was so excited and now Walter will have a friend. I don’t know if frogs really give a shit about that but Walter didn’t seem to mind his new companion so that’s good at least.

Andrew made a huge bag of popcorn while I put on PJs and warmed up my hot bag thing. We wandered across the street and everyone got all situated in their fancy theater. We decided to watch the second Die Hard because we always watch the first one. I didn’t remember some of it but it was pretty typical Die Hard stuff. I was surprised at how much they said ‘fuck’ in the movie. It was a lot!

When we got home I filled the stockings with silly crap and thought about our former Christmas Eve traditions in Arizona. Usually Andrew and I would head down to Walgreens around midnight and buy stocking stuffers. Our Walgreens was open 24/7 so it was not a problem. We’d then go by an former neighbor’s house and sneak an ornament onto their porch. It was something I did when we lived next door to them and we just kept doing it as we moved around. I don’t even know if they still lived there after several years of doing this. Those traditions are gone now but they are being replaced with new, wonderful ones like watching Die Hard with our neighbors.

Today I learned that Justin Timberlake likes to shop at the store where we bought the gift certificate. This isn’t important to me but our son will think it’s great.