Tims Blog

Now that travel and training and all that happy fun stuff has come and gone I can get back to doing what’s important…like playing video games and being lazy

On a serious note, the last monkey that I need to get off my back at work is nessquik. When that it ready to role, my software can go back into maintenance mode; receiving library updates as they are made available. That will give me some more time to focus on some small bro use cases as well.

I started playing Mario Galaxy recently since I realized I had been borrowing it from Dan for way too long. It’s a lot of fun. Not too difficult which is really a pleasure. I wasn’t interested in tough challenges to get stars and all that. I just wanted to play through leisurely and the game does that well.

• go big or go home
• how to lose traction on a personal software project
• concurrency in c++ google code university
• 100 free, open courses to be your own financial planner
• zend framework automatic dependency tracking
• yuuguu
• how javascript timers work
• unity 3d
• switching from scripting languages to objective-c and iphone

And on this fourth day of training for DNS we discuss and implement TSIG and DNSSEC. IMHO one of the single biggest reasons that people hate security is that it is “hard”. Well, TSIG and DNSSEC take the cake. Also, syslog-ng 3.0 is out; woot.

• geo proximity search with php
• zend_acl part 1
• zend_acl part 2
• zend_acl part 3
• build a web service client using ZF
• xpath checker
• advanced bootstrapping ZF
• this is why you’re fat
• pragmatic reporting for your webapps
• 10 websites to help you master gimp
• digiband
• track time with klok
• flot
• only valid measurement of code quality
• suhosin
• php simple html dom parser

I’m one payment away from totally paying off my motorcycle; I’m so stoked to be this close.

Well, the other day my car’s check engine light sprang back on. “Just what I need” was the first thing I thought. It came back on while in the garage this time, so I was extra worried. Last time it would come on when it was just really cold out. Thankfully Gartner (btw the best Hyundai dealer in the country!) had a spot open after lunch and was able to get me in for a diagnostic.

I was sitting there looking at their car software they use for the service center and saw that diagnostics were going to cost like $115. “Ridiculous” I thought. What a crock to be charged that much money and then only be told “nope, nothing wrong with your car”. Those charges are the lowest form of low. I’ll pay if the diag finds something legitimately wrong with the car, but I would be totally pissed off if I had to pay for a service that finds nothing wrong.

I asked the guy about the $115 and he said “oh dont worry about that, there’s no charge”. Thank you Gartner and warranty!

So I sit around for a while waiting for the tests to finish. In the end, it turned out to be a TPS/APS failure; throttle position sensor/accelerator position sensor. I poked arund the internet to see what exactly this stuff is (i’m not a car guy) and found a forum for Toyota Tundras that explained my exact same experience.

It will only stop working when its very cold out(10 degrees F or colder). Truck will idle at 1200 rpm and when I push on the pedal the engine light comes on and no throttle response until the throttle cable takes over in the manual mode. If you let the truck warm up, shut it off, disconnect and then reconnect the battery, all is fine due to the temperature warming up in the engine bay

That is exactly what happened that day at work that it got down to negative 20. Next year I’ll WFH or take the day off to avoid the headache.

So Mint upgraded their software recently. Holy cow it totally kicks ass now. I was considering their new Property section and how cool it would be to link your vehicles to the private sale listings from kbb.com. They did this linkage for property using a listing website, so you can get a general idea of how your house value fluctuates over time. It would be awesome to also link your vehicles to kbb though. Maybe the feature is in the pipe; who knows.

• how to create a rest protocol
• rest and python
• the philosophy of aristotle
• mortgage prepayment myths
• paying off your mortgage
• little boy boo
• well designed urls are beautiful
• getting started with rest using ZF

Joe helped me with this Tunecast hack we found on Instructables. I’ve wanted to do this for so long because the stock Tunecast transmit power sucks. Here’s the result. I can override Q101! Sweet!

This last paycheck reminded me that I don’t use vacation days frequently enough. I have something like 28 days accrued right now. Really though, look at it outside. Who would want to vacation in miserable weather like this? It’d be more “oh yeah, I’ll take a day off” if it was oh…I dunno…warm outside?

Being cold means I’d just stay home and sit in my house for “vacation”; something I do almost every weekend anyway, and can do pretty much any day I want to during the normal week due to my job being a good candidate for telecommuting.

The house is rather unkept right now though, so it would probably be a good idea to take a day off to clean. I dunno, it’s just boring around here and I like my job so I continually find myself logging back in even on weekends and during vacation.

• start a new branch on your remote git repo