Category: Life in General

Or, possibly titled “How to hang that pesky, 50-pound window air conditioner unit in those purty little vinyl windows that you can’t stick screws into.” We have beautiful, wonderful double-hung vinyl windows, yay us. They’re very pretty, very functional, operate very smoothly, etc., etc. HOWEVER, they do NOT play nicely with window-unit air conditioners (you can’t screw the air conditioner into the vinyl window parts). So after getting a brilliant idea from a newsgroup post, and not willing to pay $40 for a metal air conditioner brace that I can’t really use anyway (again, vinyl window sill), I set out to make my own air conditioner brace out of a 2×4, some white paint, and a little sweat. Turned out Read more…

I had need to convert some files today from being newline-separated (one line per file, key-value pairs) to ‘###’-separated. In other words, instead of this: foo=bar smith=wibble neo=smith I needed this: foo=bar###smith=wibble###neo=smith My first inclination was to try using tr solely like this: cat $file | tr “\n” “###” This resulted, however, in only one “#” being used to join the lines. Not quite what I wanted. My next thought was sed: cat $file | sed ‘s,\n,###,g’ But that didn’t work at all. So, my good friend Mr. Google and I were just starting to look into the deeper mysteries of sed when I found this little newsgroup posting which opened my eyes to some of the magic of awk: Read more…

A, Burying K & J, originally uploaded by vanRijn. We had an absolutely fantastical time today. I decided that we needed to find a beach to go to and go… to… it. Yah. So, we found a really, really nice beach here in RI that reminded me of both Mission Beach and La Jolla Shores from my back-home town of sunny San Diego. I had the best day I could have wanted with my little family, hopping over the waves, diving through them, eating sand on occasion as I took a wave in too close to shore, teaching my kids a little about body-surfing, and taking a nice walk with my beautiful bride along the beach. Oh. Along the way, Read more…

100_3311.JPG, originally uploaded by vanRijn. We had a fun day at church a couple of weeks ago, doing a “Father/Buddy Day”. J & I decorated our own shirts (spiffy, eh?), and participated in a series of grueling events designed specifically for the enjoyment of the mothers and other family members in attendance. But that didn’t stop us gallant warriors, no sir. We came home with smiles on our faces, sun-screen in our pores, the perfume of victory in our flaring nostrils, second-place and third-place ribbons, and wet bellies (a leaking water balloon, travelling at high velocity between son and Father cannot be cajoled into a soft landing, no matter how great the skill, sadly).

Just had to say… it certainly feels great to get into the midst of code I’ve never seen before, debug a problem, find the solution, test it, and submit a patch to the author. Man I wish I had more time for coding at home. Maybe God will let me code in heaven for Him! =:) So, anyway, what prompted this post is that I’ve been trying to use kflickr to upload my photos to my flickr account and kept getting stopped by an annoying error. So I donned my Superman outfit, pulled on my hip-huggers, dove in, found what looks to be the problem, fixed it, and am now happily uploading my pictures to my flickr account. Cool! This Read more…

Oh yes. Ph34r m3!!!

“Contentical” as in “pretty okey dokey with how things are going as of late” that is. My beautiful children and bride are sort of settling in in our new home. My bride is making some friends here and there, as are my kiddos. There is reportedly a homeschooling luncheon/picnic/get-together thingey tomorrow that we’ll be partaking in!! We have a Father/Kiddo thing going on at church this Sunday. And we’ll be joining in on the church July 4th picnic celebration thinger 2 weeks following that. Feels good to start getting involved with and meeting people again. Despite having to pay $250 recently to get a Terminix contract going on our new home (I’d like it if carpenter ants don’t destroy the Read more…

Amarok 1.4 has been released and all I can say is WWWWOOOOOOOWWWW.  This release is amazing, guys.  I’ve been waiting for it to show up in my kubuntu updates list and it hasn’t, so tonight I hunted a bit and found this announcement showing how to get it for dapper.  As I type this, I’m transferring 1.4G to my iPod nano, and it looks like it’s going to also transfer the album cover artwork along with it.  Kick butt!!! For those who have been living in a hole for the last few years, amarok is an absolutely amazing and free music manager that uses the Qt toolkit, and is thusly available for Linux, *BSD, OS X, and probably Windows too, Read more…

So, as a prelude… you may think of it as something very important to learn in life… if ever you are planning on digging very, very, very large rocks out of your New England back yard, be sure to cover yourself head to boots in mosquito repellant. Otherwise, you will assuredly find yourself covered in more bug bites than you care to count. I mean, honestly, what kind of stupid mosquito bites you on the ears??? How much blood can possibly be up there anyway? Blah. Death to all mosquitos!!! Okay, so in other news, I’ve finally gotten back to coding a bit on kpilot. Feels good. Real good. =:) Granted, all that I’ve gotten accomplished so far has been Read more…

… I shall list the things that I would actually put into a real post if I had the time: I would post about the incredibly fun time my little brood and I had down South-Easterly-like in our previous home-town of Harrisburg, PA, visiting the best of friends. I might mention the adverse effects that driving for 7 contiguous hours will have on your posterior region. I would upload some pictures to my flickr account, showing some of the fun, frivolity, and freakishness from previous weekend, including: a thorough smashing of one candy-stuffed Dora The Explorer pinata, culminating in my delicate, beautiful eldest daughter, smashing the utter bejeebers out of said beloved cartoon character, in full witness of several of Read more…