Revisiting the New Year

Now that we are a few months into the new year I thought I would revisit the New Year’s Resolutions I posted earlier. At this point I’m not real happy with the progress I’ve made, but I’m willing to keep them in mind and continue to work toward these goals.

I’m going to get these cleaned off my desktop and into a comprehensive list where I can then focus on completing one of these tasks at a time.

This is the one I’ve made the most progress on. I’m down from half a dozen lists to just two.
I’m going to communicate early and often.

As you can tell from the lack of post between January and now I haven’t kept up with this one at all.
I want to work more.

Between moving into the new house including the unpacking and finalizing work, spending the time with the family, and working at a startup I’ve had less time this year to work then in years past. I’m really trying to start focusing on this one more now
Spend more time with my family

At this point I’m not spending any less time with the family, but I haven’t been able to increase the time either.
Lose 40 pounds by the end of the year

At this point the weight is staying the same. The treadmill still hasn’t been unpacked yet so I’m not getting the walking time. However, it does feel like I’m working on or around the house more again.
it’s time to come up with a working quit plan that I can stick with.

The plans are starting to formulate.

new-years-bucks-county Posted on April 4th 2011 Filed under Editorial
Me

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Smooth Criminal

I’ve never been a fan of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal. I have always liked Alien Ant Farm’s cover of it though. It looks like I may have a new favorite cover. These cellists completely rock out. Who knew?
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Screen shot 2011-01-26 at 9.32.22 PM Posted on January 26th 2011 Filed under Media

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Python List Filter Helper

In a previous post, I mentioned I’ve been doing a lot of datagrid work lately. In addition to column sorting another feature I’ve added is the filtering of the datagrid by a specific value in a column. Most of these columns contain string values that we can use the same logic on, over and over again. I’ve come up with a helper function that generalizes the string filtering and can be used for this. The helper does a couple of special things.

  • It allows you to filter by returned values of object methods.
  • It searches for the term anywhere in the value.
  • It does a case in-sensitive search.
  • It does some basic value clean up.

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Django Mascots Posted on January 13th 2011 Filed under Work

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Folsom Prison Gangsta

Those of you who have been around for a while know how much I love mashups. I especially love it if the mashup is some unusual variation on a rap song. I’ve had a copy of this one laying around for a while and it’s still one of my favorites. DJ Topcat put together this great mix of Johnny Cash and Eazy-E. Enjoy!!!!
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Screen shot 2011-01-11 at 8.48.21 PM Posted on January 11th 2011 Filed under Media

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Python In-Memory Sort Helper

I’ve been doing a lot of work on datagrids lately. My datagrid work is originally based off of Djblets datagrids. One of the cool things about these datagrids is the ability to sort by any column in the grid. This is a problem if the sorting occurs at the query level and you are dealing with Google App Engine data models. You could mitigate this by putting an index on every property on the model, but that isn’t a realistic solution. I’ve come up with a different solution. I pass an array of objects into the datagrid instead of a query and I have a helper function that sorts the objects in memory. This helper has some cool features.

  • It allows you to sort by returned values of object methods.
  • It allows you to sort the objects in ascending or descending value order.
  • It allows sorting by multiple attributes.
  • It does some basic value clean up before sorting for sort consistency.

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Django Mascots Posted on January 6th 2011 Filed under Work

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Treadmill Desk Version 2.0

The last time I was motivated to lose weight I setup a table over my treadmill and walked while I worked. This was very productive and I ended up losing about 40 pounds. Now, that I’m getting back into the work out routine I thought I would do the same thing. There was just one small problem. We don’t have that table anymore. So being a little creative I made a new treadmill desk. It’s pretty rough, but it gets the job done.

Treadmill Desk with Computer

Treadmill Desk with Computer Posted on January 4th 2011 Filed under Me
Media

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New Year’s Resolutions

With the passing of the old year and the beginning of the new, many people make their traditional “New Year’s Resolutions”. I’ve usually eschewed these resolutions that more than likely will fail anyway. This year I’ve decided to give this whole resolution thing a go. I’m going to be successful at it too. I’m not holding myself to anything that I can’t do or haven’t done before and I’m going to focus on one thing at a time.

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new-years-bucks-county Posted on January 3rd 2011 Filed under Around
Editorial
Family
Me

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Broadband Update

I ranted about my broadband frustrations in the previous post. An update to the story. Apparently the question to ask is not if I can get service to the home, but how much would it cost to get service to the home. After I talked with Mediacom a couple of more time I found out that service can be brought to the home for $5,700. Given that cable is really about the only broadband option I can work with, that is what we are going to do.

coverage map Posted on November 10th 2010 Filed under Family
Work

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Broadband Frustration

I’m a software engineer and one of the few fortunate individuals who gets to work out of their home. We purchased some land a couple of years ago with the intention of building a new home. We are now in the process of building that house. Being a remote employee doing software development, I need a pretty robust internet connection. At the same time I knew that broadband availability would be a difficult thing to work out since the new house is in what I would call a semi-remote location. I’ve previous complained about broadband availability. I’ve been a cable internet user for at least 12 years and I would like to continue to be. It’s either that or pay the same price for 1/10th the speed and possible maximum usage caps.

I contacted Mediacom to find out if service was available for our new home. They responded that our house was not serviceable. The image below (from connect iowa) illustrates why this is so frustrating. The red square is the lot we are building on. The red/pink overlay is where cable is available. I bet there isn’t a thousand feet between the two.

coverage map Posted on November 4th 2010 Filed under Family
Work

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Shingles, Colors, and Doors! Oh, My!

Now that the basement is done for our new house, our builder is getting ready to frame. So Rachel and I spent some time making decisions about the exterior of the house. We had to make decisions on the shingles, front door, and house color.

We’ve decided to go with the “Estate Gray” for the shingles.

We have decided to go with “Whiskers” and “Atrium White” for the outside colors.

The front door will be a “Cut Crystal Series” door with sidelights. We are planning on doing the front door in a burgundy or navy color.

** note pictures are not of the actual construction or products :)

House Plan Posted on September 8th 2010 Filed under Around

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