Blue Jets and Bouncing Green Frogs
As I mentioned in my previous post we spent last saturday in Green Bay at a family get together. Evelyn and I got a chance to get crazy and enjoy some of the park equipment.
Photo credit to Mom Andria for the Evelyn/Dad action shots, and Uncle Andy took the group photos of the three of us.
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Bocce with Andy
We had a little family get together this weekend in Green Bay, WI. About half of my extended family lives in WI and the other half in the upper peninsula of Michigan (Yoopers, eh?)
I don’t get to see my brother, Andy, too often since I live in Sauk Praire and spread myself way too thin, and he lives in Milwaukee and is smart enough to not own a vehicle (I am envious of the fact that he is totally self sufficient and independent on a level I can only observe, but that’s another post all together…).
We met at Colburn Park, which is a really nice place. I have never been there and I was impressed. They had shaled bocce courts, so Andy and I tossed some ceramic balls around for fun.
International projects
I am pretty excited about a new project I am working on with @mallmus (Adam Wintle) from MallmusMedia. We are keeping it on the down low until we get a basic working alpha, but it is an addon for the MODx content management system/framework.
I have been busily chopping away at the PHP code, Adam has been working on the site, and we have spent a lot of time on Twitter and Google Chat bouncing ideas about imagery, design, and interface off each other. It’s a bit challenging given the 6 hour time zone difference. Luckily neither of us ever sleep, EVER.
Posted in: Web Development ✯ 3 Comments
ASCII Logo
I love ASCII art. I think it is amazing how we can trick our eyes into seeing pictures where there is only letters, numbers, symbols, and spaces. I uploaded my logo to the GlassGiant ASCII art generator and it spit this out for me.
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Opening day of yard work season.
Ok, yard work season may have officially opened weeks ago, but not for me. I really dislike mowing my lawn. It’s a pain in the ass. A few of our neighbors spend a lot of time (and money) on their lawns. It’s frustrating for two reasons.
- My lawn sucks. There is hardly any nice grass. It’s mostly the thick blade crab grass and whatever the hell will grow in sand. The few square inches of lawn that I have where nice grass actually grows is like the Amazon rain forest. 90% of my lawn grows 0.001 inches per month and the other 10% grows like 40 feet per week. And it’s thick, like the back hair of every shirtless idiot on COPS, so the lawn mower sometimes just stops when I am rolling over it.
- I hate mowing!!! It sucks. It’s so fricking boring. I can think of about a hundred things I’d rather be doing, like playing the guitar, working on web projects, hacking the interwebs, getting shot in the face with a crossbow, whatever.
Also, Andria wanted a fountain for mother’s day. She insisted that we pick one up this weekend, citing the fact that “there will be none left next weekend”. She is happy with it, and apparently Olive LOVES it, so… a terrific gift indeed (pats self on back).
Anyway, It was actually a nice day, and you can probably tell by my skin tone that I don’t see much of the outdoors. If any good can come from this, I guess it is that it was a light workout, hopefully staving off a myocardial infarction for now.
Tags: Fountain, Lawn, Mowing, Outside
Posted in: DFPA, Daily, Photography ✯ 2 Comments
End of April
It has been a busy week at the hospital. Andria and Evelyn have been back with the grandmas for most of the week, so it feels I haven’t seen much of either of them in a long time. We did get to have some fun outside on Tuesday. It was a semi-warmish springlike day? Nice enough for some pictures anyway.
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Octopus Tattoo
I was down at SmoothFX again today to get some more work done on my arm. I wanted a bigger piece on the inside of the bicep, and have been trying to figure out a way to work some octopodidae into my collection. This is going to be a big piece spanning a few sessions (at least one more, maybe two?), but this is what I got done from 11am to 3:30pm today.
Smooth used a stencil for the new nautical star and the skull, but wanted to do the octopus freehand. I was a bit nervous, but the dude is f*&#ing incredible. It looks so much better than I could have even imagined. I am really happy with this piece so far. I can’t wait to get the rest of the tentacles finished.
Tags: Octopodidae, Octopus, Tattoo
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NetBook Pro
The Dell Mini 9 that I ordered a few weeks ago came today. I have been looking for a nebook for a while. I was considering several vendors, and the Mini 9 wasn’t in the top 3, but then I read this article from gizmodo and saw the OS X netbook compatibility chart from Boing Boing. What could be better than a Mac powered netbook?
The custom version of Ubuntu that ships with the Mini 9 is pretty cool. The application launcher bar that Dell provides seems quite handy. I think the general Idea is to provide similar functionality to the Asus Xandros offering. The Dell Ubuntu is quite a bit nicer than Asus’ Xandros though, with really fluid animations and a full gnome desktop just a mouse click away.
But I digress… My true intentions were to install Mac OS X on this tiny beast and save some right shoulder ache from lugging around that 17″ MacBook Pro.
The first thing I did was purchase a retail copy of the Mac OS X Leopard install DVD from my local Apple Store. The one I got installed 10.5.6. I put the DVD in my MBP and opened Disk Utility.
Next I plugged in my 8GB USB flash drive. I selected this flash drive in disc utility and formated it into two partitions as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled). The first was about 50MB for the DellEFI Bootloader. For the rest, I selected the “Restore” tab and chose the Mac OS X install DVD as the source, and the bigger partition on the flash drive as the destination.
After the restore finished, I used DellEFIBootMaker to make the first partition bootable with the DellEFI bootloader. I also put a copy of DellEFI 1.2 alpha in the extras folder that was created on the first partition.
With this USB flash drive plugged into the mini, I powered it on and pressed “0″ at the BIOS splash to select the boot device and chose the USB flash drive. The DellEFIBootMaker has a semi-polished GUI. I chose the Mac OS X Install partition on the flash drive and it started an OS X install session just like it were a real Mac.
The install took about 30 or 40 Minutes. At the end, It said that the installation failed, but everything I read said that this was normal and expected. The installation actually succeeded in spite of what the message said.
The last step was to reboot, choose the USB drive again, select the SSD from the DellEFIBootMaker menu, and when OS X loads, run the DellEFI 1.2 application from the extras folder on the flash drive. after this, the Mini will boot straight into OS X like any other Mac.
Since this is not a Hackintosh modified install disc, I can use software update without any issues.
Here are some action shots of OS X on the Mini 9:
BTW, I am posting this from the NetBook Pro (my new name for the Mini 9).
Tags: Dell Mini 9, Hackintosh
FileDownloadPE
For those of you looking for information on my MODx snippet FileDownloadPE, the page has been lost in transition from my site being powered by MODx to this new Wordpress site. It is available at the archive site until (if/when) I get it reposted in this new blog. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Tags: FileDownloadPE, MODx
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Anniversary in Chicago
Tuesday, June 3rd was Andria’s and my two year anniversary. We decided to take a trip to Chicago to get away and have some fun. Andria booked a hotel room at Hotel Allegro In the theater district (Randlolph & LaSalle). It was pretty swank. They just dropped a bunch of cash redesigning all the rooms. It’s an old building, and it has this real classic charm (and smell, unfortunately). Also, it is within a few blocks of the museums and the aquarium, so that was convenient.
The weather was really nice all three days we were there so we walked everywhere. I don’t know how many miles we put on, but my dogs were barking for a few days. We got in on to town on the 3rd, around 3:30pm and spent the first afternoon rushing through exhibits at the Art Institute (they close at 5pm), but we managed to take in quite a bit.
Day 2 we hiked up to the Field Museum. We spent most of the day there. The “Evolving Planet” exhibit and “Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids” were really, really cool.
In the afternoon, we walked up to the Shedd Aquarium. It was ok, but not as cool as I remember it when I was a kid. That eveneing we grabbed some dinner at the hotel restaurant and hoofed it down to the Sears Towerobservation deck to check out the fireworks they shoot off from Navy Pier every Wednesday during the summer. It was an incredible perspective to say the least. Andria tried to snap some pics with the Nikon D40, but the backlighting caused too many reflections, and the focal area was too dark so even with a high ISO, the shutter speed was too slow to get any clear images.
Tags: Anniversary, Chicago
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