ace’s blog

Yay! My beautiful wife and cranky son are on their way back. I’m leaving in about 25 minutes to go and pick them up. It will be good to get back to our routine. I sometimes think about how things would have been for me if I’d never gotten married or had a baby and then I even idealize it in my mind but when my wife and son are gone, I quickly realize that I’ve got it made the way things are now. Even with the occassional disagreements with Meri and Aaron always wanting attention or crying, it is a wonderful feeling having them around. I wouldn’t trade my life for anything. I feel very blessed that I have them in my life. It makes me feel like I should do more to show my appreciation. 20 minutes….

MyPeeps.usPeopleArray.com, yet another web-based contact management system.

I’ve been working on an idea that I have had for a long time ago. I feel like I now have a decent contact management system, decent enough to talk about publicly and maybe get some feedback on. It isn’t very web2.0-ish…yet, but it is a decent little web application that will store contact information and send out birthday reminders. I still have a lot more development to do but I’ve worked on it enough tonight, I’m ready for bed. I’m not in college anymore, I can’t be staying up till 2am.

Well the heavy development is now complete! I found one minor issue that will take me all of about 5 minutes to fix but other than that, it’s complete. Now comes the hard part for this project…TESTING. Crystal’s gonna have fun testing that out.

…

I’ve fixed the minor issue and all is done. Now I get to check it into DQA and wait for the world to cave in next week when testing begins.

With Meri and Aaron being gone, I’ve been having a mini-vacation. Basically I’ve been doing nothing but what I want to be doing.

Like right now, I wrote a php script to query my contact database, search for upcoming birthdays and if there are any, send me an email (you can try it out here). I’ve had this idea for a while now. I had the database table set up and had some real data in it but I could never figure out how to make it run “auto-magically”. I was going to try to write a function to communicate with Plaxo to synchronize my contacts with them since I know they have a feature that will email you when one of your contacts has an upcoming birthday. After browsing around in the control panel for my websites (and finding the documentation for said control panel), I found out about something called “crontab“. Basically, crontab is a table that I can set up and tell it to run a command whenever I want to. So now I’m scrapping my idea to call the Plaxo API in hopes of communicating with my list of contacts on their servers and I’m just going to use my own functions and my hosts servers. My php script will email me with a list of upcoming birthdays.

Back when I worked at MISG, I created a very small, very basic application to manage a list of contacts. I got it to a certain point, decided it worked “good enough” and stopped developing it. Well now that I have this other piece figured out, I’m going to start developing this system again and maybe in the end, I will have my own little robust contact management system!

I’ve also set up some redirecting for my sites.  Not that anybody besides me ever visits my sites, I just think it’s cool to play with this stuff.  Now, petewood.us/blog, petewood.info/blog and acedanger.com/blog all redirect to blog.petewood.us. 

I’m probably going to obsess about getting this contact thing working as I see it in my mind.  It will be all I think about for a while.  So here’s to great fun with geeking out!

Aaron still has an ear infection.  One ear is clearing up but the other ear is still really infected.  He will be on another 10-day treatment of antibiotics.  This will be his 3rd set of antibiotics for the ear infections.  Meri also got some drops to give Aaron to numb his ear drums.  That will be useful, especially since he is going to be flying tomorrow.  I hope he is not in too much pain during the flights.  After this set of antibiotics, if Aaron still has the ear infection, we will be referred to an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist who will probably recommend that we have tubes put in Aaron’s ears.  I hope this set of antibiotics clears up the infections, I really don’t want Aaron to have to go through surgery.

In other Aaron news, we switched his pediatrician to one that Meri’s heard a lot about and I was recommended to try from a co-worker.  Meri was really impressed by the cleanliness of this place compared to the other pediatricians office.  Meri only waited 20 minutes to see the doctor too!  At the old pediatricians office, she woud usualy wait at least an hour, sometimes longer, just to be placed in a room and then wait another 20 minutes or so until the doctor came into the room!  That other pediatricians office sucked much ass!

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Before:

During:

After:

I’m so tired today.  We both are.  I am also sore, everywhere.  Parts of my body that I didn’t think were used that much…are sore, so very sore.  Aaron woke up at 6:30 and he was still upstairs, that was a chore to get up here to get him.  Thank God his stuff is back in his bedroom now.  He’s so much easier to get now that he’s back downstairs.  I have pictures now, just haven’t had time to post them.  Did I mention I was really sore?

Holy shit that was a lot of work!  The floors look AWESOME!  I can’t believe how well they turned out.  We have a few gaps but so do the floors we had installed “professionally”.  I think we did an awesome job!  The last 1/3rd of the floor gave us a run for our money since we had to go through Aaron’s doorway and then go into his closet.  We ran out of adhesive so I had to buy more of that as well.  We also rented a nail gun to make the quarter-round go a lot faster and damn, that helped.  I was also very pleased at the cuts that I made with my new mitre saw and also the cuts I made with my circular saw that an old coworker let me have. 

I think that whoever buys this house from us is going to be very pleased with the amount of work we’ve done to it!  So far, we’ve painted all but two small rooms downstairs (including the living room and it’s 20-foot ceilings), tore down, had hardwood flooring put down in the living room and we put down hardwood floors in Aaron’s room and the hallway near his room. 

I can’t wait until we get a chance to do our bedroom.  The only way I would pay someone to do hardwood floors for us again is if we had a ton of very difficult cuts.  This room took all day but it makes me feel so proud of the work that Meri and I can accomplish together.  We complement each other so well when we work together.  Doing projects like this really makes me realize how lucky I am to have such a wonderful wife.  Meri’s the greatest!  I just love her to pieces.  She worked her butt off on this project.

I got Gmail hosted email working this morning…finally.  The only way I got it to work was to find the documenation for the control panel that my hosting company uses.  After talking to the less that supportive support personnel yesterday, I was ready to dump host excellence and go with dreamhost.  To get it to work, I had to disable the email for my domain from the hosting control panel and then add the customized DNS MX records.

Now I can use my domain email address as my primary email address instead of my gmail email address.  In other useless website news, I registered the domain PeteWood.info.  I have 5 more free domains that I can register through my hosting company.  I’m after petewood.com and petewood.net too.  My plan is to have all of the major petewood tlds.  I know the petewood name is so very lucrative and wanted by all…I must have them all!  Once I get the .com domain, I’ll stop there and be happy(ier) with that.

Yay Hosted Gmail and their spam filters, yay!

Aaron can now jump!  He’s so cute when he does it too!  He squats down on the ground and says “1 2 3 jump!” and then he jumps in the air!  We’ve been working on it for about 4 days now and he’s finally started to get his feet off of the ground.  He doesn’t exactly have a large vertical leap or anything but there isn’t much I can do about that because after all, he is a white kid.  We were at Hobby Lobby yesterday looking for mirrors for the newly painted kitchen and he started jumping off of the sidewalk (when we were walking in and out of the store).  Meri gave me the evil eye when he jumped off of the sidewalk curb as we were leaving and said something about me teaching him bad things (when what she really meant was “don’t teach him new things on the concrete, at least wait till he can attempt new things on grass”).  That’s alright cuz my boy can jump now!