Bobbis.net

It's 2011 and there are still no flying cars. Weren't we supposed to have those 10 years ago?

When I was in school, I used to do a sumer goals list on here. Now that summers are not full of free-time, I've stopped doing summer goals. It has been more than a year since we bought our house and I feel like I've gotten into a rut. So, I guess I'll hop on the bandwagon of doing new year's resolutions. So, without further adieu, a list in no particular order.

• Play Xbox on a regular basis with my brother
• iPod connection to my car stereo
• Do a website for hire (outside of work)
• It has been almost a decade since I've wanted to start learning Cocoa. Set aside a couple hours each week to sit down and learn Cocoa
• Give a presentation at Cocoaheads (dependent on above)
• Be physically active at least once a week (not sure how to do this in the winter)
• Be less anti-social. Hang out with friends more often.
• Get or build a new desk for my office
• Get rid of clutter and items we don't use anymore
• Visit my brother in Philly

I will have to follow up on this to create a plan for how to attain these goals.

My mother-in-law brought her Quicksilver G4 to our place Monday evening to download and install months worth of updates. She is on dialup and doesn't have the most reliable connection, so trying to download all the updates would take forever. She also lives out in the country on a gravel road in an old house. The computer was really dusty.

So, after a good go at it with the canned air, I had to cobble together a display, keyboard, mouse and network for it. The machine doesn't have bluetooth, and the only working mice in the house were bluetooth. I didn't have a VGA monitor easily available, so I ended up hooking it up to my TV's computer input. I used a Dell keyboard and had to make an old Microsoft wireless RF mouse work again by cleaning out the leaked battery crap on the contacts.

To get networking to it (it didn't have AirPort), I figured I could steal the ethernet from the Mac Mini. The cable couldn't reach with the setup, so I pulled out a switch and another cable to make it reach only to find out the ethernet port was not working. I plugged the ethernet back into the Mini and pulled out a long FireWire cable and turned on Internet Sharing on the Mini. Yay, I've got Internets on the G4! Updates installed quickly and she whent home with an updated machine.

I finally got my Exchange account at work moved over to Exchange 2007. This means I can sync nicely with Apple Mail, iCal, and my iPhone. So, today I decided I would start forwarding my university address to Exchange instead of Gmail. I set the forward to go to Exchange and left work. At dinner I find almost 2,000 new messages waiting on my phone, and the number was growing quickly. I soon realized that I had, a long time ago, set a server-side rule in Exchange to redirect my Exchange mail to the university address. Once I changed my university forwarding from Gmail to Exchange, I ended up with an infinite loop:

1. Email comes to netid@iastate.edu
2. Email forwards to exchange server
3. exchange server keeps message and redirects copy to netid@iastate.edu
4. Repeat.

To fix this, I had to remote into my computer at work and fire up my Windows virtual machine so I could access the server-side rules in Outlook. Fun stuff.

A lot has happened since my last update. I got married, bought at house, and my brother got married. I've been kind of busy lately.

The Wedding

The date was May 2nd. The service was excellent and we got to see lots of friends and family, however we didn't have much time to hang out with them. We got lots of nice presents, thank you all. We are working on thank-you's, but as you can imagine there is a lot going on.

The honeymoon in Cancun was great. We stayed at the Sun Palace all-inclusive resort. Being at the height of the swine flu scare, there were not very many people there, which made it nice. Turns out, we were at a higher risk of being exposed in Ames than in Cancun since, at the time, there were no reported cases near Cancun and there were reports from Marshalltown and ISU the night of our wedding. The downside was some of the attractions were closed or on limited hours as a precaution.

The House

As soon as we got back from our honeymoon we got in contact with a realtor to start house hunting. A couple weeks of hunting we narrowed our choices to two. One on a corner lot that had an awesome finished basement with a very nice master suite and wet bar, but the back yard was the size of a postage stamp. The other was also in Nevada on an almost 1/3 acre lot with a basement that had potential. The corner lot house sold before we were ready to put in an offer, so we offered on the 1/3 acre lot home. After a bit of work negotiating on the price and our realtor doing a lot to save us money we closed on July 13th. (Plug for the realtor, Cheryl Eddy).

We are still trying to find a home for a lot of our stuff in the house, but for the most part we are functioning. The basement has already been torn up to make room for our own man cave, with my office, media center and, of course, a wet bar (we got ideas from the other house). Also in the future we would like to put in a back door to a nice deck so we can properly enjoy our large back yard. Looking forward to that nice stimulus check.

My Brother's Wedding

A little more than a week after closing, it was time to drive out to Keuka Lake, NY for my brother's wedding. The ceremony was lakeside at a restaurant and inn. The ceremony was nice and the party was lots of fun. After the wedding day, it was a week of hanging out at a lake side home my parents rented. Gaila and I got to meet a bunch of Jason's friends and Amaris' friends and family. We got a lot of time on the boat and even managed to catch some fish. A nice vacation from the stress of moving.

In case you haven't noticed, I've got the quotes rotating on my page again and added a couple new ones.

A quick fix for making Safari Tidy SIMBL plugin work with the new Safari 4 Beta. It seems to be working oaky.

• Find the SIMBL bundle for Safari Tidy, probably located at /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/safaritidy.bundle
• Back it up
• Show package contents
• Edit the Info.plist file in the Contents folder with Property List Editor
• Change the MaxBundleVersion to 5529
• Save and restart Safari

It has been about five months since my last post, not six weeks like one had predicted. I actually don't think there is much to write about in here. Especially since most of the trivial things end up on Twitter anyway.

Weather is finally starting to improve. I never thought I would consider 20F "balmy". This has been the coldest winter I can remember. Windchill readings reached -30F to -40 a couple times. Last week I started looking for places that are cooler than here and I found a lot of places in Alaska seem to be warmer. For example, last weekend it was about -2F outside here and 30F in Anchorage. I have to get temperature readings from Barrow, Alaska or Yellowknife, Canada.

Wedding plans are creeping forward. I have made a crappy site for it at bobbis.net/wedding/. We sent out save the date notifications last week, with the exception of a few because our printer is starting to ghost the image. Ideas for buying a house look really good for spring. With the low market and interest rates we can get a lot for our money now (that includes the house too!).

Work is going fine. It has been very busy the last month or so as I have been working on consulting for another center's IT needs and installing some of our own servers. I am finally getting back to some web development work this week and getting caught back up with my normal workload. I have also been working a little bit with the iTunes U people on campus to start getting our content published on ISU's iTunes U site.

Hopefully, I can have another update before Winter's finally over.

Fall classes start Monday. Where did the summer go?

What happened since the last post?

Not in any particular order.

• Got a deal on digital cable and cable Internet
• Bought a 3G iPhone and handed down my old iPhone to Gaila (she loves it)
• While purchasing my iPhone, bought a 1TB TimeCapsule. I now have reliable, secure wireless in the apartment. Really great for the iPhone Remote app.
• Setup my parent's iMac. I may have an iPod Touch coming my way.
• Took a class on Windows Vista
• Cleaned up a SQL injection attack on a departmental site
• Rearick family reunion. Too many relatives I didn't even know existed
• Someone was murdered at the Casey's just down the road from us
• Twitter goes over capacity while I try to look back to fill out this list
• Found the video of my co-workers doing a parody of "The Office"
• Did something to my back and saw a chiropractor for the first time
• Google Street View arrives in central Iowa
• Went to the Iowa State Fair. Butter Shawn Johnson anyone?

Gaila and I are still working on wedding plans. The tentative date is May 2, 2009. If anyone has any tips, please let us know. Since we got engaged Gaila's uncle got engaged and will be getting married in October, Meridith got engaged and will be getting married in November, and my brother got engaged and will be getting married in July '09. I think we may have started a trend.

This weekend Gaila and I will be heading down to Ottumwa for the annual tomato and salsa canning party. Next weekend (Labor Day) we'll be camping down in Sailorville with some new friends of ours.

How long until my next update?

Wow, this month has been pretty crazy. What has happened this whole month I haven't posted anything?

First week in June was settling down after the apartments flooded. The weekend after the flooding our landlord was ready to start painting most of the affected apartments. The day before I left for WWDC (Saturday), I helped paint several apartments and hallways. Then, the next day I flew out the San Francisco without really being able to stretch my legs, so the ended up being kind of sore. Pretty much all the tenants are back into their clean apartments now. By the way, Jim is an awesome landlord.

WWDC was lots of fun as always. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to talk about all the cool stuff I learned yet. However, some stuff I learned out there has already become public, such as SproutCore, a JavaScript framework for developing cross-browser, desktop-like web applications. They use it in the coming Mobile Me web applications. The band for the bash was very surprising. The Barenaked Ladies performed for us at the Yerba Buena Gardens. Friday of WWDC I went to Alcatraz with Rod and Shane who are from Iowa State. I took a whole bunch of pictures, mostly of Alcatraz.

The next week was pretty short. Dinner with my parents and Gaila's dad at my parent's place. Caught up on work that accumulated while I was gone. Wednesday morning I had my wisdom teeth removed.

I had all four of my teeth pulled. The top two were easily pulled. The bottom two were impacted, which required they do some cutting in my gums. The pain and the pain-killers as a result pretty much knocked me out through Monday. I was back to work the following Tuesday. I took the rest of that week taking things easy and catch up on more work I missed.

I managed to launch a site for a new major in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences - Global Resource Systems. My boss and I are preparing for a major overhaul to the Brenton Center infrastructure. We'll be rolling out a new Active Directory to replace the current Novell system we are currently running and consolidating file storage to a pair of 12 TB Aberdeen systems (includes the main backup plan for it). I am currently working on an online database for aquatic vegetation that is taking up most of my time right now. I also have plans to redo the scholarship system and implement a content policy for the college site.

This last weekend I saw Wall•E twice. Once with Gaila on Friday night, and once with Brett and a bunch of his friends on Saturday afternoon. Saturday evening was spent hanging out with Brett and his friends at his apartment for his birthday and to say goodbye to him as he is moving to a new job in Kansas. Unfortunately, Gaila worked pretty much all of Saturday.

Sunday, I helped my parents order a new computer (iMac 20") after their 8 year old iMac kicked the bucket. I even managed to get my dad an iPod Touch as a replacement for his PDA that died a few weeks ago. I managed to backup their data so it will be ready when the new machine arrives.

Gaila and I have a tentative date for the wedding on Saturday, May 2nd in Ames. We still need to reserve facilities and plan everything. Buying a house has been put on hold for a while, but it looks like the market keeps moving more to be a buyer's market. I hope I don't miss the opportunity to buy when the market is down. I also broke down and got my own cable internet and digital cable for a reasonable price when it was on sale in June.

For smaller stuff you can follow me on Twitter now.

Gaila and I got a few pictures from the flooding around our apartment today. It seems to have crested around 1pm so, I think we are in the clear. Our landlord has already contacted ServPro for the clean up and is expected to start as soon as the water goes down sometime tomorrow. We may be spending the night at my parent's.

So, I will be going to WWDC this year. Work will be sending me. I have my flight and hotel all squared away. I will be staying at the W San Francisco, only one block from the convention center. The W is a 4-Star hotel I got for $219/night with government discount. Yay for being a state employee. At least four other people from ISU will be going and most of them staying at the W. Colin will be splitting the room with me, unless for some strange reason he doesn't get the WWDC scholarship. I will also be going to a Giants game against Oakland that Friday night. I will be looking forward to perhaps hanging out with Mark who Colin and I met at WWDC 2006 and moved to the Bay Area from Canada just recently.

In other news, my iMac at work has crapped out. For the past couple weeks I have had a few kernel panics. Then, Monday morning the machine wouldn't respond when I woke it up. I did a reboot and it couldn't find the hard drive. Booting from the installer disk revealed that it couldn't find the drive either in System Profiler or Disk Utility. For the time being I am using my personal laptop at work to stuff done. Thankfully I have been keeping Time Machine backups, so I didn't loose anything important.