Author: Rob

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New Photo Gallery Installed

Rob

I’ve had to grab the latest version of Gallery for Nora’s website. I found Gallery 2 made it to a beta release and decided to give it a whirl. Wow! It rocks with a ton of new features. It seems a ton easier to use too. I’ve had some negative feedback about my albums with albums approach. So I’ve imported all the albums and let most of them stand on their own (some are still grouped together like the Montreal v2 trip and Tanzania trip pictures). The Gallery also supports marking things “new” and “updated” (in theory).

The really cool thing is it supports the Nokia Server API which means I can easily upload pictures directly from my phone. Nice! You’ll find them in the mobile pics gallery (which right now has a lot of junk in it).
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Weather delivered to your email or cell phone

Rob

I had fiddled with this in a couple forms. I’m pulling data from wunderground.com, but tweaking it a bit to make it email and cell phone friendly. Check it out by sending a message to: weather_[5 digit US zip code] at rsbauer.com. I’d provide an example but I don’t need the spam bots spamming this. Oh yeah, you can put whatever you like for the subject and message body. (heck, leave ’em blank!)
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HouseLeave a comment

A little home improvement project

Rob

The garage has the mailbox slot and by design, the mail is supposed to be inserted and dropped down into the box to be retrieved later on. Trick is, not much fits down the box and usually three quarters of the mail is stuck hanging out to soak in the elements. Not good.

Some short work with a hammer and a crowbar and I was able to free up the inside mailbox. Then with some minor adjustments, some roofing nails, I made more room for the mail. Trick now was to put a basket of some sort in place. Olessia had the great idea of using one of my milk crates (I have a pair that originally made up my first coffee table). The crate fit perfectly between the studs and I secured it with some more roofing nails. Then it was time to test. I tossed in a magazine and the mailbox setup worked perfectly! Here’s some pics:

the mailbox and with mail.

I also did some grilling (pork chops).
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HouseLeave a comment

Weekend fixing the house

Rob

Another busy weekend. Saturday Olessia and I went out to get dirt for the yard and plants. Also brought home an oak tree for the front lawn. I had to hurry and plant it before my haircut. After the haircut, we went to Mentor to go to a birthday party.

Then Sunday dad came over and busted a move on the house. He fixed several siding issues as well as replaced some trim. Then we went up on the roof and fixed a hole that was causing water to enter the attic and drip in the garage. Then he left and I started moving dirt (filling in holes and ruts in the lawn). Olessia spent the day planting new flowers all around the house. I’ll post some pics when the flowers start coming up.
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Site NewsLeave a comment

rsbauer.com email to news gateway upgraded

Rob

Its code that sits behind the scenes so its really not news worthy. But I point it out anyways because it now supports image handling. Again, not a big deal, except I have a new phone that supports taking pictures and sending them. Now I can snap a pic and send it directly to the website. I’m not planning on shifting the posting load over to the phone, but I’m thinking it’ll be a nice feature to have whenever I’m on the go and wish to add some news.
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PHP for fun and profit

Rob

For fun I rewrote my “blog” email site updater code. I ran into Pear’s Mail_mimeDecode::decode class and it really blew away my email string handling jumble of code. The email updater code sits behind the scenes and listens on a particular email address. Once an email comes in, it checks the sender. If all is ok, it’ll parse the email and post it here – all automatically. With Mail_mimeDecode::decode, I’ll be able to even parse emails with attachments (with things like an image). For a coding exercise, I would like to get multimedia messages from my cell phone to pop up here and look pretty. But its late and I’m no longer thinking straight so I’ll leave this project for another day.

Also new is the gallery page. On the gallery page, you can see all the highlight images of the subalbums. I think its a little funky at the moment, but a start to what I was originally thinking. That page is DEFINITELY not dialup friendly (I think this can be fixed by reducing the number of albums I show per page). Roll the mouse over the image to view the album name. Click on the image to hop directly into the album.

This is also related to the gallery and kinda neat: random gallery image or a random image from a particular gallery. Hit refresh on those pages to view a new image. Wish to kick it up a notch? Set your desktop to Active Desktop and add http://www.rsbauer.com/randimg/randimg.php or http://www.rsbauer.com/randimg/randimg.php?album=

no images were found

as the url. Then setup a schedule to refresh/resync every 10, 30, 60+ minutes (you pick). What ends up happening is you’ll get a desktop wallpaper that rotates when you want it to images in the gallery or gallery album of your picking. I think I’ll post the code for those so those running gallery can play with this.
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HouseLeave a comment

Adventures in Plumbing

Rob

Plumbing with help from my dad It had felt like everything was dripping. The faucet in the bathroom was dripping. Not a lot, but enough to drive me nuts. Then the tub started leaking! The tub wasn’t serious either – it leaked into the shower stall in the basement (if its going to leak, I couldn’t have picked a better place). So my dad was super nice to come over early Saturday morning and show me some of the tricks of the trade. We replaced the bathroom faucet and then worked on the tub plumbing (replaced the trap and connecting pipes). It was a LOT of work. We did get a little help from Powder (look in the center of the pic). My dad hung slept over to finish the job on Sunday (again, thank you!). So far everything is leak free.

Acura productsI returned the ’05 Acura TL on Tuesday (the car in the background). I HIGHLY recommend taking one out for a spin (and bring an audio DVD). We went to Home Depot at least 6 times on Saturday and enjoyed the comfort of the TL. Although my dad said it has too many buttons.

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SchoolLeave a comment

Calc 2 crash and burn

Rob

Yup. Crashed and burned in calculus 2. Went down with a big fire ball and flames. Scored a nice 34 points out of 100 on the exam. Thank you for the mercy points! There’s no way to recover from that.

The current plan?

I’m going to take 1 semester for a break from calculus and actually try taking a computer science class for once! No really! My last computer science class was assembler and that was back in spring 2002 (wow – 3 years ago!). I’m a bit cooked on the idea of calculus so I’m going to try some data structures and algorithms and then swing back to calc 2.

Oh yeah, the average grade on that exam? 51 points with an even distro of people from 0 to 100 points (meaning no bell curve).
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AutomotiveLeave a comment

Integra in the shop

Rob

Ah, the Teg is back in the shop. I was hoping it was just going to be an oil change and alignment, but it turns out the suspension needs some work and rear brake pads and rotors need to be replaced. Not cheap! BUT…

The Acura dealer hooked me up with a loaner. Usually they do 50/50 with Enterprise and I get a rental (always nothing exciting like a Ford or whatever the popular people mover is of the day). But Wednesday they hooked me up with a 2005 Acura TL (automatic, no navigation). Wow! wow wow wow…

I’ll start by saying its a big car. I bit too big for me, but it makes getting around easy and fun so I can deal with it. It had only 1450 miles on it when they gave me the keys. So it still has that new car smell with a strong hint of leather. Mmm… The weather has been crappy out so the outside of the car is a complete mess. Inside is roomy, comfy, and very cool. The instrument panel is almost a work of art. You put the key in and the blue hash marks on the dials glow along with the red needles. As you turn the key to power everything up, the white numbers and auxillary info comes to life. Every time I get in, I stare at the dash for a moment to soak it all in.

This TL has the 3.2L engine cranking out about 270hp which gets it moving very quickly when you want it to. Its a blast to rocket it onto a freeway. The rental is an automatic, but it has a sport shift so you can command it to use the gears you want when you want. With the cold weather, heated mirrors and seats really make going to work in the morning much easier. I think my next car will need to have heated seats. Maybe.

What really rocks is I know the guy who did some R&D work on the this TL. He told me to just test drive one and I HAVE to bring a long an audio DVD. Well, now is the chance and yesterday I stopped over at John and Adam’s place and they had a demo audio DVD. We popped it in. I was amazed. Individual sounds were coming from individual places within the car. It was sort of like being IN the performance. I HIGHLY recommend getting an audio DVD and popping it in. If you don’t have one, then give the XM satellite radio a whirl. It sounds good, but not as good as the audio DVD. And with a sound setup like the TL’s, FM just seems old-school.

I get to play with the TL till Monday and maybe then I’ll get my Teg back. But you know what? I don’t mind. I think I can tolerate driving a $33,000 car… (I just wish I could keep it longer!)
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