Pauls Rants & Revelations

Well, its finally done. The tree house is completed, the ladder is up, and the trap door is swinging open. I will gather the pictures and post them as soon as I find the USB cable for the camera.

This project was a beast to say the least. My wife helped me with the last bits; mostly helping heft the walls into place on the platform and general helpy type stuff. Thanks for that honey!

My kids are over the moon about it, so that alone makes all the hard work worth it.

I’m tired from all that work, so I am going to make this a bit shorter then it really deserves, but if you ever want to build a tree house for your kids… call someone else. I’m busy.

Cheers

So this weekend we (that is to say, I) started on our kids tree house. I ordered the lumber and it was delivered last Tuesday and we were all set to go. Then on Thursday while were out to dinner, my wife goes over how I’m building it again.

Her thing was that she couldn’t see all the builer-y type things that I was talking about. So we drew it out again; and its a good thing we did. I was adding full walls to the treehouse and she reminded me that were going with half walls to make it more fort like. This was fine with me because my only condition was that it actually be in a tree.

Anyways, after some more sketching we had our plan. That is to say, she said “build this” and I said “O.K.”. Here now are some pics for your enjoyment.

I got wood.

A sturdy Cedar tree.

And so it begins.

First brace in place.

Some more progress.

Joists are all in now. Heavy stuff.

Starting on the floor.

Thats what I have so far accomplished over the weekend. I was also able to finish tacking down the floor but got rained out before I got a chance to trim the ends. Next steps are starting on the walls and roof rafters which should go pretty smoothly. I’ll post more pics when the sun comes out again.

So what do you think? Pretty cool, huh?

I recently finished the new site for my friendly local gaming store (FLGS for short), Knightfall Games. A huge step up from their old site, the new site is rife with content and events that are happening in the shop and around the area. Their Twitter and Facebook feeds are tied into the shop as well to encourage customers to come in and, well, game (it is a game store after all).

If you are into mini war gaming including Warhammer and Warhammer 40K (like me), Magic the Gathering (like me too), or things involving zombies (totally), then I suggest you either go into the shop or visit knightfallgames.com to get your gaming fix. The online store will be up soon if you want to order stuff online, but for now I suggest you go into the shop to check out all they have to offer. You can also check out their busy calendar of events or chat up Chris to see all the stuff thats happening.

And, if you buy something, be sure to mention that Paul sent  you. I don’t get a commission or anything, I just like to hear the phrase “Paul sent me”. Its an ego thing.

Cheers

Yes, I have switched over all my hosting to GoDaddy hosting. It is far cheeper then running my own server. Also, since I was not at all comfortable editing base system files through a terminal window, this will prove to be a lot more stable.

So if you are hosting with me (and you know who you are) then your site has been switched over to their systems. If you find your mail not working, send me a message.

…

Ok, that was supposed to be a joke, but it was bad. If shits broken, call me.

A big thank you to Jonathan at GoDaddy for hanging on the phone with me for 45 minutes while I asked a lot of silly questions about stability, mail, whatnot.

Cheers

That was my first question after I searched for the cause of my troubles today. You see, this morning my keyboard and trackpad on my Macbook Pro started to respond strangely. Keys wouldn’t work and the trackpad was malfunctioning. Also, the button was strangley bowed up.

I hoped on my wifes computer (it being right next to me) and a quick Google search later, found the cause of it. Apparently, after a time, the batteries on MBP’s can swell. I though this was a joke. I mean swelling batteries?

Although I wasn’t laughing when i flipped over my laptop and took out the battery (which, after 2 years I have never done). The casing around it was peeling away, and the side that touches the keyboard connector was horribly bowed. I set it aside, plugged into the wall and restarted and now, thankfully, my system works normally.

However, one thing disturbs me. Firstly, the techs who replaced the screen a few weeks ago didn’t notice this. Not a huge deal, surely. But what I didnt know at the time is that when a battery swells like that, its nearing the end of its life and can, and there are many articles that document this, explode.

I asked the Apple support people this and they confirmed that, yes, a certain amount of time after the swelling starts, the battery can explode.

Um, what?

So here I am, with what amounts to a ticking timebomb sitting on my lap, wondering how the techs who worked on my system missed this. One of the guys said specifically that they inspected the entire system and it was fine. Obviously, this doesnt include a physical examination.

I will, however, be pointing this out to the tech when I go back in there tonight to get a new battery. Hopefully they will, in the future, look out for such things as I would think that replacing a few batteries is preferable to having a few dozen lawsuits against you from people with scorched laps and lost computers.

We’ll see. In the mean time, check your batteries people.

Cheers

UPDATE: I took it in to the Apple store this evening and, not only did they get to me a half hour sooner than I thought, but they replaced the battery without question. He said that the old one was part of a bad batch that the manufacturer put out (metal shavings in the lith-ion cells). This is the third time that someone has told me that something on my laptop, my very expensive laptop, was part of a “bad batch”. If this happens again, I’m demanding that they give me a new MBP instead of constantly replacing dodgy hardware. Maybe it’ll work. – Thanks

UPDATE 2: My coworker (boss, really) just sent me a picture of this MBP. He started noticing funny things happening and took a look at the underside. His battery was swollen also (the plot thickens). The only difference was that his is REALLY swollen (like, its almost a sphere). It cant be part of the same “bad batch” as mine since he got his MBP almost a year before me, so something is definately fishy with Apple batteries.

Now my only concern is what happens if this battery issue arises in the new MBP’s? The ones without the removeable battery? Scary stuff, probably. – Cheers

Here is a happy story about the customer service folks. They get a lot of bad press, but these folks are really quite amazing.

I know that a lot of people like Popcap games. They are fun. Ridiculously fun. One of their more fun games is called Peggle. My whole family played it and they loved it.

A few days ago I noticed that they had a version of Peggle for iPhone. I though ‘finally, my 3 hand-writen letters a day produced something’. I checked the requirements and from what it said I could play it on the iPhone. I quicky clicked the Buy link in iTunes and plugged in my phone to sync.

Now, I was checking the apps and noticed something not sweet. The version was for the iPod (video and nano-video) but not for the iPhone or Touch. Go back to the app store page and in small print it said “Not compatible with iPhone/Touch”.

Begin short-lived temper tantrum.

I immediatley contacted Apple who in turn said “we do not offer charge reversals for mis-bought products”. So I contacted Popcap to inform them of the problem I now had. The requirements for their software were pretty clear in saying that it would run on the iPhone. Going back to the site I realized that it was a blanked statement for all of their mobile software.

So I sent their CSR gurus an email explaining the whole deal and asked them to please update their requirements boxes as I cant be the only person to make this mistake.

The got back to me the next day (surprisingly) and said they were sorry for Apples response, and offered me a coupon for their games. They also asked for my mailing address which was kinda weird.

I sent them my address and thanked them for the coupon and told them that I appreciate them changing their website. All is now right in the world.

Skip to the following Saturday. I return home to find a UPS note on my door. I go get my package and was again surprised as it was from Popcap. A smallish box with something soft inside is what I guessed from the vigorous shaking I did.

I open it up and was delighted by what was inside.

Lots of fun stuff

Inside was 5 cute Chuzzles, a stuffed Splork (a character from Peggle), bookmarks for their Bookworm Adventure game, some pens, a branded cap, and a set of Peggle character card.

Now, most would say that this wasn’t a great lot of stuff. But I say this is fucking fantastic! Not only are they neat little things (my kids loved the Chuzzles), but I was greatly heartened by the fact that someone cared about their customers to this extent that they put together a “customer love” box. I was seriously pondering graciously returning it with an appreciative note (the original charge was only $4.99 after all), but these things are neat (plus the cat already chewed on a chuzzle).

In short, a great deal of thanks to the customer service department (Dana in particular who wrote me the follow up) of Popcap Games. This is one of the few companies that really try to make its customers happy as best they can. I would say they soundly succeeded in this instance.

- Cheers

Update: Here are some images of my kids playing with the stuff. Not really relevant, but damn cute.

I think that has a nice ring to it.

My wife and I were watching on the CNN website as the poll data started coming in. Aside from the slight anxiety we felt over whether or not Obama was going to win, it was pretty exciting to watch. CNN, for their part, did a pretty good job covering the thing with their real-time data and coverage of the speeches made by both candidates.

For me, though, I was a little nervous watching Obama give his speech to the crowd in Chicago. Not because I had doubts about if he would make a good president (I voted for him, so I obviously thought he could do the job, but because I was worried about some moron going and putting a bullet in him. Call it an irrational fear if you want, but I wasn’t the only one fearing this. Hence why he was flanked by 3 inches of bullet proof glass on either side of them.

So when he finished his speech (his best yet in my opinion) with no bullets flying his way, I was pretty relieved.

Still, that nagging fear will be with me probably until he steps down from office, hopefully in 2016.

But for now, I ‘ll just try to think of how I can best help him bring about the change he promised, happy in the knowledge that my vote made a difference and elected a man who, I think, deserves to be my President.

-Cheers

So this weekend it was fairly kickback, for the most part. Saturday was very good as there was an event that day. And since it was sunny we had an archery competition which, I’m stoked to say, I was victorious in. I had thought I lost so it was a pleasent surprise at court. I got a nifty carved feather as a prize (bonus).

We also did our pumpkin gathering on Sunday which was, well, quiet. We got there right when they opened and were first in line for everything so we got to do all the activities (face painting, boat ride, etc). We also came away with some honking huge pumpkins. I’ll post pics in a bit (I seem to have misplaced our rather expensive camera).

How was your weekend, Internet?

-Cheers

You know you want to.

- Cheers

After a long hiatus, and a lot of sweat and tears getting WP 2.6.2 working on this blog, I can (mostly) safely say that this blog is back up and running.

I know it doesn’t look much different but believe me, there is some really cool shit on the back end and I can enjoy it (instead of curse it) now that its working.

For those of you that are also updating to the latest and greatest WordPress install, I can offer come very useful tidbits of information. I moved this blog from one site to another so info is based generally around that.

• Take a full backup of you existing site. You’ll need it.
• Start with a clean install of you can. Don’t add anything, even templates and especially plugins, that isn’t part of the install package from WP.
• Permissions. Enable them for as few folders as possible. Since I host with Media Temple (they use Cent OS) everything I uploaded had no permissions set so I ended up staring at a blank site for 10 minutes. After permissions are set (usually 775 is needed to get it going) its smooth sailing.
• Importing is a gem. From your old site use the default WP export button. This is very easy and will be great for importing. However, when importing DO NOT import the attachments. This will kill your import after 30 or 40 posts. Instead, export from the old site, modify the XML file and replace the old site URL with the new site URL, copy over everything from your old wp-content/uploads folder into the new site, then import the XML file into the new site. I used Dreamweaver to edit the file but anything that can handle a potentially 2 meg large file will do.
• Wash, rinse. If you have to repeat, you weren’t paying attention.

Now that the site is back up I can start re-publishing all the posts that were lost during the last 2 months or so. I’ve been pretty busy with work and side projects and have lots to report, including my sons front teeth coming out, but that’s for another post.

-Cheers