badgerhound industries

Jesse Lamb is Not My Lawyer: You need help.

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:09:41 -0500

Jesse Lamb is Not My Lawyer: You need help.:

Ok, you’re awesome and you know it, (at least when you’re in a good mood). It seems like people just know to ask you for help or information, because if you don’t know the answer, you know how to find it. Maybe it’s always been that way. Friends, family, classmates, coworkers, have looked to you…

Adoption: It's time!

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:33:51 -0500

This is the second post in a series about our adoption trip. Read the first post if you dare.

Fast forward to Friday May 7th, 2010, 6:30PM at O’Hare. We were supposed to leave at 3:30, but we’ve had interference from a volcano, the plane was at the wrong gate, it’s tow truck busted, and now our pilot and first officer have had to go to the plane to taxi it to our actual gate because getting another tow truck will take an hour. This means we’re probably going to miss our second flight and have to wait an extra 12 hours in the Frankfurt airport. Fuck. Don’t freak out. The upside is that I’ll get to sleep, the downside is that means we’ll arrive the next day in Addis, and who knows what that means for our schedule in-country. This is the first reminder that we can’t control this at all.

On the plane This flight is packed, but pretty uneventful so far. Somewhere over the course of the next 8 hours I’ll finish Bargaining for Advantage and watch a movie I won’t remember. Lufthansa makes for a comfortable flight. I am getting a bit confused between the flight attendants speaking to me in both English and German. I think they’re testing me.

Frankfurt airport Crap! We have 30 minutes to try to make our flight to Addis. Why is this security check line taking so long? Why do I need to get re-security checked leaving one international flight to get on another international flight? Where was I supposed to get get a bomb? The duty-free shop? Grumble.

Somehow, we’ve miraculously made it to the bus to our plane with a couple minutes to spare. Now that I see there are only like 10 other people on this flight, I think they were trying to be a bit lenient to people late from their connections. I’ll watch 1/2 a Bollywood movie and get started on reading Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet before descending into my brain somewhere. I had wanted to do all sorts of stuff on this flight, but as it always does on long travels, my fatigue is getting the best of me. And, I’m getting a little bit worried.

It’s part not really sleeping and part fear of the unknown. Is he going to like us? What are we going to do if something bad happens? What if we forgot something, or brought the wrong size clothes or diapers? This is going to be interesting.

Addis Ababa We’ve landed, and gotten through getting our visitor visa. They definitely take corruption seriously here. After getting the visa, what must have been a higher official asks us how much the agents charged us. He departed satisfied with everyone’s answered, so apparently we weren’t swindled. Next up, exchanging some cash, a luggage cart with super lopsided wheels, and meeting the driver. It’s raining, almost pitch black outside and we’re exhausted.

Tomorrow we’ll get to meet Gavin for the first time…

PS. Both books were great by the way. You should read them!

Domain redirection pet peeve

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 21:52:05 -0500

I’ve had a pet peeve for a long time when it comes to bootstrapping a new site. I always seem to have to update the web server config on a server to forward somedomain.com to www.somedomain.com for some reason or another. There are a few reasons for needing the redirect. DNS is the big technical one. It also just looks pretty bad to have somedomain.com setup, but not www.somedomain.com (or vise versa). I suspect some hosted app providers are getting wise to this and will fix it, but I haven’t run across it yet.

So, I configured the webserver at 174.143.24.6 to use a HTTP 301 redirect from somedomain.com back to www.somedomain.com. For any domain that resolves to that server. Hopefully someone else will find it helpful. Have fun!

I’ll post more details here about how it’s setup and monitored.

Adoption: Getting the Call

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 10:51:25 -0500

It’s February 22nd, 2010, around lunchtime and I’ve just finished ordering a fancy ham and cheese at Artisan, a local fancy sandwich making shop. It’s my first time here, but I’m with two of my co-workers, and they’re regulars. I’m a bit confused because there’s no obvious good place to stand and wait for my fancy sandwich. So, I’m standing around trying not to look too terribly uncomfortable.

Wait, was that my phone? Crap! It’s an area code I don’t recognize and Cindy said we could get the call any time now. Call back. No answer!!!! Call Cindy. It is the call, and she conferences me in with our social worker!!! Our social worker congratulates us then tells us the story of how Gavin came to be in the orphanage, where he’s from, and when they think he was born. She’s emailing us photos and mailing a packet of paperwork that we needed to ger back to them ASAFP! I better get back to my desk to see these pictures!

Damn! They take a long time to make a ham and cheese sandwich. All this time I’ve been pacing in and out of Artisan, paying more attention to the phone than the world around me.

Holy shit, I’m a dad! I think this is the moment that it hit me that I was really becoming a dad. I mean, through all the process and the paperwork and the waiting, I knew that someday I would become a dad, but it always seemed there was so much that could potentially go wrong and make the process take longer and longer, that it never really hit me. But, that picture made it real to me.

Now, I just needed to figure out exactly what I thought it meant to be a dad. It obviously wasn’t just the feeding and the plumbing. I’m pretty sure it involves fishing and bicycles at some point. Thankfully, I still have a little time to figure that one out.

After that set in a bit, back to reality. There’s so much to do! I better call my mom, then dad, then my brother and sister. And we better go visit that doctor on Roosevelt that specializes in adoptions to look over whatever medicals they send us in that packet. Ugh, and we need to start pricing out travel. When do we find out what our travel date is? And we need to get a cashiers check for the final adoption fees. And we need a car seat. And who’s going to watch the animals? And…

I have no idea whether the sandwich was any good or not. I’m pretty sure it was cold by the time I ate it.

Meet our son - Gavin

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 07:57:56 -0500

It’s been 2 weeks since we’ve arrived home from Ethiopia with this handsome guy.

Gavin smiles a lot, seems to like everyone he meets and gets very cranky when he’s hungry. He was born in Assela just over 5 months ago and he’s our first child. Right now he has a bit of a cold, or sinus infection of some sort that our doc is helping us work through, but otherwise we’re all doing fine after the trip.

Adopting Gavin has been an almost 2 year effort for us, and for me it was easily the most arduous undertaking I’ve attempted in my life. Since I’m really just around to carry things, it must have been even harder on Cindy since she did all the real work. Thankfully, all the big stuff went as planned and now we have Gavin as a part of our family.

Before I go further, I need to thank everyone that’s helped us along the way. We had great support from our adoption agency - Children’s Hope, our home study agency Lutheran Child and Family Services, her former employer, my employer - Viewpoints, our travel agent - Golden Rule Travel, family and friends. We certainly couldn’t have done it without you.

I haven’t written much about the adoption so far, but now that we’re home and a bit settled I think I’ll finally give it a shot. I may delve into it a little, but I don’t plan to discuss much about the paperwork side to the process. It’s highly specific to the agency, the country we adopted from, the state we live in, and is constantly evolving. If you are interested in hearing more about our experience on that side of the process (or anything else), please email me at jro@codegrinder.com, and I’ll be happy to recount it in as gory detail as I can remember.

Look at More Pictures of Gavin!

This series of posts will go on both my more personal blog and on my more tech blog. This has been an incredible journey and I feel that it’s significant to both sides of my life.

Watch out for opportunity.

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:13:05 -0600

Watch out for opportunity.

You always hope hard work will pay off.

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:00:00 -0600

You always hope hard work will pay off.

Everyone starts out small.

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:29:07 -0600

Everyone starts out small.

Sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning.

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:00:21 -0600

Sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning.

I’ve submitted my Scale Well application. Have you? I need some competition!

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:00:00 -0600

I’ve submitted my Scale Well application. Have you? I need some competition!

http://seo2.0.onreact.com/7-business-blogging-clues-a-puppy-can-teach-you

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:21:00 -0600

http://seo2.0.onreact.com/7-business-blogging-clues-a-puppy-can-teach-you:

7 Business & Blogging Clues a Puppy Can Teach You - Business, blogging, and puppy, how could I not like the post?!

The funny thing is in German (remember, I live in Germany) you say “small business” for pee and “big business” for poo.

So the puppy reminded me of business matters and I actually used the term business much more often than usual. Actually the puppy business needed some attention every hour at the beginning. I was astounded by the similarities between it and the actual business matters. So I collected them.

Dogs like to shop too, apparently.

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:00:24 -0600

Dogs like to shop too, apparently.

Keeping a promise...

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:00:00 -0600

I promised I would make the results of My Awesome Email Survey! known, so here goes. I received 3 responses which means that statistically, they’re worthless. So, worthlessly:

The average number of email accounts per submitter was 17.6
The average number of email readers used was 8.0
The average number of emails received per day is 3500.0
Everyone uses email on their phone
Most people think email is awesome
Most people think email is overwhelming

What did I learn? I learned that I need more of an audience to get statistically interesting survey results. But, I did learn that at least some people are interested in seeing email improve as a tool. If you’d like to know more about what I’ve been mulling over, shoot me an email.

I do hope I can re-run this survey later with more interesting results, and I want to thank all those that submitted entries. You know who you are.

I am cold today!

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 10:00:41 -0600

I am cold today!

Emacs tip: Don't poke the bear.

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 16:44:23 -0600

Here’s a quick tip on how to set the meta-key on Mac versions of emacs.

(setq mac-option-modifier ‘meta)

I was on a witch-hunt the other day to update my Terminal.app settings to be able to use the Command key (aka pretzel, apple) as Meta to match my gui version of Emacs (Carbon Emacs). Mainly, this would keep me from going insane if I use Emacs over ssh, or in a terminal for a quick edit. What I found was that it was much, much easier to change Carbon Emacs to use option as Meta to match the Terminal.app settings. Terminal teases you with the “use Option as Meta” checkbox, but no “use Command as Meta”. The reason is very likely because the Command key is so engrained in OS X for all of it’s standard key-combos. Long story short, don’t poke the bear.

I still have some muscle memory retraining to do, since the command seems to make Option an additional Meta for Carbon Emacs, rather than replacing Command. But, I guess I can’t have everything.

Credit goes to a comment from serverfault.

Someone couldn’t stay awake till midnight…

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:00:50 -0600

Someone couldn’t stay awake till midnight…

6 things real life has taught me about tech

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:03:23 -0600

The holidays always lead to some interesting conversations. This year, I was able to share my thoughts that anyone, worth their salt, working in tech needs to be tinkering outside their normal day-to-day routine to stay relevant. And, I was able to digest some thoughts on healthcare reform, balanced diets, and choosing baby names. Somehow these chats got me to thinking about which real life lessons apply to people in startups or technology in general.

Eat a good breakfast

Just do it, or you’ll regret it. People that don’t eat breakfast murder puppies, kittens and baby elephants. You’re not a murderer are you?

That lawn won’t mow itself

Just start working, and worry about the little details later. No amount of thinking is going to help you get the lawn mowed any faster or deal with that snake that you won’t see and will inadvertently run over.

Don’t be lazy

If you’re lazy at home the dog will piss on the rug (or worse). In tech, someone is going to pass you by. If you’re a startup, your competitors will launch new functionality that makes you look like you’re from the stone-age. If you’re an employee and you get lazy about learning new skills, you’ll be 50 years old and an expert in fixing printers, and then trying to find a job because your safe corporate gig evaporated.

Think before you speak

People have a habit of remembering the dumb and mean things you say much more readily than any nuggets of true genius you may spout. It’s fine to be an ass, but save it for when you intend to be one.

Be yourself

People can tell when you try to fake it. So, don’t. Don’t take a job, or start a company that makes you act uncomfortable at a fundamental level. You’ll be lousy. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t push your limits. But, you need discover your limits and know which define you and which don’t.

Get plenty of rest

You can’t work at full-tilt constantly any more than you can stay up till dawn for 2 weeks renovating the house. You’ll cause yourself to make mistakes, and you’ll be less effective when you’re exhausted. Unless you really want to accidentally use shampoo instead of body wash, or put the car in reverse when you meant drive.

I’m sure there are more lessons that translate well, but this is what I’ve come up with so far. What from real life has helped you in tech?

You said we’d all get Snuggies and wear them at the same...

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 10:00:00 -0600

You said we’d all get Snuggies and wear them at the same time…

http://spencerfry.com/picking-your-co-founders

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:02:00 -0600

http://spencerfry.com/picking-your-co-founders:

Spencer Fry of Carbonmade has a great blog post about how luck plays into picking co-founders. There’s a good dialogue shaping up in the comments section continuing his thoughts. Personally, I value the openness and honesty of Spencer and his commenters to share their own stories on the matter.

Sadly, My Awesome Email Survey! hasn’t received many submissions. Actually, only 1. ...

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 07:45:00 -0600

Sadly, My Awesome Email Survey! hasn’t received many submissions. Actually, only 1. I’ll leave it open till the end of the year for grins, but maybe I’ll need to revisit it again later.

My hope in putting it together was to find out if other people are feeling the same overwhelming feeling from email and other sources of information. Today, I have too many emails coming into too many email accounts all contending for my attention. GTD organization methods and the like, seem like they’d help in organizing the emails but not in consuming them.

For myself, I feel like there are times when I want only a subset of emails, such as when I’m on my iPhone. Other times I’d like access to a superset of all my emails, say at home or at work. Compound this with the number of mail clients (google apps/gmail for personal, Mail.app/Outlook for work, iPhone for mobile, emacs + Gnus for awesomeness), and it can get awkward. I could try to consolidate into one or two clients, but but each client has it’s own strengths and weaknesses (eg, Mail.app + exchange is really bad at deleting thousands of error emails from work). And let’s not even get started on how to best consume all the new social media feeds and RSS.

So that’s where I am, and what I’ve been mulling over. Are there any really awesome apps/methods you’re using to solve this for yourself?