i break stuff

staff: The slow-motion disaster of the food crisis in the Horn...

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:33:31 -0500

The slow-motion disaster of the food crisis in the Horn of Africa is truly horrifying. Last Wednesday the United Nations declared a famine in two large regions of Somalia; 3.7 million people, nearly half the country’s population, are affected. The crisis is larger than just Somalia. Right now the devastating drought in the region means that more than 11 million people need food aid across Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia.

You can help by making a contribution through the Tumblr Dashboard or on the Somalia tag page, and we’ll match your support up to $10,000. Proceeds will go to the United Nations World Food Programme.

Adoption: It's time!

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:35:59 -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!

Adoption: Getting the Call

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 10:00:00 -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 08:00:07 -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.

too much chocolate

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:43:38 -0600

me: i think i ate too much dark chocolate today
ed: impossible
me: am i supposed to be hallucinating ?
ed: always
me: nevermind then, situation normal
ed: excellent....

my other blog

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:52:09 -0600

A few weeks ago, I started a blog at www.badgerhound.com for my tech musings. Lately, my interests seem more focused around startups and the state of tech in general, than hard-core sysadmin topics like building RPMs. For now, I’m enjoying having a separate place to vet those ideas. I don’t know if that means I won’t blog about anything technical over here, or if this will become the personal plus sysadmin blog. But, if you’re interested in my other musings, check out the other blog as well.

Cindy’s attempt to get me to read a Jane Austen novel.

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:14:00 -0600

Cindy’s attempt to get me to read a Jane Austen novel.

Aviary at “World’s Largest” laundromat in...

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 10:54:09 -0500

Aviary at “World’s Largest” laundromat in Berwyn, IL. This place is seriously cool as far as laundromats go. Much of the water is heated from solar collectors on the roof.

posting to Tumblr from emacs

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:59:25 -0500

I’m now using Tumble, the emacs mode for posting to Tumblr. This post is mostly for me to test it out further, but I’m very impressed with it thus far.

Now, I just need to remember that the default syntax is markdown and we’ll get along great.

Installation was easy. I just installed the ELPA package and added somthing like this to my emacs config:

;; tumble - emacs tumblr mode
(require 'tumble)
(setq tumble-email "my@email.com")
(setq tumble-password "p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d")
(setq tumble-url "my.tumblr.com")

if my post is short, does it make it to twitter?

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:16:24 -0500

if my post is short, does it make it to twitter?

trying out tumblr

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:14:39 -0500

and testing twitter and facebook integration. test. test.

I haven’t played around too much yet, but I did spend some time importing my old blogger posts. I might throw the script up on github if I think it might be useful to someone else out there.

Photo

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:32:31 -0500

I can still read?!?!

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:30:00 -0500

So, I had jury duty the other day. Well, I didn’t get picked to sit on a jury, or even interviewed really. But, I did get to sit in a room for the better part of a day that I couldn’t leave.

Oddly, it’s been awesome. The chairs sucked, there was some super-surly South-sider, the men’s room light didn’t really work (might have been for the best), but I was able to re-read most of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Which means, that I can still read!

I’ve jumped into Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good by Sarah Lacy. I’m reading the kindle edition on my iPhone and so far it’s been pretty enjoyable. I really like being able to read wherever I am and not having to tote around the dead-tree version.

I can’t remember the last time I read a book for pleasure, so this is great. Hopefully, this will become a habit like when I was younger, but time will tell.

Hurray for blogger!

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:51:00 -0600

I don’t know how common knowledge this is, but the Blogger twitter account just left some great details about dealing with exports in a comment on Craig Burton’s blog. Add in the conversion tools here, and I’m a happy camper about being on the blogger service. Now, I just need to remember to export my data every so often, just in case.

rant: iPhone apps

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 20:16:00 -0600

Apple, the app store sucks. Yeah, it’s a brilliant innovation to have an app store for a smart phone, but I’m over that. You have a serious problem in that you’ve made it so trendy and cool to create iPhone apps, that damn near everyone is doing it.

As a result, there’s a total lack of quality in many of the apps. For free ones this isn’t that big a deal, because well if I get something for free, I’m not necessarily expecting it to rock up to 11. But, when I pay $10 for an app, I want it to freakin’ work flawlessly. You don’t have to agree with them, but here are my rants on the system as it stands today :

Comments and star ratings aren’t enough. I want to know the percent of the time the app crashes, the percent of the time the application gets uninstalled, and a bug tracker for each app in the store with statistics on time to fix bugs, etc.
I should be able to return a paid app through the store. If it sucks, I should have 24 hrs to get my money back via some official mechanism. Buying software should not be a gamble.
Allow bug fix updates to make it into the store faster. I keep seeing blog post after blog post about waiting for an updated version to show up in the app store. It’s a new platform and there will be bugs in software, you need to streamline the process to resolve those bugs for the users.
Fix the platform. There are precisely 2 hardware devices for these things. How hard should it be to make a stable application for it? I don’t know if it’s issues with the language, the OS, or sunspots, but I don’t care either. There’s no excuse for a memory leak in a user application on a hardware platform of 2 freaking devices.

I feel like this rant has lost some steam since the app that inspired it had an update today and is about eleventy billion percent more stable, now. (Outpost for the record) Well, at least, the NYTimes app is still crashy.

reminder: include created_at field on database tables

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:43:00 -0600

From now on, include a created_at or some other field on every table to make it easy to dump a subset of the database for testing, development.

reminder: convert rails foo.erb to foo.html.erb

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:27:00 -0600

To help with migrating old projects to rails 2.x conventions

why you need twitter

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 06:38:00 -0600

It seems that for better or worse, our world is increasingly dependent on small, bite-size communications. And, you probably suck at it. I’m sorry; maybe you’re too old, or too young, or you never got around to taking that creative writing class in college. It’s going to be okay, we’re all bad at something. Just watch me try to communicate with a large group in real life (IRL), and you’ll see what I mean.

Instant messenger, txting on phones, facebook chat, voicemail, IRC, telegrams. We all have to deal with communications mediums that have limits. Nowadays it seems you can’t go 10 minutes without seeing, or using IM, or txting (SMS if you’re old). Trying to cram a meaningful thought down to 160 characters is really tough. The youngins do it by abbreviating the hell out of everything. Some people split the thought into fragments, or worse only send a fragment of the thought. We all have to send corrections follow-ons.

“hey what’d you think?”
“My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it’s a gr8 plc.” (link)
“wh0 8 MY 54|\|DW1cH!?”
“question” - “i get an error” - “in my app” - “when I try to click on the button”

Now, some of those carry more meaning than others. The question, is whether they have enough to convey to the reader what the author meant. I’m not against using abbreviations, but you have to know your audience well enough to know if they’ll have to consult wikipedia just to translate it. It takes practice.

In the same way that blogging offers a way to practice other styles of writing, I think twitter offers a way to refine your short communication skills. There are plenty of other (probably better) reasons reasons to use twitter, but go sign up anyway. See, the trick to twitter is that you’re putting a message up the whole world can see, and it has to be short. Real short. 140 characters, short.

So, how do you fit a meaningful thought into 140 characters, and not sound like an idiot? You think about it for a minute or two before you send it. That’s something we’re probably not used to doing before we fire off an IM, or a txt to a friend. I think that if we consistently take that extra step of making sure what we’ve typed really, truly says what we mean, that we’ll all get better at this uber-concise world we live in.

So, head over to twitter, sign up, follow jasonrohwedder, add a couple more friends and see how it goes. You might hate it, you might love it, but hopefully you’ll be a little more deliberate before you send me a useless IM/txt/email. k thx bai!

more blogging on the go...

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 19:33:00 -0600

Trying this one out since iBlogger required a line-break option that would have required me to reformat most of my old entries.

That’s something I’d like to avoid.

Look ma’ a photo.

[photo was here, really]
— Post From My iPhone

Update: This was with the blogpress iphone app, (I think). It also seems the photo service that’s built in lost my photo at some point. That’s a bit disconcerting, but I haven’t had time to dig into it, and I’ve found that I don’t really blog from my iPhone much. Go figure.

blogging on the go...

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:54:00 -0600

This is a test blog entry from iBlogger. I hope it turns out pretty because the idea of typing up a new entry from far off locales turns me on!