jonmagic.com - Blog

Bill Cosby

2009-02-13T05:34:00Z

Bill Cosby, one of the greatest comedians of all time (and the cleanest) was on Leno tonight, and after seeing him Natalie and I watched a few of his older bits on YouTube. I’d forgotten how absolutely hilarious he was and how timeless his comedy is. I thought I’d share a few clips with you that we really liked.

Natalie remembered this one from when she was a kid.

This one would have been good about 8 years ago,

and this one about 9 years ago.

This one of course is excellent.

To finish off this series Natalie picked this one.

...nuf said

A light at the end of the tunnel

2009-02-08T23:19:00Z

I know its not really spring yet, but I can’t help but get my hopes up. Today around noon we reached 41 degrees, the sun was out, and it just felt amazing outside.

To celebrate I cleaned out my car :-)

Then at 3pm we took the dogs for a walk, only Bailey’s second walk, his first to the park. When we got home Natalie gave Bailey a bath in the sink, while I gave Leo a bath in the tub (first time doing each of them alone, quite a trick). Now I’m grilling outside, with sandals on!

I’m sure next week the temperature will be back down in the teens, but I can’t help but get excited.

...nuf said

This is amazing

2009-01-29T21:06:00Z

The car that wasn't broken

2008-12-23T00:42:00Z

Saturday I had barely returned home to Indiana (from MI) when Natalie called me. She was leaving Target and Kohls in Goshen and wanted to know what I was up to. About a minute into the conversation she said “crap, gotta go, the car just died…” A few minutes later she called back, the car was dead, in the parking lot.

So like any good husband I suited up and headed that direction. She had gone on to shopping in Target (per my command/request) and it took me a good 15min to find her because her cellphone refuses to work in any department store.

Finally found her, got the keys, and headed out there. Her car (a sky blue 92 Toyota Celica) fired right up (after I checked the obvious stuff, like oil, etc), but as soon as I started to accelerate out of the parking spot it died. I opened the door to hear a loud hissing sound.

I’ll be the first to admit, I know virtually nothing about cars. Ask me almost any computer question and I’ll be able to answer, but ask me about the mechanics of a car and unless google can help me, I’m in trouble.

Well anyways, I gave up, figuring it was something bad like a vacuum hose or fuel pump.

Here is where things get interesting. Later that night I had it towed (thanks Shorty!) and we followed the tow truck to the repair shop he recommended. While driving behind the car Nat said, “doesn’t it look like the exhaust is plugged?” Sure enough, it was stuffed with ice and snow. This is where she fessed up to backing into a snow pile while leaving her parking spot at the shopping center.

I didn’t have a hammer or blow torch handy, so I went ahead and had Shorty leave the car at the shop, and then first thing this morning (Monday) I stopped at the shop and ended up helping the guys push the car into the shop. They had already peeked at it and noticed the exhaust pipe, so when I mentioned it they were like “yup” and figured that was it.

I stopped back by an hour later, and they had used a torch on it, and sure enough it fired right up and ran fine…

Moral of the story: Know the WHOLE story and sometimes the clues will jump right out at ya :-)

Where I "grew" up

2008-12-20T19:53:00Z

Mom tagged me in the Picture Tag game sweeping the nation right now (lol) so I guess I better do it :-)

The rules of the Picture Tag game:

Go to the 4th folder in your computer where you store your pictures.
Pick the 4th picture in that folder.
Explain the picture.
Tag 4 people to do the same.

So, I use a macbook, which means i run osx, which means all my photos are stored in a iPhoto archive file, BUT, thankfully I use my Pictures folder for other stuff too, so I had a 4th folder, and a 4th picture, etc. This particular picture isn’t that great, but the stuff I can tell you about the material in the picture could fill a book.

I promise not to write a book here (I’d get exhausted by the end of the second page) but the story I will tell will give you some insights into where I grew to become a man.

This picture was taken in the foyer at my old church home, Countryside Bible Church, and those three gentlemen are my brothers (in Christ). From left to right there is, Jay, John, and Craig.

I’ll talk about the church for a bit and then tell you about those three I mentioned above. I don’t remember what year my parents started taking us to Countryside, but I do remember it was the third or fourth church we’d attended since we’d moved to MI in 1989. It didn’t take me long to figure out this was a place I wanted to be, there were quite a few kids my age, the sermons didn’t put me to sleep (I used to like to sleep a lot during service) and I just felt like there was something special there. I not only attended Sunday services (and Sunday school) but also went to Awana on Wednesday nights during the school year. Mrs. Buehrer helped me start memorizing verses while I was in Awana and I found I had quite a knack for it, which later led me to get into Bible quizzing. I also remember winning many a sword drill at Countryside, which meant I had a lot of extra Bible’s around to give away.

When I was a small child I had asked the Lord to come into my life, but I’m not sure I actually gave myself to him. I know thru my teenage years and into college and afterwards, I had a long courtship with Satan that nearly killed me. Just a couple years ago I asked the Lord to enter my life again, and started learning what walking with Christ is like.

My family at Countryside grew me up the best they could, nourishing me, encouraging, pushing, and disciplining. But ultimately it was an act of God that brought me to Him. I know he used everyone of those people in that family to do it, but He made sure I knew that only by and thru Him was I to be saved.

So, on to Jay, John, and Craig! I don’t know Jay’s whole story, except that he was saved later in life after many trials, loves the Lord, and that God is still working in him to this day. I’ve known John and his wife Loretta since we started going to Countryside. John loves seeking Truth. You could find him at every Bible study, asking tough questions, playing devil’s advocate, and sometimes being ornery, but always loving the Lord. Craig is a miracle. Craig’s son Josh started attending Countryside with his girlfriend at the time many years ago, when I was still 15 or 16. Josh and I become friends fairly quickly due to our common ground, we were both geeks. When Josh got saved a couple years after he came to Countryside, he started praying earnestly for his parents. Soon after his mother started coming to church (my memory of these events is not perfect, so please correct me on details if necessary) and got saved, and a year or two or three after that Craig started coming to church and after awhile gave his life to the Lord.

Now I said Craig is a miracle. I say that because God took a man with a hard heart, someone who denied God, distrusted those who knew God, the last person on earth you would see humble himself, and turned him around. When Craig came to know the Lord there was a change. Yes we all still have our rough edges, its not like we are pristine beings overnight, and we all continue to make mistakes, but if you had met Craig 10 years ago, and then met him again now, you wouldn’t know it is the same person.

I thank God everyday for the men, and women he’s put in my life over the years. There are many people that played key roles in my development that I didn’t mention above, I’m sure there are many who prayed for me that I don’t even know about, but the important thing is they are out there.

Feeling the love

2008-12-17T23:59:00Z

Wow, I must have more friends this year than ever! Several friends called to wish me a happy birthday, I got 10 happy bday text messages, and about 20 emails!

So anyways, thank you everyone, it was a great birthday. I actually took the day off, the first time since before college I remember not working or taking exams on my bday (except for that one time our prof brought us into class for the exam, and then told us all we got an A and to have a nice day).

This morning I went Christmas shopping for my wife and my sister. Then this afternoon/evening I smoked a chicken out in the garage. Tina (my lil’sis) showed up a bit after four and she chilled in the garage with me for a couple hours. At 7pm Nat got home from work and we skyped with mom and dad and had a mini-birthday/Christmas party. Since this was our only chance for all of us to get together (virtually) we opened gifts and just had a wonderful time. After that we had an amazing dinner together and watched a movie. To top it off we had Tiramisu that Natalie made… mmm, good

In the past I haven’t always looked forward to my birthday. From now on, i think I will.

...nuf said

Globe Gravity Feed Slicer

2008-11-22T21:06:00Z

About a year before my parents headed to South America they started getting rid of most of the “stuff” they’d accumulated over the years. One of the last things they gifted to Natalie and I was a meat slicer that looked pretty beat up and rusty, but had promise for anyone willing to take the time to take it apart and restore it.

Its been sitting in my garage for several months now, collecting dust and more rust. But last weekend as part of my meat smoking tradition (started about 6 weeks ago, see older posts for fun smoking adventures) I decided I wanted to thinly slice the meat I smoked, and I’m not very good at thinly slicing meat with a knife, so I needed something more.

I dug the meat slicer out of the corner of the garage, carried it inside (without putting out my back!) and got to work.

I started by taking it apart, a bit of a challenge the first time, but I’m sure it will be easier in the future now that I know what I’m doing.

Here are all the individual parts laid out on my counter ready to go into the dish washer. Oh yeah, i also used a tooth brush and baking soda to scrub the rusty spots and remove about 90% of the rust.

While the parts were in the dish washer I started researching this slicer. A Globe Gravity Feed Slicer, Model #150, Serial #223739…

Couldn’t find much on the internet, other than Globe’s Website , and that they are located in Dayton Ohio. They did have contact info on their website though, so I shot them an email asking if they could tell me more about my slicer, and if they had any manuals or accessories for this thing lying around in a warehouse.

When the parts were done in the dish washer I put it back together and my did it look good!

I used it to slice my smoked beef shoulder roast that night (that’s a whole other story, 14 hours on the smoker + 2 hours in the oven… crazy) and also sliced some cheese, onion, and bread. It works beautifully, really quite cool. The only problem now is figuring out where to put it :-)

One last thing: Globe did email me the following Monday, and explained that the current owners bought Globe in 1993, and did not have anything from this old model slicer around. They did tell me though that it was manufactured in 1949…

...nuf said

jquery.quickselect.js

2008-11-12T18:32:00Z

Thanks to Daniel for creating a nifty new jquery plugin for me! Quickselect takes select/option tags in html and turns them into an input box with live search, and can even use the quicksilver.js for more interesting search results.

I needed this for Suite, the software I’m writing to manage my company SabreTech and I could not for the life of me find a jquery plugin that did something nifty like this. I had found this autocomplete plugin, and this live search plugin (which was actually a rewrite of another plugin by a friend of mine, John Nunemaker )...

So I asked Dan to write this up for us yesterday, and this afternoon he found some time and put it together, and guess what, it works PERFECTLY!

Well, I hope others find this useful…

Temperature Time

2008-11-01T21:53:00Z

Ok, so last weekend I totally botched the brisket. It was slightly edible, more like a steak than anything I guess, but a really really tough steak. So, rather than give up I’m getting right back on that horse till I can ride thru to the end.

But, being like my father, I’m not going to settle for mediocre tools. My smoker only came with a simple thermometer in it that says, Warm – Ideal – Hot, with no temperatures in degrees on it. I could have just gone and bought an $8 oven thermometer and attached it, but I thought I’d get something a bit cooler and take my time installing it :-)

Its easiest to tell this story with pictures, so here goes. This first pic is the Brinkman el-cheapo smoker pre-mods.

Next up is are the tools and parts I used (minus the bandsaw).

Here is the chunk-o-wood I cut with the bandsaw.

Next I clamped on my chunk of wood and drilled holes for my bolts, then I bolted it on, and finally drilled a couple holes for the thermometer probe.

I inserted the Maverick wireless thermometer probe and put on the grate.

Here is a pic from another angle without the grate on.

And last but not least here it is with everything installed and the transmitter and receiver running.

You can see the entire flickr feed here

Hopefully tomorrow night I’ll be able to blog a good report about my next brisket. This one is 4 pounds and purchased from a local butcher rather than from the grocery store. Here’s to hoping!

the Smoker Trifecta

2008-10-24T23:11:00Z

Two weekends ago Natalie bought us a smoker (for smoking meat you silly). This weekend I will complete the trifecta of smoking. The first weekend we smoked pork using this recipe in order to make pulled pork sandwiches, last weekend we smoked a chicken using this recipe and it was amazing, and this weekend I will complete the trifecta by smoking a beef brisket using this recipe (please see the rub and mop as well) from the smoker king himself.

I know, I know, I haven’t done ribs yet. But I will have done pork, chicken, and beef, so I believe we’ll meet the dictionary description of a trifecta:

“a run of three wins or grand events”

Time to start smoking!

...nuf said

OSX Styled web gui

2008-10-15T00:55:00Z

I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but I decided to release it anyways… I’ve been working on some software for running my company and needed a nice gui, implemented in html/css/js. I decided, since I prefer using osx over any other interface, I wanted my web app to look like osx too.

So I started from scratch and made up this gui using minimal html markup, simple css (I use the blueprint css library as a foundation), the jquery javascript library (including jquery ui elements), and the famfamfam silk icon set.

This is not TOTALLY osx themed, as I couldn’t find an tabs anywhere in osx that worked for web apps (at least not easily implemented ones), so I used the jquery tabs instead and just made them match as close as possible to the rest of the theme.

Caveat

This will not work in IE (i’m pretty sure, but haven’t tested), but it does work in modern versions of webkit based browsers (Safari and Chrome) and Firefox.

Here is the link to my github repo

Summer in a nutshell

2008-08-21T01:31:00Z

Last year I got married. Natalie and I had bought a house in Elkhart Indiana, and we moved there the same week we married and have been making a home here since then. My memory is so bad I can’t remember what we did last fall, winter, or spring, but I do remember most of this summer :-)

Natalie started a new job this summer and is loving it. Late spring I picked up a bad habit, gaming, and it has stuck with me thru the summer. More notable is our vacation in June, where my brother in-law and sister in-law came up to stay with us, and we rocked Elkhart AND Chicago :-)

But the most important thing that happened this summer in our lives, wasn’t even something that happened directly to us. My parents finally got all their support (to become missionaries), spent a couple months getting ready, and flew to Argentina to start new lives as church planters (these events did not necessarily happen in that order). This has affected us though, now neither Natalie nor I have parents close by. The closest immediate relative is my sister, an hour away.

As summer closes up we reflect. It was a good summer, full of life changes, some surprises, many blessings, and a few hard times.

What is my passion?

2008-08-21T01:23:00Z

I’ve had a hard time with this question lately, and it has been coming up time and time again. I’ve been praying about, asking for guidance, trying to figure out what I should be pouring my heart into.

While nothing really jumps out, here are a few things that I enjoy doing and do a lot:

My job, fixing people’s computers, making people happy
My family, doing all the little things that make Natalie happy, even if she doesn’t realize it
Programming, for fun, for work, for side projects

So according to this article I should blog about something I’m passionate about. I guess I’ll have to redefine that to somethings.

Wiring Rails to use Datamapper

2008-08-10T21:09:00Z

Well, I will write an article here shortly, when I actually figure this out… Currently I can find no howto’s for getting rails to use datamapper instead of ActiveRecord. There is no gem, however there is a rails plugin, rails_datamapper, in the dm-more gem. I haven’t figured out how to use it yet though.

More soon!

Getting hacked

2008-06-20T21:47:00Z

My worst nightmare happened last night, and I didn’t even know it until late this morning. I was hacked…

Sequence of events:

June 19th

10pm EST – hacker figured out my email password, logged in, and sent out a mass email to the top 20 people on my contact list (most contacted people), thankfully gmail calculates this list only when you use the web interface in gmail, which I haven’t used in quite some time since I switched to using Apple Mail.app. Most everyone on the top 20 were family or friends. Mysteriously the hacker does not send the mass mail to Sam or Xian, who were both on my top 20 list. The two people who would have known to call me (rather than email me) and tell me to take immediate action.
10:16pm EST – Hacker? tries logging into my blog admin section from this ip 90.194.192.57 unsuccessfully
10:20pm EST – Hacker? successfully logs into my blog admin section from this ip 88.191.47.11
10:23pm EST – Magically whoever logged in at 10:20 is now logged in under a different ip 128.197.11.30 and figuring out my blogging system
10:29pm EST – Hacker figures out my layout management system and starts adding javascript to my template files, first my tag.liquid file
10:31pm EST – Hacker find my layout.liquid file, the master layout, and adds several javascript lines in there. They cause anyone who visits my site to get forwarded to a nasty porn storm site, and installed some sort of tracking js linked to cetrk.com and crazyegg? Keeps updating the same layout file until almost 10:33pm
10:34pm EST – Still updating the same file, but from a different ip now, 91.97.75.15, keeps updating the same file until 10:36pm.
10:36pm EST – My mom emailed me that someone had control of my email. Unfortunately the email never got to me, because the hacker also setup my gmail account to forward all my mail to him, and then archive my messages so they bypassed my inbox (I do still have access to them, they went to the gmail archive folder)

June 20th

9:05am EST – Sam calls me and leaves a message as I’m in the shower
9:30am EST – I call Sam back and find out that a customer had contacted him about an email I supposedly sent, an NASTY email
9:22am EST – I log into my gmail and change my password
10:02am EST – Finally I get to spot with my work where I can start investigating. Investigation shows me that the person had logged into my gmail and I believe only sent to the top 20 people, which was later proved true, at this point I just decided to start changing my password everywhere and send out an apology email to the people I believe got this nasty email
11:30am EST – I call my dad to see if he and mom had got the message. He said he was just emailing me to let me know they had.
11:35am EST – Dad calls me back to tell me my website has been hacked too. And its bad. He just held down the power button on his computer to get away from the horrible stuff that came up on his screen
11:43am EST – I fix my layout.liquid file the first time, turns out I left one line from the hacker still in there
11:53am EST – I get back into my website admin and fix the other line in layout.liquid
around 1:00pm EST – I’m still not getting any emails, and its really getting to me… Finally figure out in my gmail settings that the hacker set all my mail to be forwarded to a spam.la address, where my emails were visible to whole world, and skipping my gmail inbox.
3:38pm EST – I figure out that my tag.liquid file also had a js line in it, so I fix that and thoroughly check the rest of my templates.
3:41pm EST – I find the 128.197.11.30 address in my mephisto logs, track it down to Boston University, and immediately call their network operations center. I talk to one guy, then get forwarded to their network security department and talk to Eric. I explain to Eric who I am and where I’m from, and that our server had been hacked (my blog is on the company server) from an ip address in his network. I started to rattle off the ip address and he stopped me, and said “yeah yeah I know, we got the guy”. I said thanks and hung up.

Moral of the story. Use a good password.

Note: 90.194.192.57, 91.97.75.15, and 88.191.47.11 all belong to a company in England called RIPE