Posted by Max Dunn Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:43:00 GMT | 4 comments
A friend asked for a few recommendations for single-malt whiskeys to give as a gift this holiday. However, like I often do, I couldn’t stop myself and ended up going on-and-on about all sorts of whiskeys that I like.
In case anyone else is interested, here is my little tour of single-malt Scotish whiskeys.
Posted by Max Dunn Sun, 11 Dec 2005 00:09:00 GMT | no comments
When we moved in September, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep the Internet connection to my home server going continuously, so I transfered all the email and web accounts I was hosting to a 1and1 account. I also wanted to update to the latest Mandrake Linux, to get rid of the hodgepodge of application versions I was currently running. So over the last few months, I wiped out my server, updated to Mandrake 2005 and proceeded to reconfigure it, especially as an router with web filtering software.
There were a few tricky things that took a while to figure out, so I wanted to document them in case I have to go through this exercise again.
But rather than clutter up this blog with all the excruciating details, I am going to add them as extended content to this entry. I doubt these notes will be of much use to anyone else, so consider this just an entry of me talking to myself. ;-)
Posted by Max Dunn Sat, 10 Dec 2005 07:23:00 GMT | 1 comment
I had a weird thing happen today where I started to feel dizzy.
At first, it wasn?¢‚?¨‚?¢t a big deal and as long as I didn?¢‚?¨‚?¢t move my head too much I could deal with it, so I proceeded to setup my Linux box as my Internet firewall and router. However, this meant that I was not connected to the Internet for a few hours this morning. Then I started to feel dizzier - but you know, getting the Internet connection going is a bigger priority than my health ?¢‚?¨‚?? so I kept working on it. ;-)
By the time everything was working, I was feeling really bad and had to lie down. But that didn?¢‚?¨‚?¢t help, and I got even worse. But I discovered that it got worse if I lay on my left side, and better if I lay on my right side. So I spent most of the day today dozing in bed on my right side.
My kids have been sick, and my right ear has been buzzing and feeling weird, so I am guessing it is just an ear infection that is causing this and that it will go away in a few days.
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 08 Dec 2005 18:46:00 GMT | no comments
We have a tradition in our family that on our birthdays, we can do anything we want (within reason). We call this our “Anything Goes” day.
Maxie likes to spend his birthday playing video games and eating ice cream all day long and Claire likes to spend hers watching TV and eating ice cream all day long.
My birthday was yesterday and it was a little different from that. For breakfast, Suzanne made me eggs benedict and for dinner, flank steak rollups with a nice bottle of wine and chocolate torte for dessert. The kids were on their best behavior and didn’t fight during the day and offered to walk on my back. The day was a little rainy so I wasn’t able to go surfing and I couldn’t reach anyone to go go-carting. So the only special thing I did during the day was to get a massage.
In the afternoon, I started to get a little depressed because I wasn’t doing anything very special for my Anything Goes day.
But then in the evening, I thought about the fact that I was living in a nice, warm house, I had my pick of whatever food I wanted to eat and wine I wanted to drink, I had a wife and kids that loved me and were going out of there way to do whatever I wanted, and we were all healthy and happy.
So I started to realize how incredible it was that nothing particularly out of the ordinary needed to happen on my birthday to make it special, because God has blessed us in so many ways that everyday is very close to my ideal Anything Goes day.
Posted by Max Dunn Tue, 06 Dec 2005 23:35:00 GMT | no comments
Does anyone else think that it is a little strange that at this time of year we go out in the woods, hunt down a perfect specimen, chop it in two, drag it home, stake it upright in a corner, force feed it fluids, leave it around for a few weeks, and then throw it out into the street when it gets too rotten? No? Okay, then I guess it is just me. :-)
Posted by Max Dunn Mon, 05 Dec 2005 18:26:00 GMT | 3 comments
Our church (PBCC), has been doing a series on the 10 commandments. Several weeks ago, Brian Morgan talked about keeping the Sabbath a day of rest. This point really struck home for me because I tend to work all the time and especially since I have been retired, there is not much difference between the week and the weekend.
So I decided to give it a try and set my first goal to not turn on the computer on the weekends. And since most of the work that I do is on the computer, and I tend to get sucked into one thing after another when I am on the computer, not turning on the computer forces me to do other things, like relax.
I have done this for 3 weeks now, and I have to say it hasn’t been easy not to even check my emails on Sunday, but it has made my Sundays much more relaxing.
So I apologize if I don’t answer my emails or seem responsive on Sundays, but I am probably taking a nap on the couch, reading a book, or playing with my kids.
Posted by Max Dunn Sat, 03 Dec 2005 19:32:00 GMT | no comments
I have been working on a web site for my son’s baseball club, Tri-Cities Baseball, with my wife Suzanne and our friend Steve Cousins, and it has been a lot of fun.
Suzanne has been doing the graphical design and static pages, and Steve and I have been working on the registration part using Ruby on Rails (RoR).
RoR is a fantastic environment that makes it easy to develop, deploy and maintain web applications, particularly for doing data-base backed web sites.
Ruby by itself is a great object oriented language, that provides all the benefits of object orientation, without the downfalls of pure(object(languages(like(lisp)))). (That was a Lisp joke. ;-)
Rails is a framework that uses a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture and a Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) philosophy so your code is cleaner and easier to maintain. It also includes a object-relation mapping so that it is easy to store and retrieve stuff without having to write a bunch of low level SQL. It also handles sessions and uses a lot of conventions over configuration, which lets you get down to work rather than spending a lot of time setting stuff up.
It is always hard to learn a new language AND a new framework, but it is amazing how much we were able to accomplish in a short time starting at zero.
Another indication of how easy it is to develop applications in RoR is that even though it has only been around for about a year and a half, there are already an incredible amount of applications available using it, including blogs, wikis, bug tracking, project tracking, accounting, forums, picture galleries, and more. For comparison, Java has been around for over 10 years, and it still doesn’t have some of the applications available in RoR!
Posted by Max Dunn Fri, 02 Dec 2005 18:11:00 GMT | 3 comments
People sometimes ask if it is relaxing being retired. Interestingly, it isn’t.
Some days I work harder now than I did when I had a traditional job. Whether it is re-doing the plumbing in our bathroom, setting up a Linux email server, helping a friend start a business, or developing a registration form for our son’s baseball league using Ruby on Rails, I have been incredibly busy.
What is different is that now I have more control over what I do and when. For instance, if I want to take a nap or bike ride in the middle of the day, I do it. Or if I want to spend time researching open source software, well, I can do that too.
So while being retired hasn’t really been all that relaxing, the big difference is that it has been a lot less stressful.
Posted by Max Dunn Fri, 02 Dec 2005 17:50:00 GMT | no comments
It is interesting that sometimes incredible portions of conversations are dominated by talking about other people. For instance, some dinner conversations consist entirely of lines like: “Did you know that so-and-so said that?” and “Can you believe that so-and-so did that?” Often these are not even people that we all know, but just “my daughter’s classmate’s mother” or “this guy I know at work.”
Now gossip is commonly thought of as talking negatively about other people, but it seems to me that this idle chatter about remote people qualifies as gossip too.
The biggest problem with this type of conversation is that it crowds out the possibility of really meaningful discussions. It is certainly easier to talk about other people’s problems and struggles rather than our own.
Not all discussions about other people fall into this category. For instance, if someone is having problems with a boss, teacher or acquaintance, it is often helpful to describe the situation in order to get advice. Likewise, if a friend is having a problem that is similar to one that has been dealt with successfully by someone else, it is helpful to describe what the other person did to overcome the situation.
But when the conversation turns to other people in an idle way, maybe we should pull it back to the people present and ask how the other person is doing and what challenges they are facing, or share our own fears, successes, shortcomings and challenges, in order to make our conversations truly meaningful.
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 01 Dec 2005 17:56:00 GMT | 1 comment
This Typo blog is setup to use Markdown, and here are some basic formatting rules.
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