fwaggle.org

I went ahead and forked Pimmitje’s MumbleReader project, grabbing only the client-side bits – as I think having the two in one project complicates things for prospective users of it, at least coming from my users whom won’t need the server-side PHP bits. I hosted it on GitHub, since I have all my other stuff there  and it’s a familiar interface.

I made a few changes, but not enough to warrant the change in name, so I ended up just calling the GitHub project “MumbleReader.js“. I’d like to think that as an example implementation of CVP, my changes make it a lot easier for those familiar with HTML to mix it into their own website – but then again I’m not exactly looking at the code with fresh eyes.

I did get to play with my first experience with GitHub’s “Pages” feature, which is actually quite nice once you get the hang of it. Having some sort of revision control on web pages is actually a sane and simple solution if your needs aren’t great.

Tonight after dinner, I think I’m going to go out and put sight-wires on all the fences the horses busted through the other day. We’re staying with my parents a while, while we build up some cash – I figure the least I can do is fix some stuff for them.

The heat and the crappy mattress we’re sleeping on isn’t doing me much good. I feel like there’s a whole Back pain seminar‘s worth of complaining in my lumbar region, and I’ve been trying to stretch it out and exercise the muscles but I really think the mattress is the chief culprit. It becomes a difficult decision though – do I spend money on a mattress we can’t take with us when we go back to the states, or do I just put up with it?

Within a few days of arriving in Australia, I was already hard at work helping my parents put up a fence to keep the ponies in a paddock they hadn’t yet been in. The day before yesterday, we went down to go fix another fence and to move some of the ponies into yet another paddock, and for some reason a couple of them decided to bolt.

In the course of bolting, they managed to break a couple of fences. The end result was that instead of getting the one fence we were going to fix, fixed – we ended up with two extra fences to fix.

Yesterday we went down to fix those two fences, and to move a couple of the metal bath tubs my parents are using for water troughs. Duncan absolutely adores being on the 4 wheel motorbike, so it wasn’t really work for him despite the heat. He had a hat and sunscreen on, and doesn’t appear to have copped any sunburn which is good.

But after working all day in the heat, I’m feeling a little worse for wear today. I thought living on a “ranch” was supposed to be all pork & beans and singing acoustic guitar songs.

I think I’ve just about got this case of jetlag whipped, and since I wanted to make some money to buy some new servers and such I figured I’d start looking for some kind of work to make a quick buck. Dad got me on to a site called GumTree, which looks almost like an Australian Craig’s List – Australia has a CL, but it’s not particularly good.

Anyway most of what I found was things like fruit picking, Waiter/Waitress Jobs, that sort of thing. I’m not sure what I want to do yet, but at least there are things available nearby.

Today we have to head out to Ballarat to organize getting a Medicare card so Duncan can get his checkups. We were meant to do it Tuesday, but like an idiot we got halfway there and I realized I’d forgotten to bring all the necessary paperwork – so we’re heading out to do it today.

Mum was talking to me yesterday about how she wants a “whirly-gig” for the attic in the pantry to bring down the summer temperatures a bit – there’s a big one on the house, but the attic isn’t connected to the top of the pantry, and one of the big ones would be a bit too much airflow for such a small area. She pointed out one on the roof of a camper on the back of a ute, and I suggested that if I’d wanted to buy something like that in the states I’d go to the local rv repair place.

Apparently there’s a caravan supplies place in Ballarat, so maybe if Duncan cooperates while driving we’ll look at picking one up out there too.

I’ve been working on a new version of our control panel for MumbleDog for a while now, and I keep stalling on it. The issue is that I keep stopping actual development work to instead focus on trivial design-related issues with the layout. The problem is that I’m not in the least bit artistic, and I couldn’t design a webpage I’d be happy with if my life depended on it.

Well a while back I discovered, via Reddit, Twitter’s “Bootstrap” project – an all-in-one CSS marvel that pretty much slaps Web2.0 style onto markup with a minimum number of keystrokes. I toyed with the idea of re-rolling our new panel using Bootstrap, but I simply bookmarked the page and forgot about it, writing it off as “too much work”.

A couple days ago, I happened upon it again while cleaning out my bookmarks, so I decided to take another look at it. I made a new HTML file on my desktop and mucked with it, and after all of five minutes, I realized how powerful it was for what I wanted.

The next day I worked on the panel so much I thought about wrapping myself up in incontinence products so I wouldn’t have to leave my desk. Thanksgiving day, while everyone was buzzing about the kitchen and dining room, I sat with the laptop and worked some more.

The end result so far: I’ve re-done what was previously 6 weeks worth of on-again-off-again work in two and a bit days. I love it, I think it looks the best our panel ever has, it has a few new features that our older panel didn’t have, and it’s just all around a positive thing.

I can’t wait to get it beta tested with a few users, then push it live.

Duncan is weird around strangers – sometimes he’s completely shy, and others he’ll yell out “Hi!” across the street to random people. He particularly likes the clerks in the various stores we visit in town – I think because he sees them so often. One of the myriad new words he learned recently is “boop”, as in what ATMs do when you push buttons. When something is dragged across the Honeywell Barcode Scanner at our local grocery store, “boop” is what he hears and “boop” is what he answers.

The only downside is he’s obsessed with pressing buttons that go “boop”. When his grandma pulls money out at the ATM, if he’s present she has to grab his little hand and make him push all the right buttons, or there will be hell to pay. Now he needs to learn to take off with the cash!

I think I’m addicted to Minecraft.

I originally picked it up as an early birthday present for my brother in law – I didn’t know he had an account, and I certainly don’t think he had an email address that he would keep sure to attach to the account, so I just bought it under my account and let him play on it.

I tried it here and there, and thought it was pretty fun, but not something I could really get into. Then someone on Reddit explained how two people can play on the same (insecure, so hackers/griefers can get on it, but it’s LAN only so that’s okay) server with the same account, and holy shit.

It was at 3am, while looking on the Wiki for howtos on log cabin decor and crafting recipes, while strip mining a cavern a few hundred meters underground that I realized it might be time to admit something’s wrong. This is not a one-time occurrence either.

We probably won’t be going this year, because Duncan’s here (I think I went last year while Sabriena stayed home) and even though out here in the sticks our Black Fridays are pretty tame by comparison, I still feel like I’m going to have a panic attack in all the mobs of people and I don’t really want to subject my son to that.

So what to do instead? Well for starters the only Black Friday we’ve really ever bothered to go to was Walmart, and I guess there are sites where you can get a lot of similar deals (though not quite as extreme as the quantities limited deals in the stores at midnight) at various websites that have coupons for walmart. I’m sure there are other sites for other outlets too.

It’s starting to get a bit cold, and that sucks. I moved the ladder around today and started to sweep the chimney, however upon further inspection the flue is coming apart and I don’t really think it’s safe to burn for another winter, so there goes burning some junk wood for a nice toasty fire one of these cold days coming up.

We’ve got to do laundry soon, which I suppose is good news – the laundromat is usually reasonably warm. It’s boring as hell sitting there staring at rows of washing machines, driers and a couple stainless steel sinks, with scant for entertainment but a kid who’s figured out that the place echoes really really good. I have a blast with him, but I’d much rather do it at home where there’s padding on the floor, a lawn outside, and a virtually unlimited supply of new toys to play with.