For the lake, happens this weekend. It’s the perenial end of summer party at the lake which means a few things: booze, food, and docks. Every year on labor day we take out the docks up and down the beach to say that the summer is over for the lake dwellers, and it’s time to go back and get cabin fever.
This is an especially hard time for me, the lake is my place of refuge. Lately it’s been hard to relax, even at the lake, so I hope this weekend brings some much needed relaxation. The plan is to arrive on Friday or Saturday (hopefully Friday) and start the fun: eat, drink and be merry until we can’t anymore. The weather looks like it will probably cooperate with us, while chilly the wind is going to turn around Saturday and come out of the east/southeast which will warm it up a bit. Sunday Michelle comes to join the celebration and Monday it gets nice and warm (80′s). Combined with the liquid courage we should get the dock out and the place closed up for the year. It’s the equivalent of starting school your senior year of high school: you know it’s not going to suck, but it won’t be quite as good as it just was. So, it’s with a heavy heart I head off to party hardy one more time this summer.
The Minnesota State fair is on right now, and I got the opportunity to go up with one of my best friends John Bergan and partake. John and I left Friday and arrived at my girlfriend Michelle’s place about 6:00. We then headed off to the Chatterbox Pub (http://www.chatterboxpub.net/) for some food and games. John’s squeeze Erin joined us there where we partook of their micro brew beer and excellent pizza. We played some board games, were joined by friends, and then called it a night and went to crash.
Saturday was Fair day, with lots of sights to see (and corn dogs to eat!). We hit the Miracle of Birth Barn, the river ride, sampled many things on a stick and came away completely exhausted. John and Erin continued to party at the fair, Michelle and I fell back to cool down and meet up with her family for dinner and a movie (inception was pretty decent). We crashed about 10:45 after an exciting day. Sunday we had brunch at a little pub in Anoka, and parted ways with Erin and Michelle. John and I booked it home in timely fashion – Falcon Heights to Sioux Falls in 3 hours 20 min. Overall, an excellent weekend with friends and fun.
I went out and shot a few pictures of the lake while it was raining, some of the turned out okay. Long shutters on a few, and short shutters on a couple to get more cloud color and less foreground pieces. Here’s a quick thumbsheet, click any of them to open them in the gallery:
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Media Temple’s grid service has been lamented a lot- it has it’s flaws, I’ll agree. It’s also a very affordable, easy to use dev enviroment- which is why I use it. Basically my dev setup is as such:
MT Grid + MySQL container
SVN repo, Mantis for bugs
Eclipse using SVN as team, Mantis for tasks.
That’s worked great, and is a very very effective setup for multiple users to keep things rolling. I also created an svn.domain.com subdomain to view our current SVN work, then checkout a revision to the main site, branch the revision, and that’s our live site, and the branch is all the bug fixes until the SVN version is ready to branch into another stable release. It’s easy that way to have multiple test sites on various stable versions of the site or unstable versions. The one thing I hadn’t taken time to figure out is having it automatically update our “live snaps” sites with the latest SVN build everytime it gets checked in. Not a big deal when you’re casually working on a new featureset and you only commit a couple times a day, but a huge annoyance when you are doing rapid code/test/code/test loops to have to either wait the 5 min until the cron-tab runs or refresh a page with the command on it, or run the command in a terminal. No more, simply using post-commit hooks you can make this happen on the GS:
where XXXXX = your acct # and project=your SVN reponame
cd /home/XXXXX/users/.home/data/svn/project/hooks
touch ./post-commit
chmod 755 ./post-commit
vi post_commit
{press the i key and paste the following lines after you edit them to be correct, don’t change the first line}
#!/bin/sh
cd /home/XXXXX/users/.home/domains/svn.project.com
svn co file:///home/62095/users/.home/data/svn/project/trunk/project html
And done. Lots of great options with the hooks folder, they have examples in there from default, but be warned that GS doesn’t have svnnotify available. Now your dev site auto-updates every time someone commits!
I’m a High Fidelity freak- anyone who knows me, knows this- I love the movie. It comes as no surprise then that one of my favorite things to do is to make mix tapes’s (CD’s) for those I care about. One place this has always cropped up is with women I’m dating, or am after, or whatever you want to coin that as. Anyway- I’m in the process of creating a mixed tape, and thought I’d share a bit of it with the world, since I’m pretty sure the person it’s for doesn’t read this.
Okay, so tracklist, with explanation:
- Are You Gonna Be My Girl – Jet
This one should be obvious- it’s upbeat, fun, and asking the important questions – Are you gonna be my girl?
- Magic – B.o.B. and Rivers Cuomo
This is not a regular fit on a “Love” cd- but this isn’t a love CD, and this song is all about how I’ve got Magic. It’s totally fun, features one of my favorite singers and is totally in your face cocky.
- Hey Girl – Dashboard Confessional
Can’t not include some dashboard, but be careful- it’s not a breakup CD. This song is all about how he wishes he were good enough for her. http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/dashboardconfessional/heygirl.html
- I Need you All the Time- BlackHawk
Another choice due to lyrical content. BlackHawk is the only country selection in this CD. It’s tough to mix genres in a big way, but the acoustic guitar of Dashboard lets us move to country without too much awkwardness. This song is simply about all the things a person needs – “They can build it or dream it / I could take it or leave it / but I need you all the time”
- Only Wanna Be With You- Hootie and the Blowfish
“You and me, we come from different worlds / There’s nothing I can do, I’ve been looking for a girl like you” – it’s a great title, good lyrics, and awesome singer.
- Your House – Jimmy Eat World
This song has a low-fi feel, which coming after the pristine mixing of hootie is a shock, and a nice one. This is all about a guy really wanting a girl he’s had once, and about how everything she does makes him more crazy about her.
- Girl Like That – Matchbox Twenty
Rob Thomas has awesome vocals, and I love MB20′s music, so this is a natural win.
- That Girl- Six Mile Grove
A local-ish band, i’m not sure they’re doing any of their older music, but it’s all good (all their music, that is) www.sixmilegrove.com I have their first couple CD’s, and this one is a great love song. “You’re that girl, yea that girl, you’re that girl I can’t stop touchin”
- Stickshifts and Safetybelts – Cake
A quirky, upbeat, purely cake song. Referencing all the things that keep his baby away from him in the car, it’s a fun song.
- I’ll Meet You There – Owl City
Another local choice (pretty sure they’re well known nationally as well) but it brings the feel back after the awkward quirkyness that is Cake. It’s a nice ender, and I would contemplate making it a bit of a hidden track, 30 second delay ish.
There you have it- A 10 track, 34 minute mixed CD full of goodness. Remember: you’re trying to convey a feeling with a mixtape- the title is not enough of a reason to include a song, they’re going to listen to it! If you want to go totally old school and awesome, make them all one track, and give them a track list later: make them want to hear what’s next.
I have an Android phone- a moto Droid, running a rooted/custom 2.2 release, and I love it. The phone itself now has issues (humidity affects it oddly) but I hear that asurion isn’t replacing them with D1′s anymore, but rather X’s… That sounds like a good deal except you lose the slideout keyboard, and frankly- I won’t live without out that. This article isn’t about that though- it’s about my tablet/UMPC. UMPC’s are dead, really, but I snagged a Samsung Q1U cheap, and wanted it to be a bit more usable than it is with winxp or win7 on it. I have 1.6 running on it, but it’s a generic build where the touchscreen doesn’t work and the wifi is a no go, etc. So I wanted a 2.1 build, or even a 2.2 if they were out there. Happily android-x86.org has a 2.1 and a 2.2 branch. The 2.2. branch doesn’t appear to be very stable at all, so I decided a 2.1 build would be great. Problem is, you need to download and build it yourself. That requires a linux box. I do happen to have a linux install on my desktop, so away I went. It takes a while to download the code, and it takes a while to build it, but when it’s done, you have a USB image of android 2.1 specifically for the Q1u UMPC, supposedly. Hit the jump for the results.
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It’s a Sunday afternoon personal update! I had a great week and weekend- culminating with the Chester SD Street Dance where Eclipse played. Eclipse was okay, but not fantastic. The party was pretty impressive, and my people watching habits immediately took over – so much crazy stuff going on. Made my way home at about 1:45-2:00 and hit the bed snoring already at 2:30. Saturday was fun with a late start, a little China Moon buffet in Madison, then lots of volleyball with Pete, Ivy and the gang over there. After volley ball and a long shower Michelle came over to the lake and we lit a bonfire and chilled out- nice and relaxing. Today was pack up and go home from the lake time, a little mowing at home, lunch in Sioux Falls at Ashley and Adams followed by a much needed nap to catch up, and now on to the rest of my weekend projects, including, this blog post. Things have been really relaxed and really enjoyable lately around here- kind of that small town enjoyment I was hoping for, and definitely plenty of lake time and party time. I’ve got some posts laid out to populate the other categories so I’ll be posting those up later, but for now it’s off to the grindstone.
