Written on Saturday April 28, 2012 at 12:53 a.m.
I've been working more than I probably should, again. With committing hours to multiple contractors on top of my usual work at CrowdCompass, and my own private projects. I feel like I have way more time to projects and work than actual time available for probably the next month or so.
I have been able to schedule a few moments in from time to time. I started my FFXIV account back up and I love all the changes they've made to the game, and recently I through a huge birthday bash for myself that was a rousing success.
The festivities involved a signature cocktail, the French 75, which Angela helped me pick up supplies for. We had sushi, cheese, charcuterie for snacking around the house. We had a bunch of great music videos on the big tv. My friends came together to get me some amazing gifts, and we all celebrated the night away. It was a probably one of the better parties I have had and possibly one of the best I will have.
Written on Friday March 30, 2012 at 11:50 p.m.
I've been busy for what really feels like forever. I don't think I've had a real break from working in what has to be three weeks at this point. Don't get me wrong, I love my job, and as far as life situations go, having "too much work" is definitely on the lower end of the suck-scale, but I really do need to take a break soon.
I've mainly been working on a single project for CrowdCompass that involves using Ember.js and Rails. I'm loving the product that's coming out of this. I have great design mock ups from my co-worker Kevin, and amazing back-end support from Matt and Sean so with any luck, this will be finished soon and I'll finally have the time to start up some RPG or MMORPG.
Written on Thursday March 8, 2012 at 3:53 p.m.
As of now, I'm the happy owner of a pair of Lady Gaga's Heartbeats 2.0 head phones, and very happily so. The quality is beyond that of my sony headphones, they are comfortable ( and very adjustable, with 8 different ear pieces to select from ), and best of all, they look bad ass.
I managed to chip a tooth on Sunday, and now I find myself looking to pay for 2 crowns on my teeth ASAP, with another couple of crowns coming soon after.
My old PS3 also died out on me, so I had to replace that too. Not a serious issue or anything, but upsetting non-the-less. Though I did manage to take care of that right away and the newer-slim model heats my apartment up at least 2 degrees (Fahrenheit) less than the old one did, and is much quiter.
Written on Tuesday February 28, 2012 at 3:23 p.m.
Last Saturday I finally managed to take a trip out to the Timberline Lodge to snow board. This was actually my first time ever doing so. I found it enjoyable enough, despite white-out conditions and the fact the weather was bad enough that they had closed all but the pucci and bunny lift. I didn't managed to master turning, but I can make it to the bottom of the slope and only eat snow once when I hit the bottom, which has to be some kind of progress. I intend to go back as soon as it's financially feasabile to, but that may take a little while given how costly this sport is.
Returning from my trip I managed to misplaced my nice little sony earbuds and had to work a day without them. I think I was probably 32% less productive that day. So today I made sure to bring in my skullcandy headphones that I had lying about at my desk at home which reminded me just how tinny and terrible the sound from these is.
I wish I could give you a model name so you know which ones to specifically avoid, but unfortunately I can't seem to find one on these. They were one of the 40$ variants of skullcandy, so it's probably safe to avoid just everything in that range from them.
Written on Thursday February 9, 2012 at 8:01 a.m.
So I recently ran into this issue regarding Sass (scss) url imports and Google webfonts. Essentially on half of the machines I tested, if the url import for google webfonts was not the first import, they wouldn't load at all. There was no failure reason reported, and the source was totally correct.
I wish I could give more diagnostic information, I suppose all my test instances were on Rails 3.2 running on OSX Lion, so that may have something to do with it, but besides that the similarities were scarce.
Written on Monday February 6, 2012 at 3:51 p.m.
Recently I was accepted into the Diablo III beta. You can ask anyone around me about my reaction to it, and at a very minimum they'll tell you I was "excited", though most likely they would tell you it was bordering fanaticism. I actually had a chance to play it all the way through too and I loved it. Love it like crazy. The gameplay is fantastic, the wizard character is charming, the weapons / forging system is interesting, and the artwork / design was amazing.
The bad news is, while I was playing this game I was supposed to have spent my first time snow boarding. I regret not going, but I think financially it was the right decision to stay home instead. I may give it another shot sometime in the future, but I just don't know that I'm ready to invest that much money into a sport that I may not even like. Especially given the fact I don't like sports in general.
The new Tedera is almost back up. I went through and finished out the basic stubs and contact forms, so now I just need to implement user verification and some upload system for the portfolio page. I realize I need to get some kind of pagination working on ramiro.mx soon too. I'll make sure to do that the moment I get a spare hour to figure out how.
Written on Tuesday January 17, 2012 at 3:27 p.m.
So I'm in the middle of upgrading one of the projects at my company from Rails 3, to Rails 3.1. An endeavor that I was very excited about. This means we'll be switching to the new rails 3.1 asset pipeline, which I've found very enjoyable in my own projects at home. There are a couple of issues I've encountered on the way though and thought I'd document them ( in case someone else is looking for a solution to a similar problem ).
One of these issues was that the current version of compass ( 0.11.7 ), actually changes the behavior of the image-url() tag in sass. Normally, this should generate a link to the dynamically compiled assets in /assets/, but with compass installed rails continues to point to /public/. I couldn't find any great documentation for the error, but did find someone asking about it in an obscure post in the sass github.
The other issue I ran into was that in my current configuration with rails 3.1.3, sass 3.1.12, and sprockets 2.0.3, adding /* this style */ comments to a sass file, after a line of code causes a "stack level too deep" error. It wouldn't have been so hard tracking this down as the problem if the same lines didn't also have complex linear-gradients which I had first assumed were the problem, since a post-line comment seemed much more benign.
Written on Sunday January 1, 2012 at 9:22 a.m.
The new year has come in and I'm looking forward to a year filled with all sorts of learning and new projects.
I ushered in the new year with my wife and friends at Gary and Dena's place, and I now have a new project to build a website for their wedding, which sounds fun.
I recently started taking my Japanese lessons online again, and my wife decided to brush up on her Spanish while I do that, which is a pretty fun arrangement.
We're doing it all through Rosetta's "totale" program. Which is way better than the previous iterations of their software, and at 20$ a month, is a pretty good deal. Recently though, it seems their website stopped offering this plan on a month-to-month basis, so you have to actually have to buy a whole year before you're switched to a monthly plan, which is kind of douchey, and hardly competitive considering there are programs like Babbel out there which are just as good ( and even better ) for some situations.
Written on Sunday December 25, 2011 at 9:52 p.m.
I want to be clear, that I'm not complaining about the lack of excitement this holiday season. It has passed very much like previous ones have in recent years. I'm actually pretty relieved that nothing new or tragic has popped up to make this weekend any fuller than it's already been.
We did have the addition this year of my younger sister's boyfriend, who's a pretty fun guy. We got to show him and my sister The Observatory and Ground Kontrol the night before. Both of which felt like good "Portlandy" choices to take out-of-state visitors to.
I spent Christmas Eve at my families home, watched moves and played video games until midnight We opened presents then and had a couple of drinks before we said our good nights.
This morning Brenda and I went north to her parent's house to unwrap more gifts and enjoy a good family day. Lunch or Dinner is cooking now and it smells great but as picky as I am, I'm not sure what the choices available to me will be when the food is done cooking.
Written on Tuesday December 20, 2011 at 7:14 p.m.
I have this pet rat named Alfred. He's a super sweet albino fancy rat who has recently developed a very large tumor and unfortunately I won't be able to pay for the cost to have it removed.
He seemed comfortable enough living with it at first but about a week after it first appeared he began to bite at it to the point where it began to bleed, and he hasn't relented long enough for it to scab over since.
I'm thinking now the poor little guy probably needs to be euthanized, but I'm not really sure how to ask my vet about that without feeling like a terrible person.