Blog moved

Well, for now I'll keep this blog as it is.  Going forward, new posts will be at http://meandmel.com/blog

Sunday Afternoon Walk

Felt the need to get out of the house on Sunday afternoon. Tom and I took a walk around the neighborhood and out into some fields on the edge of town.

Siamese Bread

Misce baked some bread, and the loaves ended up joined together like Siamese Twins

Measureable Progress

On my home machine I've managed to install, configure, and generally get running all libraries that my chosen web-development framework uses. Some dependencies were rather obscure, a few required compilation from source, and one gave me a configuration headache that took two days to solve. Well that's two days at two hours at a time. So realistically it was half a day's worth of work lost simply because I misunderstood the nuances of configuring an Apache webserver which uses named virtual hosts. There is one other problem that I still have to solve, basically how to create a stand alone start and stop script so that a Lisp program can run in the back ground as a service. That should not be overly difficult since my chosen Lisp implementation, SBCL, has truly excellent technical documentation.

A happy day.

Falling into October

Haven't posted for a while. Work has been keeping me busy, along with other things. After several months away from it, I've re-started my efforts to develop my website. It's not just work that's been keeping me away. For a bit my computer was misbehaving, turns out that a partially corrupted filesystem was to blame. The experience taught me a lesson that I should have already learned a long time ago. That being to have a back up and a rescue disk. I took some effort to recover my system and to not lose any of my data. The system can easily be replaced, but the data isn't easily replaced. The other roadblock keeping me away was my friend's website had to be PCI compliant and the deadline was in the middle of my business travels. From that episode I learned quite a bit about Apache security configuration and how SSL, TSL, and security certificates work from a practical perspective. Now my goal is measured, disciplined, cumulative development of the site. I'll keep this blog posted on my progress.

A Summer Gone By

Work has kept me very busy, and I've been traveling to a client site repeatedly for the past month. The hours I've worked in the past month are easily double what I would have worked during an ordinary month. As you can imagine, this has left me little time for ordinary chores, being with my family, taking care of my garden, let along blogging. During a brief respite during a stay on a client site, I'm posting this. As I write, as song from my late teens plays on my computer. Times like these make me wonder what the purpose of life is. More specifically it makes me wonder what the purpose of my life is and what exactly I want from it. The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that what I most dearly want is to love and to be loved. There are times when I do feel that, even if only in fleeting moments. Traveling on business, while a necessary evil right now so that I can support myself and my family, certainly makes me acutely aware how far away I am from those whom I love, and who love me. A summer has gone by that I can't get back, autumn is coming as the seasons march on. I will change my circumstances so that I will not lose another summer, or any other season, away on business. The price is too high for the time lost is too precious.

Local goings on

Well the local development environment on my machine is now working as expected. Virtual hosting is set up in much the same way that it is working on the production server. The basic web server set up is there, so now work on the applications can begin. Also now that the virtual sorting is set up, webapps that would run on a team's source control repo server can now run on my workstation. The same apps that a team would use for managing workflow, development planning, source code control, bug tracking etc are now potentially available in the local development environment. This will be a blast.

In other news, the gardens around the house are slowly coming into their own. The golden finches are back, as well as the robins and cardinals. Occasionally a bluejay visits and the crows are ever-present. Soon spring will be over and summer will begin.

The two younger boys and I've been to the pool on every day that the weather and our schedules allow. Karl improved his swimming this year. He's getting stronger and faster. Pretty soon he'll be more a young man than a big boy. Tommy is still all boy, but a few more years will change that.

Misce's been working on her quilts as always and she turned out several lately. They're all well made as always, she's very fastidious about her work. The all look good, and some are even spectacular. Over the years she's made quite a few and at times I really don't know where we will put all of them. As far as quandaries go, that is not a bad one to have.