I would have to say my favorite class this time around was Chrome Developer tools down and dirty. I learned a lot of new things that you can do with it. Network breakpoints. debugger; statement in code breaks on that line in the JS debugger. It was super useful! here’s a link to the slides for your own enjoyment.
http://blittle.github.io/chrome-dev-tools/
Thanks Bret Little for putting that together. That was single highhandedly the best one hour I’ve spent at OpenWest.
We took trip a few weeks ago to Mesa Verde, and it was a lot of fun! It was very relaxing to take a step back from technology for a few days, and see what our predecessors did for life. “We don’t give ourselves enough credit as a human race for what we can accomplish.” We’re looking back at 1200 AD people’s dwellings in the sides of cliffs. And here we are in 2013 with buildings 2700+ feet tall. I would love one day to go back and see what these dwellings looked like after they were finished building them.
Back in March we went to Disneyland with our girls, and it was a lot of fun! Lizzy got to meet her favorite character of all time. Tinkerbell. Before she got her turn, she started drawing Tinkerbell. She’d study Tinkerbell, then pen what she saw.. then she’d study Tinkerbell for a little more. It was very cute to see try and capture the moment on paper. From the drawing you can see Tinkerbell’s wing. We’re going to let my brother give her some drawing lessons soon so hopeful she’ll be a great artist one day!
This last weekend was OpenWest open source conference. It was a lot of fun to attend and learn from some great people there teaching great things. I was impressed with how calm and well organized the event was. Everyone genuinely wanted to help others out. It was great to see how passionate some people were about the subjects they taught. My favorite talks of the conference came from Josh Broton. One of my favorite talks of his was Sticks Spit and Ducttape. But Embrace Your Inner Designer was great too! Great conference! I really look forward to seeing the files Josh will put up that will go along with Sticks Spit and Ducttape.
5 apples up on top
We are so good they will not drop! Lizzy and I were stacking apples and got up to 5 apples up! This is not an optical allusion!
So it’s been quite a while since I last posted. I’ll have to do some followup posts to journal about what I’ve been up to. This one is about my new endeavors with Arduino. My friend has been wanting to automate his heating and cooling system for his home to give him complete control over each room. It’s looking like we’ll use the Arduino as the brains of the project, with an Ethernet port and eeprom to serve up pages. I’m looking forward to the data gathering and processing side of the project. With lm34 temperature sensors and using the ADC 10bit resolution on the ATMega328p this will be fun to figure out.
So I’m sorry it’s been a while since the last time I posted. I copied all my good pictures since then to my laptop, and I’m posting from my phone dock so I don’t have any of those pictures.
A few notable things: The flashlight is still on my swamp cooler. I mowed the law. Pulled a bunch of weeds in the front yard by the fence. Unlocked the bootloader of my phone and flashed a new kernel. With the new kernel on my phone I enabled zram (virtual swap), and a small portion of swap on my phones internal flash (293MB). Watched Thor and Captain America, great movies! Applied for several new jobs. Got a offer for one. Took the offer and I start in several days.
There are other things that I’ve done that I’ll need to post about in more detail. That’s just a small list. The big time consumer was the job hunt. Hopefully now we’ll be able to pay our bills and get out of debt. I’ll miss my last job, and the friends I’ve made. I’ve committed to keep hanging out with you all. I’ve learned and grown so much from all of you. I’m sorry I have to bow out before we really got successful, but we just can’t afford it any more. I still don’t know if we’ll have enough to buy new tires and pay for our car registration this month. I pray and wish you all the best.
So today I borrowed a ladder from our neighbored and set to work replacing the pads on our evaporative cooler. It seemed that the pads were several years old, the base of the cooler had a lot of filth in it. I really don’t know how to get rid of it besides scraping it out by hand; which I got a lot out, but there is a lot more work to do in cleaning it completely up. If anyone has a good way of cleaning it out, let me know! The view was nice, and I had a lot of fun just looking around. I think I just remember that I left my flashlight up on top of the cooler. I will have to borrow that ladder again…. sooner then I’d like. Oh well. Just before I got up on the roof, I took Lizzy around the block in the gorilla cart again. She really enjoyed that. I hope to take her on a few more trips, maybe even to the park, before I have to give it back to my parents.
After storing all of our left over potting soil in big garbage bags we finally had the cart free to give our girls a ride around the block. It was fun! We will have to definitely do that more as the days goes on. Lizzy really loved the ride, but leah wanted out early because she got hungry. This sturdy little Gorilla cart is from Costco. It was well worth the purchase. We’re borrowing it from my parents while we work on our yard and garden.
Lizzy wanted to play in the laundry baskets today. It was cute. Then she wanted Leah to join her. So we let them play in the baskets together, it was way cute. We were cleaning a lot today, and the house is looking cleaner, but it’s not quite there yet. We’ve got to clean the down stairs still. Maybe while we watch 24.