our life online
Twenty Week Appointment
Apr 26th
Today Jenni and I had the baby’s twenty week check up. I am happy to report that Mommy and baby are both doing great!
We had the ultrasound – you know, the ultrasound. The one where you can determine what flavor of kiddo you’re going to have. Much of the ultrasound had us looking at a little baby lying face down, rolled up in a ball, not wanting to wake up (already the baby takes after Jenni…)
The kiddo definitely didn’t want to roll over and was more than a little camera shy. After some jostling of Jenni’s tiny-tummy, we were able to get the baby to roll over for a pretty great shot.
All of the movement, different positions, finally got things turned around…
In the end, Jenni’s “need to know” was satisfied and we’re both really excited to meet her when she gets here.
Now, who wants to help me paint the room?
Need a Reason to Use Evolution Email? – Attachment Reminders
Mar 30th
Tonight I was cranking away on an email, extremely focused on making it sound as professional as possible. I was re-reading sentences, moving words around. When I was finally happy with what I had on the page, I hit send. What I forgot to do was attach the file I was writing about – oops. What this usually means is that I have to send a very unprofessional follow-up email saying “and here is the attachment” or something of that sort.
But tonight that didn’t happen. Tonight Evolution, the default mail client in Ubuntu 10.04, was looking out for me.
It had a pretty good idea of what I was doing and prevented me from having to send that very silly follow up email. I am a big fan of software that has my back. Congratulations, Evolution – you just moved up in my book.
Idiocracy In Progress
Mar 26th
No one likes tax time… And, yes this is another rant about how incredibly complicated and ridiculous the tax code in our country is…
So, Jenni and I recently moved out of the condo into our first conventional 3 bed, 2 bath ‘home’. We did this mainly because we want a family one day (one day is now mid-September 2010), but also because there was a carrot extended to us in the form of a housing stimulus tax credit. Or so we thought…
We thought we were qualified (as did our Realtor, Lender, everyone else we spoke with) for the long-term resident tax credit that was introduced with the expansion of the original bill. We were all wrong.
The Q and A below explains how we do not qualify (available here):
Q. I am a long-time resident and current homeowner and my spouse is a first-time homebuyer (has had no ownership interest in a principal residence during the three-year period ending on the date of purchase of a new principal residence) and we purchased a new principal residence. Can we qualify for either the first-time homebuyer credit or the long-time resident homebuyer credit if we purchase a new principal residence?
A. No. Both you and your spouse must be first-time homebuyers in order to qualify for the first-time homebuyer tax credit. Since you had an ownership interest in a principal residence during the three-year period ending on the date of purchase, neither you nor your spouse qualifies for the credit. Similarly, both you and your spouse must be long-time homeowners of the same previous principal residence in order to qualify for the long-time resident homebuyer credit. Since your spouse is not a long-time homeowner of your current principal residence, neither of you qualify for the credit. (12/14/09)
So, how did we miss this extremely important detail? I am not totally sure, but the “(12/14/09)” at the end of the explanation surely makes it look like this was added after the wheels were in motion on our purchase.
Okay – so it sucks. We are going to miss out on $6,500. Ouch.
What frustrates me the most though is after reading Form 5405 several times I can now say with a great deal of certainty that law makers hate married people. I now know that if I had divorced my wife the day before closing on our home, and we entered into that purchase as two, non-married people, we would have not only qualified, but we would have actually been eligible for $7,250 instead of $6500! I would have loved to put the extra $750 towards a great second honeymoon for use with Jenni when I happily married her again the day after our closing.
So, my extremely cynical advice to couples out there is to never marry – at least not legally. I am all for spiritual marriage; have a ceremony, exchange vows and rings, stay monogamous, raise a family together - but there are so many financial incentives to stay single just like the one mentioned above.
There are however exceptions to this rule. I think it is a great idea to legally marry in the following scenarios:
- Tax incentives: Your partner does not work and can be claimed as a dependent
- Health insurance: Your partner requires health insurance and your plan at work will only cover a spouse
So, basically we can sum those up into marry your partner when he or she isn’t working, then divorce when they are gainfully employed. Toggle back and forth to maximize your benefit.
Quick and Easy Multipage Tiffs in Ubuntu
Feb 6th
I have never really been a fan of the multipage tiff creation within xsane. It works okay when you are scanning a lot of paper that makes up a single document, but it is somewhat cumbersome when you just want to lay a big stack of paper on the scanner consisting of several single and multi-page documents, scan in the entire batch as single page files and then create your own multipage tiff files on the fly.
I have used tiffcp in the past to create multipage tiffs from the command line. However, what I wanted was something built into Nautilus so as I was reviewing large icons of the batch of paper I just scanned, I could simply select the ones that go together, right click, and create a multipage tiff from those files.
Installing nautilus-actions
To make this happen, I was going to need something that allowed me to customize my right click options in Nautilus. Some quick googling lead me to the nautilus-actions package. It provides a slick interface to build out custom actions for the right click menu, exactly what I wanted to do!
Setting up nautilus-actions
After installing, I navigated to System > Preferences > Nautilus Actions Configuration and added a new action called “Create Multipage TIFF”.
The next thing to do was to setup what I wanted this action to do using the Edit Action dialog. It is pretty easy to do as well. We specify the label, the tooltip, the command we want to use, and the additional options. Nautilus-actions provides a legend for passing various parameters that could be determined based on what is selected. For what I wanted to do, I simply needed a list of all the files I selected (%M) and the current working directory (%d). I decided I wanted my output naming convention to look something like, out-<filename of file I right clicked on>.tiff, so out-%f.tiff became my last parameter.
I think this next part is really cool. Nautilus-actions allows me to specify when I want this right click option to be available. This is great because I don’t want to see this option when I am not selecting multiple tiff images. To prevent this from happening, you can just click on the Conditions tab and build it out. For my use case, I wanted this to show up only when I selected multiple tiff images. I didn’t want to fuss with specifying multiple file extensions, so I decided to qualify on the mime type, image/tiff. Finally, I specified that this should work for only files, and checked the “Appears only if selection has multiple files or folders” checkbox.
The Result
After logging out and back in to restart Nautilus, I was ready to test. I found a directory with several tiff files that I wanted to merge, selected 2 of them and saw my beautiful, customized Nautilus action.
Thank you serveraxis.com!
Dec 3rd
So, here is the deal… I like to tinker. A lot.
Today during a discussion with my dear friend Nathan, we decided we needed to install byobu so we could configure and setup our virtual terminals with ease. Our server, however, was running Intrepid and there was no installation candidate. So, rather than take the easy route and add the PPA, we said “eff it, let’s upgrade”.
A sudo do-release-upgrade later, the upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty kicked off, finished great, rebooted, and we started the upgrade to Karmic goodness. Again, things were running smoothly, new packages were installed, and another reboot.
After the reboot, I got caught up with real work and totally forgot all about byobu, why we were upgrading, etc.
This is where serveraxis.com comes in, and the reason for this post. Before heading out that day, I checked my email one more time and saw an email from support@serveraxis.com about my VPS. They said it was not starting and recommended I take a look at it. I tried to ssh to it, and it was unresponsive, so it appeared very down indeed. I wrote them a quick email back asking if they had any recommendations, they said they would take a look.
During my commute home, I got another email from support about how they had located and corrected the kernel issue and that the VPS was operational again.
Here’s the deal. I looked and looked at several VPS providers, and even tried two others, before landing on serveraxis. I initially landed on them because the specs you got for the price were outstanding. What I didn’t realize I was getting was proactive support (they told me I had a problem before I realized it) and super speedy problem resolution.
For those of you out there nerdy enough to know what a VPS is and might consider getting your own little slice of the cloud, I hands down recommend checking out serveraxis.com.
Jordan’s Top Albums of 2008
Jan 19th
After a great deal of thought, the list is complete. I have never had an easier time identifying the albums that were in the top ten. That being said it was incredibly difficult to order the top 4. So, here they are…
10. Coldplay – Viva La Vida
9. Kings of Leon – Only By The Night
8. The Dodos – Vister
7. The Gaslight Anthem – The ‘59 Sound
6. The Walkmen – You & Me
5. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
4. TV on the Radio – Dear Science
3. Dr. Dog – Fate
2. Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
1. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
Honorable Mention:
Cold War Kids – Loyalty to Loyalty
I love the internet…
Mar 29th
During software development (especially with my outdated computer), you spend an incredible amount of time waiting for resources to build. This is especially true when the project you are working on is extremely reliant on another project undergoing very active development, but that is a story for another post…
While waiting, it is quite common to check out things on the web. I love the internet – I honestly don’t know how people worked 90 hour weeks in the past without it. While in the office today (a Saturday – so I really don’t feel guilty about browsing the web or making this post) I was pointed to Skeptoid: The Critical Analysis Podcast. It is hands down the coolest thing I have found today.
Skeptoid is the brain child of Brian Dunning, a person committed to debunking pseudoscience via podcast. He is quite entertaining to listen to, and raises some great questions (which he encourages you to think about/research for yourself) regarding many of the buzzwords, trends, and fads floating around today.
Some of my favorites so far include:
- Organic Food Myths [Listen]
- The Terror of Nuclear Power [Listen]
- Super Sized Fast Food Phobia [Listen]
- MonaVie and Other “Superfruit” Juices [Listen]
I sincerely encourage anyone to take a few minutes and find some favorites of your own. After only listening to a few, I am already beginning to think twice about some of the things I do without questioning. To me, that is really great thing.
Happy critical thinking!
Rockhurst Commencement
Mar 11th
May 17th, 2008 is the date set for the Rockhurst University graduation ceremony. Full details can be found here. The ceremony will take place at Municipal Auditorium, conveniently located near our place and the awesome new Power and Light District.
I would anticipate some sort of party afterwards. Keep your eyes peeled for more details or an invitation.
Meet Max and Mable
Feb 10th
precious dogs
We’d like to introduce you to the newest members of our family…Max and Mable Miller! We just got them last night from Land of Paws in Prairie Village, and we’re so excited to welcome them home. M&M are “Westie Poos” (mix breed of West Highland Terriers and Poodle) and they are eight weeks old.
We have really missed having a dog around the condo ever since Pudge passed, and though it was hard to decide when and we needed some time to grieve, we both started getting dog fever this week and felt the time was right. We didn’t plan to come home with two bundles of energy, however when we saw them we fell in love and once we realized they were brother and sister, we knew it was a package deal. They have been very good so far. They slept together in their crate last night and made it through the whole night with no accidents and no crying! We love them a lot.
We greatly miss Pudge Dog and he will forever hold a special place in both of our hearts, but we know he would like these little guys and want us to have dogs in the family again. We can’t wait for you all to meet them in person – they’ll melt your heart! 
A Sense of Progress
Dec 9th
This December marks the culmination of two and a half years of work for my mother and for me.
She was one of 39 who recently graduated from the NSDC Academy for Staff Developers (Click here for full article), an organization which seeks to provide the tools and knowledge for professional learning within an organization in order to improve student learning. Please send her an email to congratulate her and find out what she is going to be doing with her newfound free time.
I have just wrapped up my last semester at Rockhurst University to complete my MBA. Not having to consider class schedules, assignments, and tests when juggling my personal and professional obligations is a huge relief. This Christmas season will be a great opportunity to relax and recharge with family (especially Baby Jack!) and enjoy the new ’space’ in my life. I most look forward to spending a *lot* more time with Jenni, she has been such trooper!
If you would like to congratulate me on my achievement, please leave a comment, send me an email, or consider spreading the light of education to the rest of the world by giving to either (or both!) of the following non-profit organizations:
Here’s to a commitment of lifelong learning and the never ending process of becoming!