Musings of an Engineer

Wedding time is closing in upon us. After being engaged for 607 days, it’s about time it happened.

Both Debra and I are hard at work creating things for all the details of the wedding. She’s making centerpieces from fake flowers and wine bottles (Picture to be added); I’m making signs in Adobe Illustrator. It’s crazy chaotic, but really fun and exciting in the process.

So now that we’re in the home stretch, it’s good to know that eventually we’ll have to “put down the metaphorical pencil” and finally be finished. I think, for the most part, everything is coming together pretty nicely. There’s no major issues, at the moment, that are in need of solution.

Below are the excerpts from our travel journal for our trip to NYC.

Click on any of the photos or here to see the whole photo album.

Day One:

We were plenty early at CAK, almost too early. Thankfully the flight and flight crew were ready to get the plane moving, everyone was boarded and we left earlier than scheduled.

We arrived early at Laguardia. We caught the bus to the subway station and were able to check into the hotel when we arrived. We went to go grab some breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien and suddenly the cops showed up and started banging on one of the bathroom doors. After quite a few bangs followed by “it’s the police, open the door”, a young couple emerged. The girl looked completely oblivious to the happenings around her. The boy was talking with the cops for a bit before they all four left the restaurant. I overheard the waitstaff stating that the boy had told the cops that he had flushed the drugs. A great introduction to life in NYC.

Back in August I made an impulse buy, the Fuji X100S. After chatting with the guy at the camera store for a little while, he told me the rumors were Fuji was releasing another camera soon, the X100T. I promptly returned the X100S, waited a week, and preordered the X100T.

I’ve taken around 200 shots with it, some fair and some really not good. I’m still feeling my way around on a proper camera. The last camera I owned was a SD900, which was a replacement for my SD100 that had broken. Hardly impressive by smartphone cameras these days.

To Debra: “We go together like peanut butter and onions. You’re the peanut butter and I’m the onions, because I make little bitches cry.”
-Tom

“OH BABY A TRIPLE”, ok maybe not quite, but it was a double kill.

I was headed to work yesterday, and some woman in a Minivan decided to pull out of a gas station, turning left across three lanes (one was a turn lane, the diagram isn’t quite correct) of traffic to smash into my car in the fourth, the farthest from her point of origin. See the diagram below:

A few months ago, the Meggitt corporate IT put a tighter polity in place for non-work related uses of the internet. No more personal email, no more Imgur, no more Dropbox and, saddest of all, no more Spotify. So, I’ve had to resort to a different method of streaming, mainly from my iPhone.

Unfortunately with the advent of the new and improved, all digital lightning cable, Apple has left the Line-Out functionality out of the picture. This is really unfortunate, as the only easy way to get audio out of the device is using the amp’d headphone output.

The weather is changing again, almost time to end another year. The temperature during the day is trending towards the lower end of the spectrum. I’m going to miss the temperate days, but I guess that’s part of living here with all of the four seasons.

On that note, I started a 365 Project for photography. One photo, every day, for a year. I’m trying to stick to a “no food” rule, but I just broke that one today.

CSS, Javascript, Handlebars, HTML, ZOMG, etc…

So many things involved in web development, I’m kind of glad that it isn’t my day job. Trying to get all the elements in a page to line up and play nice. Checking the layout on different platforms. Testing performance on various devices. Damn man, talk about complicated.

When I first started tweaking this template, I thought it would end with me in a rage induced fit. Fortunately, it’s worked out OK, but I’m sure I’ll tweak it later.

So much has happened since my last post and a lot of things were left out of my post from when I started the blog. Four years ago was the last time I wrote about anything life releated. Let’s start with a quick bulleted list, ordered by significance.

• Engaged to Debra
• Planning wedding for June 2015
• Living in apartment with Deb and a little orange tabby
• Completed various projects (which need to be documented!)
• Went to PAX East twice
• Traveled to Canada more times in the last 2 years than all of my life (4x for buisness, 2x for pleasure)
• Migrated the blog to a more reliable/faster machine
• Working at Meggitt full-time as CSeries Lead Software Engineer for the Brake Control System

I’m sure there are other things that just aren’t coming to mind, but there’s been a lot of changes in four years. This year and last specifically though, have been milestone years. Friends/co-workers having babies, buying homes, traveling the world and starting families. Not necessarily all of those, but that’s the gist. I’m getting excited for the future though, as each day passes we’re closer to being debt free and can live a bit more comfortably.

Wow… Cascading Style Sheets are complex.

I never properly learned or understood how CSS works in larger quantities than just a few lines. Sure I understand the piece parts, but put them together in a huge file, along with other files, throw some HTML in there and wow, I’m lost.

That being said, I think I’ve fiddled enough with the style sheets of the template that I’m using to be happy. Gone are the days where you only looked at a site on a PC in a few browsers and checked it at different resolutions. Now it has to work on mobile platforms too. I don’t even own an Android device, so I have no idea how it looks there. Hopefully if they render like Chrome does on the PC, it should be OK.