Picked up this Stealth Gear holster and SOE Gear belt. Love them both. The holster is super comfortable and the belt holds it up great.

I kept my Dell laptop while I was using my MacBook for the past nine months. The last distro I put on it before switching to the Mac was Fedora. It’s a bit different from the Debian distro’s I was using before, but it has the best support for the latest Gnome desktop and software that I use. In the time I was on my Mac the Linux system ran great. No problems at all.

Last week my contract ended with MortarStone and I’m still a few thousand shy of paying my taxes. Since my Linux system has run fine I’ve decided to sell off my Mac to help pay the government theft of my hard-earned money. Also I don’t have another contract lined up yet.

So I’m back on Fedora GNU Linux.

After a quick upgrade to Fedora 23 and I’m off to the races. I’ve gotta say, I’m glad I’m back. Fedora is running perfectly. Everything works great so far. It has all the latest software that I use like Passenger, Nginx, Atom, and so on. I also found this really cool new email client called N1. I just need to get used to the keyboard again now.

Gotta get back to tweaking my OS for my next endeavor. I’m hoping to start my own project this time around, but when you don’t have any money because the government likes to take it makes it hard to do six months without a paycheck.

Picked up this sweet S&W M&P Shield 9mm pistol the other day and got my Kydex holster for it. It’s a nice little setup. Works well.

Well. I’m back on a Mac Book Pro after three years on Linux. Finally got tired of fighting with Linux trying to keep it working correctly. Even when I had it “working” there were still problems. Like full screen video would tweak the display, tool-tips were corrupted, and that stupid authentication box popping up a few times a day that did nothing.

Recently my Linux system was just locking up all the time. Not sure if it was OS or hardware but I was at my last care given. I was just over the constant battle to keep it running.

I spent 10 years on Apple and hardly had any problems on their platform. The only reason why I left was the Apple lock in that was happening. Now that there is competition that doesn’t seem to be a problem as much anymore.

So, I went down the to Apple store and purchased a new Mac Book Pro with Retna, 16gb ram, and a 3.1GHz processor. It has way more SSD than I need but that’s fine.

It took a few days to get everything installed that I needed on it. My development tools, Rails, databases, PHP+WordPress, all that usual stuff. I’m a bit behind on work but I think now that I’m not messing with my computer I can actually get something done for once.

So here I am. Back on the Apple wagon. Hope it works for me.

I installed Debian Jessie a while back because I was totally sick of Ubuntu and it’s every-upgrade-breaks-stuff. I was sick of video card problems mostly. It would never save my screen setup. And it started corrupting my wallpaper after waking up from sleep. Annoying.

So I installed Debian and everything was working well. I did run into a few video card problems mainly with full screen videos (YouTube, Netflix, Hulu). This is my TV as well as my computer.

So I switched to Gnome-Wayland and that fixed it right up. The problems were gone for the most part. Fonts were a bit weird but I could live with them.

So I was working away yesterday and then suddenly out of the blue my screen locks up. After fooling with it for a bit I found that it’s my OS that’s locked up. And I had a bunch of work that wasn’t committed yet.

So I hard boot the system thinking that everything will come back up and I can start working again. Nope. I would get the GDM log in but I could not log in. It would act like it was then it would just return back to the GDM. I did no updates or anything. This was totally out of the blue.

So I try switching back to Gnome on X11. Nope. Same thing. Would not work.

I’ve had it with Debian and its no-propitiatory-software BS. It was a pain to install Google Chrome so I could watch Netflix. So I’m done.

I download ARCH Linux to try. Boot off my USB drive and it boots to a shell prompt. No installer! What the.

Well while I’m here I’ll mount the main drive and back up some work to my backup drive. I do that then I go to the docs to figure out how to install this thing.

This is not an easy system to install. You basically have to do everything manually at the shell. I get a bootable system but no network. Another hour I have bootable and networking. Then I install Gnome and my tools. Then Google Chrome…. PITA. I’ve had it. Nope, do not like.

I just want a system that I can use to do my work and not have to mess with to make it work. And no, I don’t want to run Windows or Mac and be locked into their BS.

Back 15 years ago when I ran Linux it seems like it ran a lot better than it does today. I never had problems with updates or video cards. Everything just worked. But anyway…

I download Fedora 21 to try.

I haven’t liked RedHat distro since I switched back to Debian way back in 1996 or 97. RPM was horrible and always had dependency problems. Then they went all enterprise and corporate.

The install was beautiful! Even the boot screen was really nice. It was a little weird picking the install drive but the rest was fine. It was super fast too. Way faster than any other distro. I was up and running on a bootable system in no time. And it looked great.

After copying a bunch of stuff over until wee hours of the morning I finally noticed I had a bunch of updates to do. So I ran those and it actually improved the system.

After doing the updates the font rendering was super nice and everything seems fine.

So, here I am on a Fedora system. So far so good. Two days later I have all my stuff installed and my work environment setup.

A few things got me messed up like my copied rbenv from my old system wasn’t compatible with the new. Had to recompile all my Rubies and gems. Only took a few hours to figure out that I had some ruby stuff breaking everything in my ~/bin dir. But for the most part everything is almost back to normal.

We will see in a few weeks if things stay good. I’ll let you know.

Today was my last day at Brasher's Auto Auctions. It was a great ride. Learned a lot of things. Now I'm moving on.

While I was at Brasher's I designed a pretty neat auction system using Ruby on Rails. The concept for the lanes in the bid client are very unique. I haven't seen it done anywhere else. I came up with the idea a long time ago with David Gehring. Finally got to build it while working at Brasher's.

I also learned Angular.js while working for Brasher's. Their team was using it for their back-end tools and turned me onto it for my stuff. It worked great for my auction client. So well that I rewrote the app again with Angular front ends and a Rails API back-end. It improved things a lot.

After moving on from the auction app I started working with their team in Windows and ASP.NET. I was actually using Windows 8.1 if you can believe it. Something that you would never see me do in a million years. LOL. Yep, I was using Visual Studio and everything. It was different I can say for sure. It wasn't really too bad either. After figuring out C# and how everything works it's just MVC. The syntax wasn't too bad. Compiling was hard to get used to. The editor was a bear to use.

Tomorrow I ship my monster workstation back to them to be recycled to another employee. It was a really good system. Wish I had the money to keep it. But I have bills to pay.

So now I'm back on my Dell XPS 13 running Debian Linux. Just finished up re-installing everything and getting it ready for development again. I had used it for Netflix for the past few months.

For a few years now I’ve had problems with my furnace blower cycling on and off when it’s really cold out. Usually at night it would do it when I have my house set to 64 degrees. When I had it set above 70 it would work fine.

First I replaced the top plenum sensor being the only one I could find. That didn’t fix it. Later I thought it had something to do with my filters being too thick. So I replaced them with thinner ones. It seemed to help but when it got colder outside it started up again.

Finally this year I decided to fix it once and for all. So I opened things up and found the limit switches. There are two of them on my furnace. One is the high limit for shutting down the heat if it gets too hot. The other is to control the blower motor. First I figured that they just needed replacements. So I purchased replacements for them. It didn’t help. In fact it got worse.

This is when I started to really research this problem. The way the limit switch works is that when the flame comes on and heats up the plenum then the switch will turn on the blower. When the flame goes off the plenum cools down and the switch turns the blower off. There are different temperatures for the switches. There is a high temp that is for turning on and a low temp for turning off. My furnace had a 115/20 switch. That means it turns on the blower at 115 and turns it off 20 degrees below that. So 115 on 95 off. The new replacement switch I got was 120/20. 120 on and 100 off. And the new switch made it worse.

This is when I realized what was happening. The heat would build up to 120 then the blower would turn on. My house was 64 and that cold air would enter and cool the plenum down under the turn off temp. What I needed was a lower temp switch.

So I purchased a 100/20 and that was a problem in the other direction. The blower wouldn’t turn off now. I guess it’s too close to 100 degrees in the plenum normally. So then I found an adjustable switch. It was about $15 but it was worth it to save in fuel and electricity.

I put the adjustable switch in and set it for 110/20. That night it still had the problem so I turned it down until it worked. Finally ended up close to 105/20 on the switch and it’s been working out great!

I’m posting this because there wasn’t many answers on the internet when I was searching for this problem. Lots of people have the problem but nobody posted any solutions (other than call a professional). So if you are having the same problem then pick up an adjustable limit switch and go for it. Also, many other furnaces already have an adjustable switch. Mine did not.

Update – 2015-02-12:

My fancy adjustable fan switch stopped working. Lame. Woke up in the morning with the fan cycling over and over. Turned it up and that kinda fixed it but now it’s doing the cycling when it’s cold again. So I ordered another switch that has a 30 degree difference. So it’s a 115/30. I think the problem is the difference span is too small. We will see.

For about six months now I’ve worked in a few other programming languages. Played a little in Go, and a lot in ASP.NET/C# for work.

Go is a pretty neat language. I like how simple it is. I really like that you can compile a binary, deploy it to a server, and run it. Really simple. It also compiles really, really fast. Fantastically fast.

I’ve only done a little bit in Go and I hope to do more in the future. I think it would be really great for an API behind an Angular or other type of JavaScript web app.

Now ASP.NET and C#.

First problem I have with it is that I have to run Windows. As you guys probably know I’m not a fan of the Windows operating system. I used Windows 1, 2, and 3 way back in the day. But soon as OS/2 came out I was done with Windows. After that I went to Linux in 1995. I haven’t looked back at Windows since. Although I did do a 10 year stint on Mac OS X. It was great at first, but that’s a whole other story.

Second problem is that I’m working on an old code base that has mutated over the years to its current state. C# isn’t too bad, but learning it while Shaving Yaks isn’t the ideal way to appreciate a language. I love my co-workers (if you’re reading this) and I understand how the cruft builds up when you aren’t given time to go back and tidy up.

I’m starting to understand Visual Studio a little but there is a lot of hidden switches in there. I’m not a fan. I’ve done most of my work in Sublime Text 3 just because I’m more used to how the editor works. Of course it works differently on Windows. And there is Resharper for Visual Studio that gives you a lot of goodness. It’s just too bad the IDE feels so clunky and slow.

Recently I got the chance to do some work in my old pal Ruby on Rails. I have to tell ya it’s a world of difference. It’s so easy to spin up a project. Even easy to spin up an existing project. And the language is so nice to use. It is nice to get back to interpreted vs compiled. No more waiting for the app to compile before I can see stuff in the browser. Although I do wish there was the option to compile Ruby into a binary.

I’m looking forward to doing some more work in Ruby on Rails. I do enjoy it very much.

During Christmas the topic of crock-pots came up. It was mentioned that I could have a crock pot and a few days later I picked it up.

I went online to find some beef stew recipes and start my adventures into crock-pot cooking.

I found a few and made a shopping list. Picked up some stew meat, potatoes, onions, celery, carrots, and a few other items.

I was going to start on the stew yesterday but I was invited out so I waited until today. I woke up this morning thinking about stew. Went into the kitchen and started getting things ready. Of course by then I had my morning meeting for work.

After the meeting I went back in to get started. Chopped everything up. Put the meat into a bowl and added some oil, seasonings, flour, mixed it up real good and put it on the griddle to brown. Then I put all my vegetables in the bowl and mixed them up with some seasonings. Once the steak was browned I put that into the bowl and mixed it all up again.

Then I put everything into the crock-pot and poured a can of beef broth in with it all. Turned it on low and put the cover on.

Right away the smell was wonderful. But I had around 8 hours to wait for it to cook. So back to work I went thinking about stew for dinner the rest of the day. 😉

Every once in a while I would come out of my office and get a whiff of that awesome crock-pot stew smell. Every hour I was getting more and more hungry for stew. While I did my workouts, while I got some water, after I came back in from the mailbox (btw it’s a holiday, no mail). I can’t wait to chow into this stew.

The best thing is that I only used half the ingredients for this batch. So after cooking this pot I’m going to cook another tomorrow. Excellent!

Once the stew was done and I had just finished my work day I went in a dished up a bowl. It was pretty good but needed just a little more salt and a little more spice. That was easy to fix though. Next batch I make I’ll add more ahead of time.

Now I just need to not eat too much! Already had two bowls and there is probably two more bowls left. Got to save it for tomorrow. So…full…

Part of my new years resolutions is to working out consistently. I started to do it last year but stopped after having some elbow issues. Well, I still have the issues and I don't think there is anything I can do about it. So I'm just going to ignore it and hope it goes away. There is no pain, just strange sounds.

So I've started back on the 10x 30 day challenge. This is where you start of doing 10 reps of something. Then the next day do 20, then 30, until the end of the month you are doing 300. It's was pretty good when we did it last year. I felt really good when I was up to 300 a day. My plan is to settle into around 100 a day and take it all the way to the end of the year.

Last year I did the challenge with friends. We only did sit-ups and push-ups. But this time I'm taking it to the next level and adding weight lifting to it.

• 10x Bicycle Crunches


• 10x Dips and/or Skull Crushers


• 10x Push-Ups and/or Bench Presses


• 10x Curls with barbel and/or dumbbell


• 10x Squats with weight and/or another leg exercise