File this under things I thought I’d never say.
Clothing belongs in one of three places: on your body, the laundry, or folded up and put away.
Category: Daily Life
Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.
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Doug’s Mantras
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Sunday – Coding
Last night, Cathy and I joined friends in celebrating a good friend’s birthday. It was a lovely celebration in a Knoxville (Fountain City actually) landmark. The evening was a welcome break from bits and bytes. I even allowed myself to sleep in something morning. Now 9:30 am, I must return to programming.
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Day of Coding
I’ve been wrapping on the keys since 6am. I need a break from this 8 hours of coding. Doing something to make the wife happy then back to code.
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From the mouths of babes
Evan, 4.5 years old seeing the food I just prepared: "Eggs!"
Me: "Do you want toast with your eggs?"
Evan: "Yeah!! What’s toast?" -
How cold is it?
It’s so cold that my lip froze to my coffee mug while waiting at the bus stop with Amy.
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Brrrrrrr
It’s 69°F (that’s 20.5°C to the rest of the whole) inside the house and probably 10 degrees colder in the basement. That’s with the emergency heat on and the thermostat set to 75"F (23.8°C). I can’t use the woodstove because 1) it needs to be cleaned, 2) Tommy now lives in that room and has piled stuff all over the stove, and 3) I haven’t put the fireboard up on a wall I built near it. That stove used to heat this house in the winter. I really need new windows and to re-insulate the walls and attic.
*temperature conversion by OnlineConversion.com.
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The Magento Headache
I’ve had 3 people ask if I could support Magento, the open source e-commerce application that is the current rage. It is good for midsized businesses. According to today’s reading, small sized operations are better off with a different application as the complexity of customizations and updates on Magento are more costly than a small operation should consider. I can attest that Magento is a pain to configure. What seemed like should have been a quick infusion of data into a database and a simple installation process including a config file or two and this thing should be running. No, never that simple. I allotted two hours today to install and evaluate Magento. Instead, I reached the end of the day with my head throbbing; eyes tired, red and watery; and nerves on edge resulting in an undeserved burst of anger on Noah. I’ve read dozens of tech articles, forums, and blogs, and tried installing Magento on my dev server as well as my shared hosting server. Both simply return a "500 Internal Server Error." I have not exhausted my efforts and still feel I need to know Magento. I will get it installed!
Update: I ran the Magento server check script and found my hosted server at 1and1 meets the requirements for Magento and my development server is lacking one component. Coincidentally, the magento-check.php file produced a 500 Internal Server Error on both the dev server and the hosted server until I renamed the .htaccess to something else. It would appear there is a problem in the .htaccess. This should be easy to troubleshoot now.
Update 2: My error logs indicate "DirectoryIndex not allowed here" The Magento forums suggest altering httpd.conf to have "AllowOverride All"
Update 3: This barebones guide to installing Magento at 1and1 helped.
Update 4: Success! I now have a demo installation of Magento running. This will lead to many good things. -
And he vanished…
I read something today which almost prompted me to try to delete my online identity. I guess one would call that virtual suicide.
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State of Me
Wait a minute! What’s this under my feet? A sandbar! In the middle of the ocean! Okay, yes, the tide is rising. Quickly. But for the moment, however brief, my head is above the water without me having to kick my legs in a frantic panic.
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Dorm Room Flashback
The in-laws must be cleaning out their garage. The children brought home a huge box of highlighters. So I started thinking, "What could one do with so many highlighters?" Then I remembered Clement Hall room 308 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. That was my room. The walls were the color of an 80s computer that had been used too long. Dingy. Gray. Like a light but wet modeling clay. And the walls were cinder block.
A fun trick for the frequent traveler who stays in hotels a lot is to leave a message on the bathroom mirror using a light application of chap stick or other oil. Done correctly, the message remains invisible until a hot shower steams the mirror.
Highlighters on cinder block painted in that gray color work the same. Draw the highlighter art by turning off the normal lights and turning on black lights. The art in room 308 was quite intricate when my friends and I were done. When the black lights are turned off and the normal lights turned on, the highlighter disappears. Turn the black lights on and feel like you stepped into a Jimmy Hendrix black light poster.
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And the rugged got pulled out…
Have you ever been building up to make that leap? You know, the leap of faith. The one where you commit your whole self even though you aren’t sure you should but you do anyway and you are ready to put your all into it. And all the while you are gearing up to make the jump, someone else runs past you and just does it. It’s kinda like that. But that’s okay.
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Those dreaded in-laws!
I’ve never understood the stereo type of the spouse having to despise the in-laws. My in-laws are awesome! How great are they? Well, thanks to the in-laws, tonight we dined upon a delicious, succulent London broil.
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The noose
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