Author Archives: docwhat

Cathy Ferguson

I had this idea of this huge post I’d write about how I went about getting a house and the paperwork and all that stuff.
Well, it turns out I really don’t want to write that. Instead, I’m going to write about one of the people that I can really recommend; Cathy Ferguson our “mortgage [...]

Bang! Bang!

So, me and my wife got home from Ikea with a new Billy bookshelf for the dinning room (aka, book room #2 — book room #1 is the living room). We lucked out and found a spot nearly in front of our house, right on the outside of the curve that our house in [...]

No Laptop

My laptop has died a horrible death and I’m not happy about it. I bought it about 3 years ago from Linux Certified, way back when Linux laptops was a novel concept.
Currently, it just flat out won’t power up. There is power from the power cord (checked it with a multi-meter), but the [...]

First House!

So, I haven’t been blogging much lately. Part of the reason is that Robin and I have been working on buying a new house.
This is very stressful and scary. We’re almost done. We close on November 16th. I plan on blogging about the people and companies that provide excellent service during [...]

Weil McLain

So, I’m trying to find out how old a boiler is. It’s in a house that I made an offer on and I want to know how old it is and any other information that would be helpful.
When I viewed the house, I took a photo of the model information so I could look [...]

GTD and Mutt

I found this article about Getting things done with mutt. It talks about using the the techniques from David Allen’s productivity book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity“. I’ve been reading GTD for a week now (taking my time, you know) and think it’s pretty interesting.
Since Mutt is my favorite email [...]

Amazon Christ!

Amazon redesigned their web-site, shrinking my name even more than previously…

Ciao!

It’s All Text! v0.8.0

I have just released version 0.8.0 of “It’s All Text!“, the Firefox extension that answers the age old question, “What happens when you give a yo-yo to a flock of flamingoes?”1
New Features

HX-20

I was walking through Squirrel Hill today with Robin and my Dad. There was a house with some junk on their porch and a sign saying, “For sale. $1 each.” I looked through the stuff and found an Epson HX-20!
Oh. My. Gawd!
When I was in High School a guy named Randy had a [...]

Mashups and JavaScript Security

I found this excellent video of Douglas Crockford (discoverer of JSON) talking about the security problems inherent in Mashups and of JavaScript as a whole.
He proposes a solution involving what he calls vats; a self contained JavaScript interpreter with limited communication to the page. The JavaScript in the page would be the only trusted [...]

Wordpress User-Agent

Well, I just got a nasty shock!
I got in at the tail end of a thread about the new update notification feature in WordPress 2.3.
One of the comments I read kept ricocheting around in my head. Matt Mullenweg said something about the dashboard RSS feeds transmitting my blog URL. I thought, initially, [...]

Site Redesign

I have redesigned my whole site. While a lot changes are visual, there are even more changes in the way the unseen back-end parts have changed.
Previously, I had a modified copy of the default WP 2.x theme (which is based on Kubric theme). It was reasonable markup, but I spent a lot of [...]