Newer Remote

01.10.2015

In August I dug out an old (2008) universal remote to replace an even older (2007) remote that had finally died, or at least died enough that it was more of a pain to use than I was willing to tolerate. Right before Christmas, both that (2008) remote and the even newer (2009) version of the old (2007) remote stopped cooperating.

I guess 6-9 years is a good life for a universal remote? I liked my remotes, mainly the convenience of being able to program them online versus fumbling with codes on the remote that may or may not work. While I'm sure there are plenty of remotes that can be programmed this way these days, I tend to stick with what I know, so I went to the Logitech site to see what remotes they now offered.

My remotes were long out of production, but they still fetch a premium price on eBay. My Logitech 880 (the 2007 and 2009 remotes) were listed above $200. That makes me feel like I got my money's worth out of my original purchase! But I want a new remote. Having looked at the options, I decided on the Harmony One Ultimate. Having looked at the price, I thought about it some more.

Enter eBay. One of my original Logitech remotes was a refurbished model I bought through eBay. I scouted and saw similar deals for the Harmony One. Even better, one of the sellers was Newegg.com, who I've dealt with before. Refurbs are substantially cheaper and the warranty they offered made it worth the risk, so I placed an order and began to wait patiently for my parcel to arrive.

Arrive it did! I plugged the remote into the PC and set everything up. The interface is simpler than what I'm used to - most of the options/buttons that I'm used to are gone. I set up my main activities on the living room and bedroom tvs and I was off to the races.

The only option(s) I miss so far are customizing the order in which button/features appear. The is countered with how much better the one-touch activities are handled (I always had to switch between devices on the old remote when changing volume and watching a movie, but I think I just never set it up correctly).

Now to see if this one will last until 2022.


random

68

01.05.2015

Today would have been Mom's 68th birthday. Or is her 68th birthday, depending on whether or not you're supposed to keep counting after someone dies. I decided to keep counting for Mom. Since I keep talking to her it's only fair that she gets to keep her birthdays.

It's not a "crazy person at Wal-Mart listening to voices telling them what to do" talk, it's just talking to her like I used to. 2 weeks ago I had a nice chat with her while I was going for my (what has turned into a weekend-) morning walk. Granted, her side was pretty, but I enjoyed catching her up. Plus it helped to motivate my walk.

I would worry about doing this except for a few things. I enjoy it, as it keeps Mom close in my mind (and my heart) even after all these years. I'm a Momma's boy, so that's important to me in the long run. Jerry told me he's been thinking about his Dad more than normal lately - it's the time of year when we both recollect about our missed parents - so I'm not alone in my weirdness. The most important reason I don't worry about this though, is because I don't care if it's odd or weird. It makes me feel good, with one of those warm, fuzzy feelings that we used to always hear about when I was growing up.

So happy birthday Mom. I still miss you. I'll always love you. I'll talk to you in a little bit.


mom

Pee Ess For

12.29.2014

Way back in 2001 I wanted a PlayStation 2 for Christmas. I wanted it because the new wrestling game that came out was not being published available for the plain old PlayStation that I had. This was the year I bought my house, so I didn't have the disposable income for a PS2, or the game.

Enter sweet, lovable Gina who got me both the PS2 and the game that I wanted. She had sworn after getting Jacob his last gaming console that she would never buy another one, and then lo and behold I talked/guilted her into it.

In the years since I've played many a PS2 game, and when the next generation of gaming consoles came out I opted to go the route of the XBox 360 instead of PlayStation 3. It didn't make much of a difference as most games were finallly being released for both platforms. Last year when the XBox One and PlayStation 4 were released I didn't pay a lot of attention as my game playing had come down to 90% Grand Theft Auto and 10% Wrestling.

The Xbox One/PS4 version of Grand Theft Auto came out a month ago and Jacob was telling me how much better the graphics were and that they added some extra online content. He decided the PS4 version had a little better graphics. I admit, it made me want to upgrade, but that was a lot of money for what I basically play 1 game on.

This Christmas was a gift card-centric Christmas thanks to Gina deciding to make it easier. I liked the idea, so I loaded up with some gift cards and regular cards to hide the gift cards in. Jacob & Megan when the traditional route with real presents, wrapped and in boxes. What's wrong with these kids? When I opened my present from Jacob I knew what was wrong. My box was too big. And it had another box inside of it. A PS4 box. An unopened PS4 box with a PS4 in it.

The little shit got bought me a PS4 for Christmas.

All kinds of things went through my head at roughly the same time.

After that I quickly thought about the PS2 Gina got me years before. I skipped the PS3 and now Jacob got me the PS4. It seems that when the PS6 comes out sometime after 2028 it'll be their turn to get it for me.

Now I have to schedule time to get sucked into playing the prettier version of GTA.


video games

Work Week 1.5

12.21.2014

Thus far I've been working a week and a half at Dealnews. My contribution has consisted of the following code being rolled into production:

&& !Browser::is_mobile()

A month ago I didn't even know the above was a valid way of referencing a PHP method. I've been writing PHP since ~2001. Granted, I've never gotten deep into PHP objects and how to properly use them. I knew a big part of this job would be learning both the right way to do things I've taken for granted once I learned a way that worked, as well as how many different ways something works now versus how I hacked something together back in 2001.

But after a week and a half I've managed 22 characters of usable code. That will humble you when you're a senior level programmer with 15+ years of experience.

Most of my past week has been navigating existing code a learning where things are done & then how they're done. To add to my humbling, I've been ramping up on the Yahoo JavaScript library that they use, which has loads more depth that the simple JavaScript I can claim to know.

My saving grace for what seems to be my slow development progress is that I'm touching lots of different places with my code. Multiple databases, JavaScript, PHP, some CSS. I'm over thinking my task, which is a combination of not wanting to break anything along with poking around where this code is touched to see how it works over there, and then over there.

All of that experience I'm supposed to have tends to get me to think of the big picture, so instead of excitedly typing away at what I've been assigned I instead poke around and see what all might break if I started blindly typing. That's led me to 2 big "what if" questions so far that have hopefully kept me from doing something stupid. I hate doing something stupid.

With any luck I can wrap up my little over-thought task before Christmas. If I knew what I was doing it would take a couple of hours to get everything coded and working instead of the 2 weeks I seem to be taking. But I can be sure that this little bad boy is going to work like a charm once I claim to be done with it.


programming/interweb

DealNews Day 1

12.10.2014

Today was day 1 of employment at DealNews, my first job with a commercial (non-government contracted) job since 2003. I was ready for a non-government contracted job, at least in spirit. Today was not a typical sit around filling out paperwork and reading day. Today was instead a hands-on, this is how things work day. The job description advertises that you'll likely roll out code to the production site on your first day, and that's just what happened. Granted, the code consisted of 2 lines that I basically copied from another file, but the meat of this was learning the process by which to to make the change, commit the file(s), and have everything smoothly go live.

Smoothly may not have been the best word choice, but nothing broke on the live site!

The hard part of this job, at least from my first-day perspective, will be getting used to navigating using a Mac and running command line Linux again. For the first time since 1997 I ran vi to edit a file and after a couple of foggy attempts at how to enable editing the text file and saving changes, I slowly remembered a couple of commands. Granted, I'll seldom use vi, but I had to edit a 4-line file on a server that I'm not real sure how I was connected, so my gui options for getting to the file were limited.

I'll most likely forget a lot of what I learned today by the time I wake up. Instead of taking the detailed notes that I enjoy referring back to, I was instead following along and blindly typing to keep up most of the time. near the end of the afternoon things slowed down enough I could ask my stupid questions about how some things worked, and those answers will likely keep a little longer. Still, I took in a whooooole lot of info today.

I liked today though. It was a long day (I haven't worked a 8-9 hour work day in a long time!), but I enjoyed it. More importantly, I'm looking forward to going back in the morning.

I've gotta fit in some note taking so I can remember more of this stuff though.


programming/interweb

Blog Archive

As always, correct spelling is optional in any blog entry. Keep in mind that any links more than a year old may not be active, especially the ones pointing back to Russellmania (I like to move things around!).

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