A few days of extended work hours at the day job has messed up my schedule a bit. I wasn’t able to get as many things accomplished as I had hoped, but I did make some progress. We’re back on track now, though. I’m writing a small import utility in PowerShell with a XAML UI. The software ingests Excel files and adds entries to a database. I’m running into an odd roadblock today where the specific Commandlet that performs the import is not able to properly latch into the Excel file and read its data. I need to get this tool ready before tomorrow, so this issue is really slowing me down. I'll be in the day job's office all day tomorrow, so my weekend won't see many more personal projects completed. The wooden boxes for my geeky collection of items have arrived and they’re great. They’re raw wood (sanded,...
Category: Development
Buildup to PCB
Now that the Weather Station ISD prototype is breadboarded and working, I've decided to start designing v1.0 of the printed circuit board. The Fritzing drawing, and schematic are complete. These will be used as reference for transferring into Eagle. Weather Station ISD Fritzing drawing.Weather Station ISD Fritzing schematic.Weather Station ISD Fritzing part design (Illustrator). All new work was added to the internal GitLab server with commit SHA fad61e9e.
New PC
I've finally had time to build out my new PC, and I'm writing this from it. It's really nice to have such a fast machine. I think I'll end up being a lot more productive in the long run. Most of my day-to-day software has been installed. Dev tools, 3D printing software, and games are still pending (well, I did install Minecraft and tested it - wow!). A nice side-effect of building the new computer is that I've been able to clean up the office a lot. All of the boxes are now gone and my desk is no longer an assembly area anymore. We're on day 3 of the Monte Carlo seeds in the aquarium. Still no visible germination. I ordered some Dewalt folding workbenches to augment the workspace in the garage. I think these will help m a lot with some upcoming projects. Speaking of garage, I'm going...
Lots of Digging
It's been quite a while since I've posted up here. I've created a reminder on my phone to post at least once per week, so we'll see if that helps me or not. Over the past two weeks, I've finally gotten on the Minecraft bandwagon. Yeah, I know it's late, but I tried playing the game about 10 years ago, and for some reason I wasn't interested. But, I revisited it and have to say that it's really been a great mental relaxation game. Nothing too heavy. Simple. It's been fun playing on a server with a couple of friends, which helps too. I'm still working on the lighting project for the kitchen cabinets. I'm really hoping to be done with the entire project by the end of September. Decided to use a Raspberry Pi and a microcontroller, which is new for me. It's taking more time than expected, but...
We’re Live!
The new site is live! I've decided on a WordPress platform moving forward, as I've completely burned out on using DotNetNuke. The site is also hosted internally on the Suncoast Studios server farm - no more crappy hosted solutions. The last couple of items were shored up, including dropping the Google Analytics code into the site, and also setting up and applying a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate. What's this site doing back online? Didn't Chewbode abandon it? Yes. And no. I recently realized that I tried too hard to make the site flexible in the past. That hurt the creativity. Bouncing around from platform to platform, using hosted services that lost my data - it was a nightmare. For some time now I've known that there were fragments of old blog posts scattered throughout the file server and in archives online. I really just wanted to get everything in one place....
Imports Complete
Offline Archive 2 and all of the readable entries from Archive.org have been imported. Some things to note: The old versions of the Museum and photo galleries won't be rebuilt. Google Analytics is currently not installed but needs to be. Since April 23, 2016, I've been building this site on a development platform on my internal server. After Google Analytics is properly set up, I'll roll out WordPress to the production site and secure it with an SSL certificate.
Offline Archive 1 Imported
Offline Archive 1: I had an old file on the file server with posts from Apr 2004 through Dec 2005, and from Oct 2010 through Jan 2011. All of these have no been imported into this site. Some pictures are missing, and I've done a little bit of cleanup on some typos and formatting. Offline Archive 2: I have another offline archive file that looks to be from Apr 2011 through Mar 2012 that I'm going to be importing now. Lastly, I've seen that there's a bunch of blog entries that are available on Archive.org from a previous incarnation of this site. These entries span from Dec 2005 through Nov 2008. That'll be the final archive I import (hopefully today).
Backlog
Yesterday, Cari and I spent some time running some errands and doing some chores in the early part of the day. Around 2:30pm, we went over to the TGI Friday's for lunch. The rest of the day, we drove north through East Lake, then Trinity, across to Odessa, and down the Veteran's to back home. Along the way we stopped at a Lowe's and saw some great things for the house. We ended the trip by grabbing some Cold Stone ice cream. Today, I'm going through a bunch of old, archived chewbode.com blog posts and am spending the effort to import them into this site - the entries from April 2004 onward.
A Little Update
Today I moved over the September and October 2005 blog posts. I've decided that I really don't want this site to be too involved right now. The current to-do list to complete the migration is: Migrate all blog entries. Migrate all photos. Migrate all backend data files. Move the chewbode.com domain name. Decommission, archive, and delete the old site and the hosting plan. Reskin this site. I'm hoping to have all of this completed no later than June 1st. Right now, I'm just listening to some podcasts before starting some work tonight. I need to cut up the boxes my bed came in and put them in a trash bag. Now's a good time to do that.
Moving Data
I've grown tired with the complexities of DotNetNuke for my personal site, so I brought the blog to Squarespace. I spent last night moving a bunch of data over. It's painstaking, as there's no real export feature on the old site, so I'm having to move each blog entry over one at a time. As soon as all the data comes over, then I'll migrate the domain name.
