The cost is the same. But the convenience is greater.

The advantage of this scheme is I can easily bring up a copy play, make changes and delete the VM when I’m done.

Plus I might even earn back my sysadmin merit badge again.

A kid in her step mom’s Volvo SUV hit me at about 20MPH.  I felt  like a I was in a pinball machine.  Bang! she hit me. Bang! I was knocked into the truck in front of me. Bang! I bounced back into the Volvo.

I got out of the car and and saw her air bags deployed. She was fine.  Airbags makes it smell like the car is on fire. Especially with the smoke coming from them.  I told her to get out of the car since I did not realized the airbags caused the smell.  The truck in front, he seemed fine.  I did not realize there was another car in front of him.

These days the first thing you do is pull out the cell phone to call police, insurance, AAA…  Well, my iphone died that night before. I was without a means of communications. AAAAAAAAH.  Felt a bit helpless.   I was going to stop at the apple store to get a new phone before I went to work.

She admitted she was at fault.  She lent me her phone.  From  the text messages on the screen, I know what she was doing.  So, yeah, don’t text and drive.

The guy in front said “he thinks he blacked out for a moment”. His bumper was not hit that hard.  So, good luck collecting.

Cops showed up. Collected everyone’s info to file the report.

The tow truck comes and wants to take me to Redwood City.  I said no. Since I had no phone I had to get him to call my mechanic to get a local body shop.

I get it over there, then get a cab home. It is almost $5 per mile in traffic.  Between waiting at traffic lights and $3/mi.

I definitely did not feel myself for a couple of hours. I little shaky. I little shock never hurt anyone?

I relaxed for an hour, called insurance, work and arranged a rental.

Then I drove back to the auto body place, pulled most of my crap out of it.  Jumped over to parrot cellular and got the new phone. Talked to the insurance company .

Now, you would think that since both myself and the girl that hit me are both with State Farm things would be simple.  NOOOOO.  For privacy and protection, they had to have a team assigned to her and another assigned to me.

So to get things to running, I opened a case knowing I’d have to get the car rental and my deductible from them, possibly even having to go to small claims to get it.  They are supposed to be adversarial.

I open the case off my insurance Tuesday to get things rolling.

A Thursday I find out I have $12,000 in damage.  They won’t say it, but I think totaled after seeing kelly blue book pegs my car at $12k-$15k.

I do some searching on line.  It has been over 6 years since I’ve looked at cars.  To replace my highlander with a new one is about $38,000.  OY. Not ready for those payments.

I look for a used car for the first time in over 30 years.   I find that the price range for cars with up to 70k miles are 2006-2009 is mid-20s.  I look at  certified preowned cars and look at their carfax report online.  Found a couple one owner cars with the full maintenance record at Sunnyvale Toyota.

I went over Saturday afternoon and looked. Explained the situation. Mostly making sure he understood I was just kicking tires since I did not yet know if the car was totaled. He had no issue.  One Highlander was sold, but the other was on the lot.  I liked it, great shape, clean and 50k miles.  I told the salesman, Socrates, that I was willing to look at tacomas and 4runners as well.  I also gave him my ceiling price out the door. We looked at a couple.  I don’t like leather.  I don’t need 4wd.  He showed me a 2008 4runner with 20k miles.  I liked it.  We went inside and I saw what certified pre-owned means.

It means a 3rd party checked the car and filled out a form.  Then the sales manager and service manager sign off on the form.  And, I get a 12k mi/12 month warranty as well and any outstanding warranty from the vehicle.

An hour later I all but own the car.  They will hold it for me until Tuesday.

Now trying to get a final word from State farm on the fate of the car.  I called Friday to get a status update.  No one calls me back.  I call Monday, 6/20,  and find they are waiting for a salvage estimate.  Tuesday I call again. we talk and they say they will total the vehicle.  Even though I did not want car payments, I was afraid the car would come back and not drive the same.

So, I tell my boss I’m taking the day to get the car. I go pickup the car, ‘borrowing’ from my self until the insurance check comes in.  I’m out of there an hour later.  I go to work. 8 days later and the vehicle is replaced.

Fedex package comes Wednesday from state farm. Check is received Tuesday 28th.

I don’t pick up the check until and deposit it until  Saturday 7/2.  On Tuesday my neck goes out like it hasn’t in years.  I get to the chiropractor on Tuesday the 28th and get an adjustment.  Does not help. But I can’t move my head enough to go back until Thursday morning.  For 2 days I could move my head yes, but not much other motion.  Friday I’m fine, but don’t want to drive since you really do move your head around a lot when driving.

The question, can a soft injury like this really be connected to the accident 2 weeks before?  I kinda don’t think so.  I’m sure there are some schiester ambulance chasers that might be reading this and salivating.

In the meanwhile, 3 weeks, 4 vacation days, a new loan, a newish truck and a stiff neck and I think it is all done.

I hope it is done.  The last time I was in an accident, the person in front of me sued everyone, even though a cop showed up on scene before me moved our cars and did not cite me. That freaked me out. I had never been sued, I was served on a Friday evening when I got home. I had no one to call to find out what was supposed to happen.  End result, state farm hired a lawyer. After a few months, then lawyers got her to settle for 8K from each party.  I was reading monthly report from the lawyer.  I got a letter from state farm stating they treated as a nuisance case and would not raise my rates.

So I hope in 2 years I don’t get served again for this one and have to deal with bullshit when I was not at fault.

So, interesting life experience over.    Not one I recommend to anyone.

I hope life lets me do with this one I was planing to do with the highlander, drive for 10 years.

University is a one(1) lane road.  While waiting at a light, 2 motorcycles and 1 car drove down the shoulder and  bike lane for almost a full block in because they were inpatient.

One person almost hit a couple of people walking in a cross walk.

In the garage someone just had to park in a space on the left.  Just had to back up to get to that space.  To the right there were a dozen open spaces.  Maybe the car can only make left hand turns?

When I parked I noticed someone with no depth perception only pulled halfway into the parking space.  I guess a wall 5 foot away was looking like it was getting realllly close.

Maybe chalk it up to Cinco de Mayo hangovers?

What about this crap where someone creates a package. Gets bored, or finds a job and drops the package. Then someone branches the package, fixes a few bugs, then all of a sudden, we have the joeblow-package.  If we are lucky, the original author of package adds a note about joeblow-package, or god forbid, takes the fixes and we don’t have to care about joeblow-package anymore. Or even better, finds a new maintainer.

But that does not seem to happen. It’s a fucking free for all where people don’t have to play nice.  Just create your own branch off a package. The bored or fully employed original gem owner never tries to suck in your branch. Then you can have your own version of a gem that works for you.  We are the users trying to get a job done without reinventing the hammer wasting a day figuring out which branch of which gem we should be using.

If you don’t care anymore, change the readme and make it clear that the project is dead. Or see if one of the people who created branches has the wherewithal to take over as maintainer of the gem.  I know old school. Nobody maintains shit anymore. Dump and go.

I’ve been paid to write code in Java, Perl, Python, PHP and not RAILS. I have seen my share of well maintained and poorly maintained libraries. Ruby is tipping the scales in the wrong direction.

People bitch about Perl.  RAILs, isn’t it just object oriented Perl? Lots of opportunity for unmaintainable  obtuse code.  But it is object oriented

Why is it I find I only blog when I have to let off some steam. Yes today was spend getting a solid package for dealing with database enum fields and foreign keys in my migrate scripts under Rails 3.

Surprise, surprise, surprise.  I went to port a rails 2 set of migrate scripts over to rails 3.0 and it it does not work.

First non-suprise, rails does not natively support enum fields in mysql.

Second non-surprise, nothing actually works for rails 3. So this godsend called rails 3 will cost me days of project productivity to create or port a gem to add enum field support.

Granted, some  miopic engineers created gems that let you hard code the enum values in your active record definition.  Really not good in the real world.  Ya know like when the guy writing Java wants access to your DB.  Then gee, two places where the enum definitions are hard coded.

A couple of gems are just really, really old school. You other grey backs remember when you used to create lookup tables in the DB before enums were natively implemented?

The one that seems to have the best description is  http://rubyforge.org/projects/enum-column/ but it is rails 2. It has to be ported.
The one that is rails 3, but I think it only handles things in the model is https://github.com/jeffp/enumerated_attribute
. I have to investigate this one as well.

https://github.com/electronick/enum_column This one is the winner. It worked. If you are on Rails 2, enum-column.

You GEM guys need a naming convention.  Dash or underscore, PICK ONE.

It is funny, that before I could solve this, I was hit by the fact that rails does not support  foreign keys either.  Happy last century!  For rails 3 use this: https://github.com/matthuhiggins/foreigner.

I seem to do this a lot. Look for something simple. Find what I want is rails 2 and need to be ported, or rails 3 and does not work.  Example, I’ve spend about 6 or so hours getting a rails 3 port of ujs_sort_helper to actually work the way it is advertised.

Rails, the costco of programming environments. Lots of cheap shit that in the end you really did not want.

Here is what I looked at:

gem search enum --remote

*** REMOTE GEMS ***

active_enum (0.9.1)
acts_as_enum (0.1.0)
ar-enums (0.3.6)
attr_enum (0.1.0)
attr_enumerator (0.3.0)
classy_enum (0.8.1)
daeltar-enum_field (0.2.1)
easy_enum (0.2.0)
edave-enumerated_attribute (0.2.18)
enum (1.0.0)
enum_attr (0.0.6)
enum_column (0.1.5)
enum_field (1.0.1)
enum_type (1.0.0)
enumargs (2.0.0)
enumerable-extra (0.1.2)
enumerable-proxy (1.1.4)
enumerable_lz (0.1.1)
enumerable_mapper (1.0.0)
enumerabler (1.0.0)
enumerate_by (0.4.4)
enumerate_it (0.7.4)
enumerated (1.0.1)
enumerated_attribute (0.2.16)
enumerated_state (0.0.7)
enumerations_mixin (0.2.1)
enumlogic (1.0.3)
has_enum (0.7.3)
has_enumeration (1.0.2)
haz_enum (0.5.1)
in_enumerable (1.0.0)
in_memory_enumeration (0.3.0)
LazyEnumerable (0.0.4)
markcatley-enum_field (0.2.0.1)
menumatic (0.2.0)
nice-enum (0.1.3)
nice_enum (0.1.3)
object-in-enumerable (1.1.0)
objectreload-simple_enumerations (0.1.6)
pg_enum (0.2.0)
rap_enum (0.0.2)
rap_enumerable (0.0.1)
renum (1.3.1)
robot_enumerable (0.1.0)
sga_enum (0.1.0)
simple_enum (1.3.2)
simple_enumerations (0.1.1)

The person I had to stand near while I waited was very polite. But there was a blackshirt TSA supervisor watching the area.

Also since I knew what to expect, I made sure I they let me run my stuff though so that I could keep an eye on it.

The guy was very professional during the “procedure”. Overall until there a certification of the backsatter that other medical radiation emitting devices have to go through, I’ll skip it.

There was an interesting woman a bit behind me in line. She was wearing a tiger costume. A costume like you wpuld expect a child to wear at holloween. No mask. I waited to see if she was an opt out. She went through the backscatter.

Also once I went through the line I picked up a bottle of water and a packsge of halls mints. I joke about airport price correctly. The manager gave me a discount. I paid supermarket pricing.

We should be boarding soon. See ya’all on the otherside.

I was to stand next to the guy watching the line for a minute. He asked it i was sure i did not want to go through the scanner that it was safe. I said i did not believe the machine went through all the normal FDA testing. He said everyone is entitled to their opinion.

i asked if i could at least watch that nothing happened to my stuff. He said i had to wait were i was, that i made my choice.

After a minute some one with a pair of blue gloves asked me to follow him. He collected my stuff and asked me to empty my pockets. He fully explained to me what was going to happen and offered to ,do it in private. I declined.

He was very professional about it. Told me as he was about ti touch each area. He asked it i has ant sore body parts he need to be extra careful with. I just said to be careful with “the boys”. He grinned. In a i’m a guy and understand. Not in a evil or sadistic i’m grtting way.

When he was done he ran my wallet through x-ray. I asked he new about opt out day on the 24th. He grinned, said yes and that hed had the day off.

They have been quite a few stories about the jerks at the TSA. I am not saying this was a pleasant procedure. Procedure and touching. Something normally done by a doctor I thought up until now.

I guess it all depends on the airport.

Bottom line, get the pat down, slow down the wgole system, protest these new procedures.

When I fly back on the 30th, i’l opt out again. Let’s see if the TSA staff at dulles are as professional.

I would assume this is slightly dangerous.  His bike was not parallel to the median. It was diagonal across the whole shoulder.  He was  straddling the motorcycle in a way that wold qualify him for chiropractor visit after an hour or two.  So safety and ergonomics in the trash for the revenue from a few speeding tickets.

Then when he found one, does he really take off fast enough to merge into the fast lane? Does him turn on his lights cause people to slam on their brakes possibly causing an accident?

This was a ridiculous situation.   Does the state really need the money that badly?

I’ll get to see a friend that I have not seen in 2 or 3 years.  At this point, I think Mike is the friend I’ve known the longest, 28 years.  My younger days of playing at the volley ball courts on the DC Mall near the capitol steps and going drinking after wards.

Me and my brother will be spending a day baking. We aren’t talking some chocolate chip cookies here.  We are talking tradition!  This is the Rugelach recipe from my grandma.  Just enough flour to hold the cream cheese and butter together.  You freeze it so that it is workable. You roll out the dough for each cookie in confectioners sugar.  You then add the walnut, sugar and brown sugar mix onto the rolled dough and roll it up.  These aren’t the dough lumps you get in the store.  These are sugary, crusty pieces of heaven.

These cookies are what insulin was invented for.  It is worth the blood sugar spike.

I also am really hoping to bond with my niece.  The last time I was out it was a short visit and she did not start warming up to me until I was leaving.  I’m staying with my sister, Becca will see me everyday I’m there.  Let’s see what happens.

I packed my balloons and hope my sister gets permission from the kindercare where my niece spends her day to do balloon animals for some of the kids.

This isn’t the fun part, but I’ll do the annual maintenance of my dads computer.

I also hope to catch up on a bunch of reading.

One of the tenets of ham radio is experimentation.  We are the only non-commercial licensees from the FCC that are encouraged to follow the makers creed, “Void the Warranty.”

So in the last few years, folks have thought of how cool it is to take a picture using a camera with a GPS.  Hams have been doing this for about 20 years.

We combine SSTV, sending pictures over the airwaves, picture messaging, with  APRS, sending GPS coordinates & text over the airwaves.  Then everyone who captures the signals knows what we saw and where.

Bernard took it one step further and integrated the image and gps coordinates into Google Earth live.  See the website here:

http://www.starlabs.tv/aprn

The images show by the slide show were taken at the 2010 Bay Area Makers Faire.