Getting colder, in a week.

11.16.2015

Last week I lamented my refrigerator not refrigerating. Do I go the route of most sane people when their refrigerator gives them a problem for the first time and call a repair service technician to come out and take a look? Hell no. I go buy a new refrigerator.

My current (non-working) refrigerator is almost 8 years old. It's a low-end fridge, an any life span beyond the extended 5-year warranty I consider bonus time. The problem with the fridge is the compressor, and or things connected to the compressor. The most likely culprit is some type of computerized controller board since my problems started after the power had gone off (power surge?). A replacement compressor is $350 on the internet. Add in the cost of an out of warranty service call, labor, etc, I'd be lucky if it was fixed for $500. Even then it's still an 8 year old refrigerator that I know I'm going to have more problems with. I don't have good luck with refrigerators.

This is a good time of year to have appliance problems. Many places are starting early Black Friday sales. Home Depot has an early Black Friday sale. They even have (yet another) low-end refrigerator that has just what I want, along with not having things I don't want. So I took advantage of the sale and placed my order, because the Home Depot appliance department is just a showroom - everything is delivered from a centralized warehouse. In theory the refrigerator should get here this Saturday. In the interim I've dug out, cleaned, and plugged in my old 3-ft tall refrigerator that I used the last time my refrigerator died.

I could have gotten a better model refrigerator. The one I got comes with a 5-year warranty. The salesman was really pushing a better model that has a 10-year warranty and has been one of their best sellers for the past 3 years. It cost twice as much as the one I bought. Plus it had all kinds of extra stuff I didn't want. Last twice as long for twice the price VS get what I actually want, and likely to buy it again in 5 years. Although I generally dislike the hassle of buying appliances, this time I'm going to not talk myself into getting something fancy that will last longer due to (basically) peer pressure.

We'll see how all of this works out starting this weekend.

Permalink random maintenance

Not cold enough

11.11.2015

2 weeks ago, or so, my freezer stopped freezing and spent a day or so going to ~50° before bouncing back to 0° overnight. I thought at the time that I may have just not shut the door all the way.

Last night I noticed more moisture than normal in the freezer, and the IR temp gun measured it at 40°. Today after work it's at 50°.

I really don't have time for a broken freezer right now.

Permalink random maintenance

The Hoard

10.20.2015

I've joked a lot about how much boardgaming stuff I have, especially minis to paint. This past weekend I was moving things between various storage spots, trying to make a little room and cull those things that have been sitting around for years. One of the reasons I haven't painted as much as I want is that the minis are hard to get to/find. I'm excellent at storing things, I pack things away with the best of them. Getting to something specific after I've stored it - not so easy. With that in mind, part of my storage rearraging was not to maximized what I'm storing, but to make it easier to get to those things I may want to [paint] while still keeping them out of the way.

Things to paint made their way to the garage utility closet. The closet was reclaimed over the summer, previously being "that door in the garage I haven't opened in 15 years". The bed I slept in from ages 3-30 - gone to my aunt in Rogersville. Jer's Soloflex he acquired when living in his Madison townhouse, which I think I got when he married Elaine 17 years ago - gone (to a dumpster, over the course of 2 trips). Other miscellaneous crap which for some reason was in there - trashed. With a bleaching of the floor (damn mice) and moving in some of my handy dandy wheeled wire shelving I was good to go.

The rack pictured above is 4 ft wide, 18 in deep, and (I think) 7 feet tall. The top and bottom shelves have games that I'm still trying to decide if they'll stay there or end up somewhere else. Most are oversized boxes so they don't fit well where I'm storing most of my other games.

The 4 shelves in the picture, though, can best be summarized as "where did all this shit for me to paint come from?" Most of the top shelf is 2 Kickstarters worth of generic plastic scenery to glue together and paint. There's Robotech robots, zombie survivors, Star Trek fleets, Firestorm Armada space ships.

On the bottom right is a box of 3D printed models from Shapeways - mostly GI Joe themed. That bottom shelf isn't so bad, as everything else is cardstock scenery (and the stack of 2 white boxes is yet another Kickstarter).

It's hard to see, but the black mesh boxes have individual minis, actual people, to paint. I remember counting the Reaper minis (on the right above the 2 white Kickstarter boxes on the bottom shelf mentioned above) and there were 103 packs. That's ¼ of a shelf. What am I thinking?

I am a gaming hoarder. Games. Stuff that goes with games. I've cut back on accruing as much ...crap... over the past year, thanks in large part to being out of work for 4 months last year. During that time, seeing all the games I've had for years still in their shrink wrap has helped quell my need for getting more games. Hopefully the above will convince me that I just don't need anything else to paint.

Now that I can get to this stuff to paint, we'll see what kind of progress is made.

Seriously though, how did I end up with that much stuff to paint? I know of at least 3 Black Friday sales with stuff sitting on those shelves. Got to remember that next month.

Permalink gaming miniatures

Javascripting & MVC

10.15.2015

For the past couple of weeks at work I've been writing a lot of Javascript. Traditionally Javascript and I don't get along. I'm not completely sure why, Javascript has always been a part of web development. Even in the 90's, although it was avoided because it was evil and could be coerced into doing bad things to your computer. These days, Javascript is a fundamental part of the modern online experience, responsible for the seamless back and forth of data that doesn't interrupt the web page you're looking at. It puts the "fun" in "fundamental"!

It's also responsible for a good chunk of the "mental" in "fundamental" too.

Granted, I don't know the right way to do a lot of things in Javascript, but I can generally hack away and figure them out. Gone are the days of embedding events in an object to go do special things when you click/type/look at a textbox or a button. Now the hip cool thing is to search the Document Object Model for that textbox and button, then add a listener object for when you click/type/look at it. It's of great benefit to add listeners as you can add multiple listeners to a textbox or button. And that's got to happen at least a couple of times every few years.

The above is a by-product, I think, of modern programming separating the code from the design. Adding those embedded events meant that I knew, from a code standpoint, that certain things were fairly certain to happen. With listeners, it's not imperative for those things to happen and they (I think) handle things better when stuff's missing.

But I still make code and design. I don't hand off the logic to somebody and say "go lay this out and display it properly". I'm still in 1997 when there was 1 guy that did everything for a website. Knowing what a pain it was to be that one guy, I should be better accepting of how code/design is at least trying to evolve.

But then I look at the file I worked on last week. It was an HTML table that had 3 columns on each row that you could click on and it would either toggle Yes/No text that was displayed, or edit a number that was present (without turning into a textbox). It took 2½ days for me to make, and it even has a spiffy green background that would fade in to show you had successfully edited a field thanks to a 2 minute Google search-copy-paste. The problem was that the 1 new file and 1 edited file I used was implementing the old, pseudo 1997 way of things. I had to convert it to the new, hot 2015 way.

A week later, with 7 files involved (not counting the usual included files each page on the site has) it was finally working, doing the exact same thing it had been doing a week earlier. It shouldn't have taken that long, but I was fighting with Model-View-Controller object interaction AND that damn Javascript. Javascript that I had working once but all the references changed, somehow, thanks to the MVC setup.

But I learned. I learned the hard way, the painful way, which means it should stick.

And then when I was done, I learned there was a 2nd set of things to do that nobody told me.

Now I'm not done again. I have to return to the breach of MVC and Javascript. As painful as it is, I actually enjoy it. It makes more sense as I step through and use parts. Maybe not common sense, but I can see why it works. And even though a different command may work just as well, I'll use this new stuff I'm supposed to.

One of those reasons to use MVC and our homegrown Javascript objects that just seem like a glorified wrapper popped up earlier. When I develop and test I use Chrome and I often forget to try different browsers. I'm just lazy that way. I've got a Javascript function that will loop through and show all the properties of a Javascript object. When I wanted to toggle those Yes/No fields earlier, I looked and saw an innerHTML property that had what I wanted. Great, I used that. When it came time to edit numbers, innerHTML messed me up when I went to validate that number because any extra characters (space, line break) were converted into HTML and thus made my number not a number. I looked at the properties again and found innerText that had, you guessed it, the text with no HTML. Great, I'll use that. Everything worked great.

Until I switched away from Chrome. There was no innerText. There was no innerHTML.

The cross-browser friendly field turns out to be textContent. I think there's a library call I should have been making that would have grabbed the right property for me. Maybe after 20 years of making websites I should know textContent is the right property to use. But I didn't. Until now.

textContent. That's the ticket.

 

Permalink programming/interweb

Tinkering Lament

10.07.2015

Wednesday afternoon was my last (hopefully) mowing of the year. I've had little problems with the mower this year - gas in the carburetor, some kind of belt broke - but for some reason I actually enjoy riding around on the mower so I get things fixed and continue on instead of going back to the guy that I used to have cut my grass.

Most of the things that have gone wrong with the mower were things I could fix if I knew how. Replacing a belt isn't the same as rebuilding a carburetor, but how hard can replacing a belt be? According to a 10 minute YouTube video it's not impossible for the common man. But I lack the fortitude to get in there and try to fix something and not give up in exasperation before something goes wrong. That's why I ended up spending over $100 to replace a $10 belt. Labor and getting the mower carried back and forth adds up.

At some point I decided I was too good to learn how to fix things with wheels. I can narrow it down to when I had my Camaro, and thanks to the combination of being in my teens/early twenties and not able to afford to have someone else fix all the little things that go wrong with a car that was 10 years old when I bought it, me and Terry were constantly fixing all the little things that go wrong with a car that old. And of course, fixing it once NEVER meant not having to fix it again.

With the above said, yesterday when I started to mow I noticed the front right tire didn't look right. My front tires on the mower aren't aligned correctly, I think thanks to hitting a trench not filled in deep enough from my water line replacement 2 years ago (this is on my "get them to fix it next year during the mower tune up" trip list). The tire looked low, not like a car tire does where the weight just kinds of flattens it out, but low as if the tire was skewing on the wheel rim. I hopped off the mower and pressed down on the tire. Yep, it was flat. Well, crap, what do I do now? How do I get air in a mower tire at home?

Back on June 5, 2013, I purchased a Black & Decker air compressor for Amazon. Why? Dunno. At the time I thought I needed one. In the garage, inside a cabinet, I finally opened the box which held that air compressor and read the instructions. Fortunately those instructions boiled down to "plug in, attach hose, inflate" and I was able to continue on mowing with a tire full of air.

It's likely that tire's been flat for a while and it's only my paranoia of getting through 1 last ride for the year before putting the mower away that made me actually notice something was wrong. I felt way to proud that I was able to put air in a tire all by myself. I wish I knew how to (confidently) take care of the other things the mower needs on an annual basis, things my grandfather used to do both at work and just in general - for some reason I remember him sharpening mower blades for our mower when I was little. I have no idea how to sharpen a mower blade, or even change the oil or whatever filter(s) the thing has. While the internet can show the steps for all of this, there's a part about getting your hands dirty and twisting everything around that I tend to screw up.

This sounds like some type of night class that should be available out there. Likely taught by some 14 year old kid.

Permalink random