Robs blog o stuffs

Originally published at robsayers.com.

Rory and I ride the Long Leaf Trace a good bit, its really nice, but I wanted a change of scenery. I suggested that we ride the Natchez Trace and combine it with a camping trip, and Rory said ok.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at robsayers.com.

Tomorrow morning Rory and I will depart on the Natchez trace in Ridgeland for Port Gibson MS where we will camp out before riding back the next morning.  Google maps claims it’s about 100km one way,  considering we rode the entire Longleaf Trace in a day which was about 140km, this should be pretty doable.

There are a couple things I am expecting to be a challenge however.  First, unlike the Longleaf Trace, there will not be rest stops along the way with cold water fountains and bathrooms.  Second,  we will be lugging all our camping gear with us.  I was unable to purchase a set of panniers for my bike, so I will be carrying a fair amount in a backback with some items on my luggage rack.

It appears the front hub on my bike has gone bad, so for now im using the wheel from another bike I have, a quick test ride and it felt better than it has felt in some time,  guess that hub has been going bad for a while.  Time to upgrade to a nice heavy duty sealed hub I think.

I’ll be bringing Karen’s camera with me, so hopefully I will get some good pics.

Originally published at robsayers.com.

I guess a lot has been going on lately and I really havn’t updated much.  Here’s a rundown:

School: This has been the biggest thing lately.  I started taking classes at USM last wednesday,  1 week later I’m enjoying it very much, but was not expecting it to be as difficult as it is.  I’m finding it to be pretty challenging but in a good way.  Learning new things always excites me.  Let’s see if I can maintain the enthusiasm for as long as it takes.

Work: Work is going well.  I’m officially customer support, but lately I feel more like a web developer who occasionally has to take support calls.  Lots of projects in the pipeline here,  I’m happy to be enjoying this sort of work again.  I feel that I’ve grown a lot as a programmer in the past year or so.  I’m able to complete semi-complicated projects in a fraction of the time it used to take me and have been ending up with a lot more reusable code.  Happy about that.

Cars: My car is at a standstill again, between work and school I’ve had no time to work on it.  Looks like weekends will be all the time I have from now on.  Gotta make plans to make the most of that.  Karens car popped a timing belt, gotta replace that asap.  Finally hit 30mpg in the metro, gotta get that back on the road soon!

Mud: Working on a mud with havard.  What started as a normal mud using a rom-based server turned into writing our own server, first in tcl on aolserver, then in ruby, then to ada, and now we’ve settled on lisp.  We’ve already comitted more code in lisp than all other langauges combined.  I’m having a blast just learning Lisp,  I can see it replacing ruby as my langauge of choice.

Biking: Still riding a bike everywhere,  in a couple weeks Im going with rory on a trip down the natchez trace to go camping.  Carrying just what gear I can fit in a back or on my rear rack.  Should be fun.

Karen: She now has a job and has turned 21, so congrats to her on both counts, woo!

Originally published at robsayers.com.

Well, after not being satisfied with how my server was setup I decided to do away with Fedora Core and go to Debian.

I’ve been very happy with Debian, I’ve been using it on my eeePc for a few months now and it’s been the best Linux desktop install I’ve used by far, so we’ll see if I’m equally happy with it as a server.

My email is still pointing to Ryans server as he was relaying mail for me while mine was down. Once that switches back it should be working like usual. I’m running Postfix/Cyrus instead of Surgemail now. We run Surgemail at Megagate, and for an ISP, its fantastic. The free license however only allows 5 accounts and it’s just not as flexible as more typical linux solutions which prevents me from doing hacking/experimentation.

Originally published at robsayers.com.

I wanted a quick way to view the package tracking data for some ebay items I recently purchased. Here’s a quick Ruby script to view it from the console, just pass a valid tracking number as an argument. It will work with any tracking number supported by http://isnoop.net/tracking/ as that’s what it uses for the raw data.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rss'
require 'open-uri'

rss_feed = "http://isnoop.net/tracking/index.php?t=#{ARGV[0]}&rss=1"
rss_content = ""

open(rss_feed) do |f|
   rss_content = f.read
end

rss = RSS::Parser.parse(rss_content, false)
rss.items.reverse!
rss.items.each do |item|
      puts "#{item.description.gsub(""," - ").gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, " ").gsub(’  ‘,’ ‘).gsub(’- -’,”)}"
end

Originally published at robsayers.com.

Today I completed the freshmen preview at USM. I now need to purchase books, but other than that, I’m ready to show up on day 1 and get my learn on.

Starting college at 27 is a bit strange, too young to be considered adult education, so I was grouped with the ~18 crowd all day. One of those times I felt lucky that I look younger than I am. I was sure to get a close shave before I left this morning.

This semester I am taking English I, College Algebra, Physics I, Religion I, and Anthropology I. Aside from the English requirements, all the classes required for my major seem very interesting, so I imagine I will enjoy them. I’m taking 14 hours this semester with 1 class being an online class, I think that will be pretty manageable.

Originally published at robsayers.com.

Still having a blast in Mexico City.  I think this is the most fashionable city Ive ever seen.  Finally figured out our way around the subway,  its fast and mad cheap.

We are at an internet cafe now,  10 pesos per hour is so much cheaper than the 150 pesos per day our hotel was charging us for slow wifi access.

Today is a shopping day,  yesterday we say the zoo and Museum of Anthrepology.  Tomorrow we visit Teoteucan (sp?).

Originally published at robsayers.com.

We are in Mexico City in our hotel room.  This city is HUGE.  From the plane the city just stretched out as far as you can see.

We are getting settled in now before we explore a bit.  First order of business is food.  Gotta find a taco bell…

Originally published at robsayers.com.

Originally published at robsayers.com.

So this Saturday I get to marry the best person I’ve ever met.  I’m quite lucky.

Tuesday we go to Mexico for 8 full days.  I can’t wait.