MikeBrum.com

I happened to look out the window while making lunch and noticed that the sun was backlighting what I believe to be a Yellow Foxtail — which is just a common weed of the family Setaria.

I put everything down and grabbed my gear (switching out the 35mm for the 100mm macro) to shoot a few frames. A few minutes after taking the shot the sun disappeared behind clouds not to be seen for the rest of the day and the wind kicked up just for fun.

I’m glad I acted on the impulse and opportunity.

I’ve been quite obsessed with Lego in the recent past. Frankly, I’ve been obsessed with Lego for more than 20 years, but the recent past has seen a resurgence in that obsession.

Not that long ago, I shot a time-lapse of a Lego 8294 Excavator build. It was a fun learning experience (the shoot), but more than a little work.

I currently have a new Lego 8265 Front Loader sealed in its box sitting just behind me that I need to assemble. I haven’t been able to pull the hours and work through it. I want to do another time-lapse because the first one seemed to be well received. However, the time logistics have me wondering if it’s worth putting off the build (which I want to get to because I’ve had it for a couple of weeks now!) to shoot the time-lapse or not.

I guess I can always go back and shoot a build later — I just hate having it sit there ignored, but I don’t have a ton of free time right now.

For the longest time, I’ve used phpMyAdmin to manage my MySQL databases when a UI was required. While it definitely gets the job done, I was never a fan of the web interface and I figured it was the best option available.

A few weeks ago while in LA, I was shown Sequel Pro. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for. It’s kinda like a Macified SQL Query Analyzer tool – which is awesome. Oh, and it’s free!

One of the greatest features is that when you’re configuring a database to connect to, you can specify an SSH host to tunnel through for the connection. This is great because it allows you to prevent having to open up your MySQL privileges to everyone (especially useful if you connect from multiple networks or if the IP of those networks changes) and you can specify separate credentials for the SSH tunnel and the database login (since most people will have different accounts and passwords for each.

Sequel Pro has definitely earned a spot on my dock.

I just discovered today that the ‘watch’ command isn’t natively available on OS X. You can apparently get it through Macports. Since I don’t have Macports installed, this seemed like a very heavy solution for a rather small problem.

Looking for another solution, I opted for a basic while loop — which is a shell command. My basic command is going to look something like:

while echo "This prints every 5 seconds" ; do clear ; sleep 5 ; done

It’s not as useful as watch in that you don’t have the additional time output, but it definitely works and doesn’t require any additional installs to get the data from the command line.

For the creative and motivated, it probably wouldn’t be difficult to make a very simple wrapper script to more closely match the watch output by leveraging a while loop. You’re probably better off just getting a compiled binary at that point, but it might be an interesting exercise regardless.

Before my transition to my Mac, I used ID3 Renamer on Windows. It’s a great application and does everything that I need it to do – which is full renaming of mp3 files along with full id3 tag handling. One-stop shopping at its best. And it’s free.

Unfortunately, there isn’t an OS X version and running it under a VM of some description would be a real PITA for me. I’ve also been unable to find a (free) app that does what ID3 Renamer does.

The good news is that I’ve found two apps that handle the two tasks well.

ID3 Management

Musorg is a really small and streamlined app that lets you manage ID3 tags. It’s that simple.

mp3 Renaming

TriTag handles the mp3 renaming based off of ID3 tags. It would be perfect if it had a mature tag editor, but you can give it a mask and rename the mp3 files based upon the data in the tags.

Not iTunes

Some people use iTunes for tag management, but I’m not a fan. It’s fine for small tweaks here and there, but not for large scale editing and management — plus it won’t do the file name management. While a lot of people don’t care about file names as long as iTunes displays the ID3 information in its library, it’s something that’s important to me.

While at the end of the day I’d love to have one app to handle both of these tasks in the way that ID3 Renamer works, I’m happy with the TriTag + Musorg pair to handle the work.

My watch has been running fast for a few days. There’s definitely something wrong with it. I reset it as of 9am this morning. I went to a watch shop after work (around 5) and it was already an hour ahead. Definitely not good. I’ll hear in about a week what the damage is and how much it’ll be to fix that damage. I’m hating not having a watch and I want to just run out and buy a new one.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that after getting home, Corinne and I went on a nice bike ride to the Forest Hills Cemetery. Despite riding around a ton of dead people who are buried in the ground, the cemetery is really nice and rather large. There’s a bunch of people that regularly visit for riding, walking, bring their dogs, etc.

I don’t think I’ll be able to ride much for the next week since I start the week-long on-call rotation tomorrow at 10:30am. I’m not looking forward to it, but hopefully it won’t be horrible.

The fun never ends.

Over the past few days, I’ve done a bunch of work to redesign the site. I obviously rethemed WordPress, but also made a number of modifications to that theme and changed how the Google Ads are distributed and displayed.

I had to make a few changes to various plugins to get them working properly, but I think everything’s working without issue now.

I’m sure there’ll be some minor tweaks, but this should be it for a while.

I really like the cleaner look and how everything exists in a discrete “box”. Visually, I find this very appealing and easy to identify elements and identify what you’re looking for.

If anyone notices any problems, feel free to let me know.

My site was offline for a few hours. The hosting company had some problems that took them a while to fix. Not sure of the details. I just know that when I woke up I didn’t have access to email or any of my domains. Not fun. Only about two months ago there was an issue with a disk that kept the host down for a bunch of hours as well.

Everything’s back up now, but I don’t know if any email was lost. External mail servers should try again a few hours later, so maybe some stuff will trickle in. It’s not that I get a ton of mail — I just don’t want to miss anything that might be important due to a stupid server outage.

All of this has me considering dropping the whole VPS setup and finding a place to host my own physical host. I’d need to find a DNS hosting service (DynDNS used to be super cheap per domain, but that price has sky rocketed), but I’m more than capable of actually administering the box myself.

We’ll see if I actually go through with this or if I’m just pissy due to the outage this morning. It’d be a lot of work up front, but not a bad deal in the long run. It’s not like the VPS is the cheapest thing ever.

I just got through updating WP and all of my plugins to the latest versions. It takes some time because I’ve made modifications to about half of the plugins and it’s a PITA to upgrade my test system, test it, make sure I’ve made all necessary changes and then upgrade the production box and make the changes that are needed.

It’s worth it to stage all of the upgrades so that I don’t totally FUBAR the production box, but it definitely makes the task run a bit longer.

Luckily, most of the plugins don’t tend to have crazy updates, so I just need to get a diff of my changes and basically apply it to the new version of code instead of having to re-engineer the functionality against a new code base.

If anyone finds anything odd about the site, feel free to holler at me via the contact form. Though everything’s looking good right now.

Oh, and I’m back from a very productive trip to LA that was 100% related to BME. As a totally unrelated, but exceptionally cool, aside, I’m still overjoyed that I got to hear the space shuttle’s sonic boom on its way to land on Saturday.

I’m flying out to LA in a couple of hours and returning Sunday.

That’s pretty much it.

I’m just glad that I’m escaping the dropping temps and rain for a few days.