Blizzo :: The Morgan Blog

Amy took Diablo to puppy class the other day and found out that he… well, is a she. Oops. Something was mentioned at the Pet Store about the puppy being male, and I never bothered to look that closely. I respect her privacy.

A conversation from the movie Gross Pointe Blank:

Debi: So, is there a Mrs. Mysterio?
Martin Q. Blank: No, but I do have a very nice cat?
Debi: Not the same.
Martin Q. Blank: Well, you don’t know my cat, it’s very demanding.
Debi: It? You don’t know if it’s a boy or girl?
Martin Q. Blank: I respect its privacy.

After this discovery, we talked about whether or not “Diablo” was a good name for a girl. Amy says she wants to keep it, so we will. I am still not sure.

When I was young, my mom and I saw an adorable chocolate lab at a pet store and ended up convincing the rest of the family to get her. All of us came up with ideas for a name, but in the end the grown-ups decided to name her Tucker. Throughout the entire life of that dog, it slightly bothered me that she had what I considered to be a masculine name. For the record, my name for Tucker was “Mocha”.

The problem is we already have out puppy trained to the name Diablo, and the kids have bonded with her over that name. So, the name stays. If anyone asks, I’ll just tell them it’s because shes a little she-devil.

The Ruby on Rails application that I work on uses a plugin called Hobo. We are using a fairly old version of Hobo, because upgrading has been difficult, but the recent security concerns prompted us to take a serious crack at it. It seems that every time I get close to pushing through, one of the three things in the stack (Ruby, Rails or Hobo) causes problems. If you are considering upgrading, keep the following in mind:

Looking at the above, I think I have no choice but to choose Rails 2.1.0 and Ruby 1.8.7 and try to tackle the Hobo issues.

Also, looking at this post in my blog makes me woefully aware that the width of the content column isn’t sufficient for a lot of things. I have a custom thing I have worked on, and promised to develop earlier, maybe it’s time to look into that. Enjoy squishy table content during the interim.

A coworker of mine has been looking to rent a new place in Colorado.  After a lot of searching they found a house they liked that is managed by Blue Sage Realty.  You can read for yourself, but he was treated horribly by them.  Despite the problems I am having with my house, I am glad to be an owner rather than a renter.  It means I don’t have to deal with petty, annoying, unprofessional people like that.

When Amy was a little girl, she and her family used to go up to these little cabins in the Poudre River Canyon. For a nostalgic adventure we loaded the kids and dogs up into the Subaru for a quick trip. The cabins were nice, but small. They had cold running water and a stove that was a wood burning/gas hybrid. There were shared restrooms, a little playground, and a fire pit. We spent the night there, and then on the way down the mountain the next morning we went for a hike on the Dadd Gulch trail. For me this hike was the highlight of the trip. The trail was beautiful, with lots of wild flowers, little streams for the dogs to cool off and a swarm of butterflies. I’ll let the pictures do the talking here.

As I was heading out from my appointment to make an appointment to get a root canal, my phone rang. Amy extended a very innocent sounding invitation to come look at puppies at PetSmart with the kids, they were right around the corner.

I headed over and found my kids playing with this adorable puppy. He was only six weeks old, way too young to be separated from his mother already. The adoption agent told us he came from Texas, where they euthanize a lot of animals because they can’t find homes. Apparently Colorado is such a good place to get dogs adopted that a lot of them are shipped in.

Madeleine looked up with at me, dog in hand and said “Daddy, I *love* him”. I looked at Amy, and I saw in her eyes there was no way I was getting out of that store without that dog. We have talked quite a bit about getting another dog as a companion for Dante, so why not now?

The meet & greet went well:

So over on the Pink Asparagus blog Catherine did this mosaic thingy, where you take the answers to 12 questions, do flickr searches, and build a mosaic out of the results. It sounded like more fun than work, so I took a few minutes to do it.

The questions:

1. What is your first name? Morgan
2. What is your favorite food? right now? Pizza
3. What high school did you attend? East High School
   
4. What is your favorite color? Orange
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Jessica Alba
6. Favorite drink? Smoothie
7. Dream vacation? Danube Castles
8. Favorite dessert? Ice Cream
9. What you want to be when you grow up? Happy
10. What do you love most in life? Marriage
11. One Word to describe you. Difficult
12. Your flickr name. Blizzo

Originally three of the answers were all “ice cream”, but I went back and changed them so there would be more variety. Did I mention I like ice cream? I have never been one of those “ohmygodcelebritywhatshernameissohoticouldjustdie” types, so I just sort of picked one. For the thing I most love in life, “Amy” just got me a bunch of photos of random girls, so I changed it to “Marriage”. My Flickr name turned up an old picture of Mason that I shared on an SXC, a free community driven stock photography site that someone inserted birds into. Anyway, thanks for the diversion Catosaurus.

The results:

1. Morgan Aero 8
2. La vegan pizza del diavolo\
3. East High School
4. Orange is In…
5. Jessica Alba Blue – Mobile Wallpaper
6. Strawberry Smoothie
7. Sigmaringen Castle Reflected by River Danube
8. 7th Course: Tasting of Ice Creams
9. don’t worry be happy new year
10. A Marriage…
11. colorful but difficult
12. Child’s Play

One of the ways I prefer to debug is to print things to standard out and watch a console window. The problem is, in Rails, I get a lot of spam to sift through that I usually don’t need: SQL statements, routing and rendering info, etc. It makes finding your output difficult. Today I came up with this convenience method, which makes all of my output a nice orangish/yellow color thats easy to pick out.

Below is a partial screenshot of what my output looks like. Everything I output with the ppp method is very easy to see.

I’m a slacker blogger, but I’m OK with that. Life has been very busy lately, and next month is looking to be even busier. I managed to upgrade my WordPress install and I am so excited to play with it that now you get pictures. Lucky you!

The trip was great fun. After several weeks of cold weather, walking into the warm California sun was nothing short of amazing. I was so excited, I took excessive amounts of pictures of palm trees (only included some of them).

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite web comics, Diesel Sweeties, is about to hit its 8th anniversary and 2000 comic mark around the same time. As a way of celebrating, the creator is releasing the entire archives in 10 separate free PDF volumes (though donations are appreciated). DS is a guilty pleasure for me, the perfect mixture of pop culture, intelligent humor, sarcasm, irony and prurient elements. The first PDF will be released tomorrow, then one a week after that. More about the free PDFs.

A couple of weeks ago Mason got to go on an impromptu day trip with Grandma Susie to Disneyland. He had a great time and brought back a present for Madeleine. During discussion around the event I told my mom that I didn’t really remember my trip to Disneyland for some reason, which is strange since I usually have very detailed memories about my childhood. A couple of days ago she called me and told me that it was her turn to go on the trip (it’s sort of a lottery thing at her work) and she wanted to take me. So my mom and I are headed to Disneyland next Wednesday, and I couldn’t be more excited. I will tell you all about it and share photos when I return!