Ross Nelson

People voted for me. LOL

Christine doesn’t remember what she voted for me on, but she put my actual name (not my twitter name) down for some write-in.

I didn’t put either of them up to this, and I don’t know if Christine had seen Pafford’s write-in by the time she did hers or not. All I know is that I’m apparently officially in the voting record as receiving a single write-in vote for two separate positions this year.

One of my opponents for State Board of Education has a blog, where he talks about “liberal Moon-bats and Loonies.” It’s pretty awesome.

I expect plenty of votes from all of you in 2016!

I started a new job today. While I fully expect it to be a great job that’s more in line with my interests than the last few, today wasn’t the best first day ever.

1. After I got my computer all set up (except for SQL Server being mid-install), we discovered that my email didn’t work. In the process of trying to fix it, the IT guy accidentally made Exchange delete my AD account. Goodbye, all of that configuration I just did.
2. I looked at my phone at some point because I hadn’t seen the annoying blinking light go off telling me that I have email since about 9 AM, which is quite rare. Nothing. Wouldn’t respond to the wake/sleep button, wouldn’t respond to being slid open, wouldn’t boot after having the battery pulled. I messed with it periodically throughout the day, with plans to go to Sprint from work and see if they can tell me what’s wrong. Around 4:30 PM it finally started working for no particular reason.
3. Once I was back in and had working email and a working MSDN subscription, I finished installing all of my various development tools and set out trying to install our software. By the time I was almost done, I realized I was hungry. It was 4:15 PM. I forgot all about that whole eating thing. Hello, 9 hour day. (Oops.)
4. While getting ready to leave this morning, I discovered that both of my filtering water bottles need some serious cleaning. As a result, I didn’t have one to bring with me. So dehydrated.
5. Having consumed nothing since I left my apartment, I decided I was going to go buy a frozen pizza for supper. While walking into the store, some old lady decided that she was more important than me and flew in front of me into a parking spot just as I was getting up to the parking spot she crossed.
6. I picked up the aforementioned pizza and some $1/ea 32oz Gatorades. Just after getting out of the store, one of the handles on the plastic bag (I didn’t have any reusable bags as I hadn’t planned on going to the store) ripped. Got home and noticed a big hole in the bottom as well, but that didn’t rip further on me.

On the bright side, I discovered I have the 4th off!

My internet has been having problems for a couple of days at home, so I contacted TW help via twitter this morning. Unsurprisingly, they want to rule out the router.

I had hoped to connect my MacBook Pro to the modem and share the connection out to the other computers, but that doesn’t seem to work. All googling for stuff while working on my research now gets to be done on my phone.

My modem is in my office, which has poor lighting and window setup so I use it as a store room. Instead of cleaning it to use it for one day and be near the computer that’s connected to see if it loses access, I wrote a script that will alert me if something goes wrong.

The email didn’t get sent as soon as network returned because Mail had complained about not being able to access servers, but after I manually dismissed those it sent out. The actual script I have running will send an email as shown but also display a message box with the email’s contents (most importantly the time).

Today was Streets Alive here in Lincoln.

A few fairly major streets were partially or entirely blocked off from 11a-6p with the actual event running 12:30-5:00.

Sandy, Bob, and I all went and Karin and her husband showed (though sometime after we left the meeting point). We even saw Borky and T, though I don’t think they were participating.

There were all kinds of vendors and performers scattered along the route. Pepes was giving samples of cucumber lemonade, someone (I can’t remember who now) was doing smoothies from a pedal-powered blender (I’ve actually seen that somewhere else, some other event in town), Super Saver provided water, bananas, and granola bars.

One of the exhibits was some pottery place that does classes. They had some pre-made tiles that participants could design. Bob appeared to be too manly to participate and went for another loop, but Sandy and I stopped to make a couple of tiles.

I decided to use the design from our “I [bike] LNK” shirts. Conveniently, Sandy was wearing one of said shirts so I had reference material to work from. At one point, though, she did yell at me (“stop staring at my chest!”). Hehehe.

Travel there and back included, I did somewhere in the 18-20mi range or so and was beyond tired. Too much work and too little biking lately; my body wasn’t ready for that.

It was fun. I hope they decide to make it a yearly event. If so, they should do a better job of informing the public. We had quite a few cars driving parts of the route, going through a parking lot to get past the Street Closed signs, etc.

For the past couple of weeks, the cops in Lincoln have been warning and ticketing people who bike on the sidewalks downtown. While I’ll be the first to admit that I had ridden on the sidewalks there (though much slower and, hopefully, more observantly than most), it is illegal to do so. And as I’ve written before, not very safe.

I’m very much in favor of people not biking on the sidewalks. If we get more people biking in the streets, maybe the drivers will be more accustomed to us and not make it such a hostile environment for those of us who can’t maintain 40mph (in a 25, of course).

While I’m aware it’s hypocritical, what I’m not in favor of are the bike cops who repeatedly bike on the sidewalks, even with the ticketing, and don’t feel it applies to them.

A week or so ago, a friend saw a bike cop riding on the sidewalk near campus. When he told the cop that he wasn’t allowed to ride there, the cop replied saying he was “looking for someone.” Upon next sighting, he was in the street.

Know what’s better than stories of cops breaking the law? Pictures of it. Karin has started a new Tumblr called Biking in #LNK. While the blog will probably eventually feature other things, the first two posts are bike cops biking on sidewalks in areas downtown where biking on the sidewalk is illegal.

Thankfully, the delivery trucks have mostly stopped parking in the bike lane on 14th St. However, that lane is still in the middle of multiple lanes of traffic that send cars back and forth across the bike lane because of turn-only lanes. Everything from small cars to very large buses merge without looking for bikers.

If something could be done about the horrible drivers (AND the horrible cyclists — those red lights and stop signs apply to you, too; stop pretending they don’t), maybe more people would bike in the street and stop making the sidewalks so dangerous for pedestrians.

And with that, I’m off to campus. Which will include some biking downtown. In the street. Here’s hoping for decent car traffic!

For a few weeks (months?) now, my friend Sandy’s been talking about jumping out of a plane again. She’s got a better telephoto lens than I and wanted people to document the jump (as it would be her first static line jump), so I pushed back helping a friend move to go take pictures.

Flickr | Facebook (same pictures in each location)

Much more importantly than the images uploaded to those, I opened Photoshop (most of my photo editing is in Aperture).

I present the result of my Photoshop work: amanda_dance.gif and sandy_meets_corn.gif.

Just putting these somewhere where I can keep track of them.

• Nebraska Revised Statute 60-6,317. Bicycles on roadways and bicycle paths; general rules; regulation by local authority.
• Lincoln Municipal Code 10.48. Bicycles (PDF)

(via Brandon)

My current project at work involves interfacing with a Dell DX6000. While it has a REST API that you can work against, in an effort to have something fairly usable I would end up porting a large chunk of the existing API (whether directly or indirectly) to PHP if I were to write in that.

So, instead of reinventing the wheel, we decided to go with one of the languages they have an existing API for (C++, C#, Python, Java). C++ wouldn’t be a great choice (though could be amusing), and C# would require a Windows web server (unless Mono’s ASP.net stuff is decent yet?), so we’re left with Python and Java. The CDRH does some Python stuff with Django, but we don’t. We have one custom Java webapp (written long ago) and some third party Java stuff that we run. While I’m proficient in both Python and Java, with little-to-no experience doing web stuff in them, the fact that we already have a production Java environment running has us going that route.

For a couple of days last week and a few hours over the weekend, I’ve been writing blahg, a very minimal practice blog app in JSP. Having built in the basic functionality that I can refer to while writing my actual project as well as a general build script covering the things that I care about, I wanted to get one more thing figured out: integrating a CSS extension thing (LESS or SASS, for example) in such a way that the only instructions I need to provide for future developers on this project are how to configure pom.xml so that maven tomcat:redeploy works.

After a ton of searching, I ran across LESS for Java. There are two options for working with LESS in this library: 1) use the LessEngine class from within Java code to compile a String or a File with the LESS compiler, or 2) use LessServlet and map some/all CSS (and/or) JS files to run through it.

To simplify things, I chose route 2. The following shows the (relevant bits of) files to use LessServlet: