EdWords - The Ramblings of Ed Salisbury

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

So, it’s been a while since I’ve actually blogged, so I figured I’d update y’all as to what I’ve been doing:

• I started playing Star Wars Galaxies again
• I’m taking History at the local community college
• I got an iPhone
• I went to San Diego
• I have a bum hip
• I went to Las Vegas
• I’ve been working on my super-secret web project again
• I’m working on cool Halloween costumes

SWG: So, my friend Chris and I started up playing SWG again — there seems to be a lot of new stuff to do, so been having fun with that.

History: Since I knew I was going to be traveling a lot this quarter, I elected to do a class online this semester.  Since there’s not that many classes I can actually do online, I figured I might as well take History.  So far so good, although I got a 75% on my first test :(  I made it up with the last test — I got a 96%!

iPhone: It took me a while before I pulled this trigger — when I saw my friend Ray’s, I had to have one — they’re just so freakin cool!   No buyer’s remorse here — definitely worth the cash

San Diego: In August, my niece Melanie got married in San Diego, and I went there (along with other family) to see her off.  It had been a while since I was in SD — was definitely a memorable experience.  Other than the wedding itself, the most memorable parts were: Closing down The Beach (a bar at the W, complete with bonfires and sand :), losing my keys at said bar and freaking out about it the following day, and then spending some time in ER a few days later!  I’m not sure if the events were related or not… :)  After that weekend, I spent the week in San Jose.

My hip: So after my trip to San Diego and San Jose, my left hip started bothering me.  My doc put me on 800mg IB, but that didn’t do much besides deadened the pain a little bit.  I’m still limping pretty heavily –  have an appointment to see an ortho in a week or so — hopefully he’ll fix me up.

Las Vegas: I took Brandy to LV las month (with bad hip and all) — was cool, but not being able to move really sucked the fun out of the trip

Web Project: I have had an idea for a website for many many many many years now, and with the current economic status, I figured it would probably be a good idea to knock it out.  Hopefully I’ll get it to the beta stage and can start getting people in to check it out!

Halloween: So a couple of months ago, I had an idea of going all out this year.  We’re not normally the type to do much for Halloween, but since I’ve been so heavily interested in Star Wars lately, I mentioned doing a SW theme for the family.  They were totally on board!  Daphne is going to be a jawa, Amelia is going to be a jedi padawan, Brandy is going to be Leia (ANH, no golden bikinis ), and I’m going to be… Vader :)  Mine is going to be the most work.  I’m making mine and Daphne’s costumes — I’ll of course post pics when we’re all done.  Will need to find some costume contests to enter

Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

So, last Monday I started on a weight loss program to shed some L-B’s.  I believe that before I started, I weighed over 340 lbs, and today I am down to 333.  Not bad for 1 week, even though a lot of that was water weight.   In order to make things a little easier and more hi-tech, I wrote a couple of simple webapps that I could use with my Blackberry to keep track of things:

• Weight Tracker
• Calorie Counter
• Glucose Tracker

I also started the 100 Push Ups program so that I can do something physical at the same time.  My initial test: 5 push-ups.  Better than 0 I guess

At the end of one week, I think that things are going swimmingly.  My first goal is to hit 310 for my niece’s wedding at the end of August.  I should be able to hit this goal if I keep at it.  If anyone feels like the simple web apps would work for them and would like the source code or for me to make them useful for others, just let me know, I’d be happy to help.  (The data entry page is a simple webform that’s easily navigatable with mobile devices)

Filed under: weightloss | 2 Comments »

So yesterday we were over at a neighbor’s house to celebrate the 4th, with fireworks, etc. and two new 8-year-old girls showed up that we hadn’t seen before.  They said that they were visiting their Aunt who lived in our neighborhood.  These girls were our around our kid’s age, so they were playing together, biking, etc.  One of our friend’s children gave the new girls some toys and some American flags in a backpack, which they proceeded to (quickly) take back to their Aunt’s house.  A few minutes later, they came back, with flags in hand (but no toys) to return them.

“What are these flags for?”

“To celebrate the 4th of July.”

They looked at the adult who said this with a confused look on their face.  When the parent came by to pick them up a few hours later, Brandy tried to talk to them in general, and found that they spoke very little English.  (The kids spoke English just fine, but with a slight accent)

So, Brandy and I were talking about it this morning — were the kids not allowed to have the flags?  They kept the other toys just fine.  How can people live in this country and not have any idea what the 4th of July is about?  Many people in this country celebrate Cinco de Mayo, and it’s not even our holiday!  Are they oblivious or do they just not care?

I hope everyone had a great (safe) holiday!

Filed under: Life | No Comments »

So, lately I’ve been feeling rather fat — moreso than usual.  I’ve been gaining weight lately, but haven’t been looking at the scale out of fear.  Today, I decided to step on the digital scale to see what I’m weighing in at.  My fears were warranted — the scale read “0L”.  My heart sunk.  I actually did reach the point where the scale said “One at a time, please!”  While out and about this evening, we stopped at the mall and while I was in the restroom there, I saw that there was one of those coin-op scales.  I said, why not, I’ll see what it says.  “352.4″  Jeebus Crisco, what the hell have I done to myself??  I’m now officially the heaviest I’ve ever been.  I gotta stop this.  Monday is the day.

Filed under: Life | No Comments »

So, a week or so I got a Blackberry from work. I really haven’t done much with it until today, so now I’m sitting here trying to think of cool and interesting ways to use it. I’ve gotten twitterberry installed, and now I’m blogging from it.

Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

So, I have a rather large collection of files — music, photos, etc., and lately my server, Twiki, has been feeling rather full.  I solved this problem by heading to Costco and picked up a new 1TB Western Digital MyBook external HD, with USB and Firewire.  All of my other drives on that box have been USB, and this was the first FW-capable drive to be added, but unfortunately Twiki’s hardware is a little on the old side, so no on-board firewire.   I did, however have a card sitting in my Box O’ Parts, so I thought I’d see how Fedora 6 would handle it.  Powered down, gave him a thorough cleaning (cough cough, my god the dust bunnies must have ties to their real-life counterparts — it was a mess!)  Plopped the new card in, hooked everything all back up and powered it on.  I let it boot up, and logged in.  Lo and behold, the icon for the new drive was sitting on my desktop!  I was thoroughly impressed!  I hadn’t had that kind of luck with this box, like ever.  I repartitioned and formatted (natch) and added it to the fstab, and did a reboot test to verify everything was still good to go.  No issues!  Twiki is very happy!

By the way, here’s a tip you might find useful.  For hot-pluggable media that you don’t want to have move around on you every time you reboot (the /dev entry can be different depends on what order the drives get detected), a friend of mine suggested using the /dev/disk/by-id entry instead of /dev/sdXX.  For this drive, the /dev/by-id entry is:

/dev/disk/by-id/ieee1394-0090a9cc933d1bbf:0:0-part1  for ieee (firewire) drive blah partition 1.  Unfortunately the name isn’t very descriptive — my USB drives had names like usb-WD_4000KD_External_57442D574D414D5931373030363734-part1 which, while long, is still more indicative of being my Western Digital 400 GB USB HD.  In any case, this ID should never change, so is suitable for fstab.

Filed under: Linux, Unix | No Comments »

Today I went with Brandy to go see the latest Indy flick, (partially courtesy of my employer who gave free tickets to people that wanted to go, albeit at the ungodly hour of 10 am) I went into the movie feeling like it would be 2 hours and 4 minutes of a geriatric Harrison Ford with a walker stumbling about, but was pleasantly surprised. They didn’t try to pass him off as a spry young Indy (that was of course the role of Shia LeBeouf), and the dynamic worked well. They even joked about his age — “What are you, 80?” All in all, it was an entertaining flick, although perhaps a little far-fetched at times, but not enough to pull me out of the experience.

4/5 stars.

Filed under: Movies | No Comments »

So, based on a tweet from @wilw, I found out that today was Free Comic Book Day, so I took the family to see what treasures were in store at our local comic shop (Mile High Comics) We each grabbed a free comic and since they were having a sale on just about everything else that was non-free, I picked up a couple of TBPs — Wolverine Origins #2, and Sin City. I’ve been wanting to get back into comics for a bit, and this was a good excuse We also did a fair bit of garage saling today, and I managed to pick up a few boxed old-school (and some not so new) video games, and a couple of LOTR board games. After lunch at Taste of Philly (mmmm, cheesesteaks) I went to the college to finish up my take-home Calc II final with a team member (cool prof) and then headed to see Iron Man. I was pretty impressed with it actually. All in all, it was a pretty righteous geekfest today — now, only if I had fellow geeks to share it with…

Oh yeah, I should probably mention that I started a new blog, GameLuvr. I’ve been wanting to play more games, especially old-school games, so I figured I might as well document it.

Filed under: Comics | No Comments »

So, a while back, Chris showed me what people have been doing with Perler Beads, which are these little beads that you melt together to form into cool designs. People have been taking video game sprites and have been making some very cool items with them. I recently got started with them, and decided I’d make a tool to make it a little easier to layout the design, color match to the Perler palette, etc. Well, after a few hours of work, here it is! PerlerPal. I’d really like any comments you might have!

Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »