[ Posted by Ryan Rickerts ]
Wow, the electronics team is on fire this week! Must be the Leap Day phenomenon.
Look for the “videos” link on the right, under Pages. It will show you all our delightful YouTube videos at once.
Susie will work on adding footage of Q’s new skills, such as crawling, playing catch with Bandit, and more! I will work on archiving the older stuff into a separate page.
Enjoy, sports fans!
[ Posted by Ryan Rickerts ]
As Susie promised, I applied my “electronics skills” to the Flickr API. We are now displaying all the images from those galleries here for your viewing consistency, and you should notice the links in the sidebar.
Just to be really consistent, our image sets on Flickr are also linked over here once they have been added to the blog.
So what’s all the sorcery about? We have a bit of software called FlickrExport that synch’s Susie’s sets in iPhoto to Flickr in a few button clicks. Then I copied the Page class in Typo, called it Gallery, and added a method that identifies each photoset through the Flickr API using rflickr. So it is one more click to update the listing of content here with new galleries.
We will add descriptions, links to larger versions of the image, better layout, and maybe even some javascript slideshow effects to the gallery pages (eventually). But now, the hour has grown late, and this is really not my day job…
[ Posted by Ryan Rickerts ]
We put new floors in our kitchen/office/laundry/mud room this weekend. Actually, we paid for a Hispanic guy named “Junior” and his trusty assistant to do it. But we had to move half of our house into the other half of our house, including all 5 of our major appliances, which was logistically challenging. It also made our lives pretty jumbled for about 48 hours.
But it is now done and looks great! Susie was inspired by the open walls to paint, so we even have a new color in the kitchen – it’s called “Honey Butter” (formerly Birds Egg Blue). We will post pictures as soon as the new counter tops and trim is done.
Adding to the challenge, but also very rewarding, was Quincy’s new-found mobility. She started crawling on Friday! Unfortunately, it was while Daddy was at work, but now she can do it pretty much anytime she wants. As soon as she figured out how to flop over that pesky leg, the rest of the movements seemed to follow. She can now cross a room pretty quickly and find something to try and climb. She even managed to boost herself to standing position at the couch! Watch out - suddenly everything in our house seems very accessible.
Susie brought home another form of baby transportation today, courtesy of her boss Bill (or Grandpa Bill). It’s a Tot Rider, something she sits in and can scoot around on her feet. With our new smooth floors, she was on the go in no time flat!
Wow, it sure is different when they can move under their own power. I feel quite occupied by it (literally).
Videos to follow soon.
[ Posted by Ryan Rickerts ]
I’m in my 2nd week at a new job. I’m an “associate programmer” at Saturna Capital Corporation.
What is Saturna? Well, you could check out their website. Basically, they (we?) provide brokerage services as well underwriting mutual funds, managing 401(k)s, IRAs, and the like. I don’t actually know what all this means, which is all part of the fun! I have to learn quite a bit the investment industry, as well as a new language and platform.
The custom program (a.k.a. application) I will be working on is called Neptune. It was originally written over a decade ago by the company founder, Nick Kaiser, to manage their funds and other internal business. It is written in and runs upon a rather uncommon database development software called 4D (or 4th Dimension). It has been maintained sort of “on the side” by a few different people over the years. Now there will be two full-time people maintaining and improving it, so it should get much better. If not, maybe we’ll just have to re-write it using something like Rails!
Another really nice, unique feature about this business is it’s almost entirely run on Macs! We made the switch at home a few months ago when I got Susie a Mac Mini. I have been running on my MacBook Pro for well over a year now. So my life is almost entirely cleaned out of that junkie crack called WinDough$, and I’m loving it.
There are more fringe bennies, like being located at the core of downtown Bellingham, one block away from the Co-op and across the street from the YMCA (where I get a free membership and a discounted one for Sue and Q), free haircuts at the salon downstairs, lots of cool people to meet and chat with, and so forth.
I will post more as I learn more. In the meantime, check out my stylish, professional photograph for the staff directory (click to see it in context):
[ Posted by Susie Rickerts ]
Hello all you Quincy fans! I am starting to load our new website with many of my favorite pictures of Q. She is such a ham in front of the camera that we have a ton!
In the near future Ryan is going to snazzy this up a bit with his ‘electronics skills’. There will eventually be a page that is titled ‘gallery’ with all the photos. But for now, click on one of the pictures to the right and it will take you to flickr. There you can watch a slideshow of all the pictures that I am adding.
Enjoy!
[ Posted by Susie Rickerts ]
Ryan has just created this new website for our family. You can check us out here periodically for new posts and images. Quincy no doubt will have the most air time…but you are probably here to see her anyways!
Take care!
[ Posted by Ryan Rickerts ]
I just built up this snazzy application for showing off our beautiful family. I can’t wait to get started! But first, let me tell you how it works:
This site is hosted at RailsMachine. They host Ruby on Rails applications, which are my favorite to work with, but in a special way. For a fairly handsome monthly rate, I get a slice of their server called a VPS, or virtual private server. Basically, it means I can do whatever I want – upgrade the software, run special jobs, almost anything. They also include some pre-written tasks that help me set up my Rails application, which you are looking at right now.
This application is a copy of some open-source blogging software called Typo. It is a body of Ruby on Rails code designed for easily posting content to the web. Not that much different than what we were doing on Typepad, you say? Not much, except 1) I can host it at whatever domain name I choose (see your address bar, and 2) I own a copy of the code. So that means I can totally customize it, along with the server environment, to do almost anything I can imagine. Well, at least as much as quality, open-source web development software will let me.
So let’s just see what sort of cool stuff I can pull off. This is also a practice run for another project I am involved in called BicycleNorthwest.com. More on that later.
