{"id":244,"date":"2008-03-03T10:39:52","date_gmt":"2008-03-03T16:39:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/?p=244"},"modified":"2008-03-03T10:39:52","modified_gmt":"2008-03-03T16:39:52","slug":"the-automated-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/the-automated-home\/","title":{"rendered":"The Automated Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

Man I like my new coffee maker.\u00a0 I didn’t realize how bad of coffee our old one was making until I tasted a cup from the new one.\u00a0 I’d have cashed in the Braun a long time ago.\u00a0 Plus, the new one has the “schedule” feature, so when you get out of bed you’ve got a nice hot carafe of coffee brewed up and ready.\u00a0 (Actually the old one had that too, we just didn’t use it for whatever reason.)\u00a0 The only downside is that the bean grinder sounds like a jet airplane taking off, but I’m getting used to that;\u00a0 Just another alarm clock.\u00a0 We picked up a Roomba<\/a> too, and that’s working out very nicely.\u00a0 My biggest fear when we bought it was that the dogs would attack it, but they don’t even seem to pay attention to it.\u00a0 We schedule it to run while we’re sleeping, so when we wake up in the morning we’ve got a fresh pot of coffee and a clean floor.\u00a0 Ahhhh, wonderful times.<\/p>\n

Friday afternoon I went out to some gun range in Independence with a few guys from work for some shootin’.\u00a0 Fun stuff there.\u00a0 It was an indoor range though;\u00a0 All-in-all I’d rather be outside, at least if the weather is decent.\u00a0 After that episode of manliness, I met the wife down at the Brooksider for a “date night.”\u00a0 (I spare no expense on these events, obviously.)\u00a0 We socialized there for a few hours, then walked down the street a few doors for dinner at Jalapenos.\u00a0 (This is remarkably similar to every other Friday night;\u00a0 We just decided to call this one “date night.)\u00a0 Usually you have a long wait for dinner on a Friday night, but since they went non-smoking we just sit at the bar if there’s a line for a table, which was the case on this night.\u00a0 Being the last Friday of the month, they were serving my favorite too;\u00a0 The chicken verde burrito.\u00a0 SCORE.\u00a0 After dinner we went home to watch a movie.\u00a0 The evening selection was 3:10 to Yuma<\/a>, one of the 8 movies in existence we both agreed sounded interesting.\u00a0 I found it so exciting I fell asleep about 10 minutes into it, effectively ending date night.<\/p>\n

Saturday I had planned to go out to Mom’s and pick up my motorcycle, which I was pretty fired up for.\u00a0 I wasn’t entirely certain where to put it once I got it home, since Donette parks her new bus in the garage, but I decided to just worry about that part later.\u00a0 So, we waited for it to warm up a bit, then made the arduous journey to Peculiar.\u00a0 We had a typically fine lunch at “The Best Burrito” to start things off.\u00a0 I had the chile relleno and enchilada combo plate.\u00a0 Their rellenos are quite good, and I find them easy on my braces too, so that’s been one of my common orders lately.\u00a0 After lunch we went back to the house and I tried to fire up the Yamaha;\u00a0 Alas, no joy.\u00a0 Drawing on my extensive military mechanic skills, I was able to diagnose the problem as a dead battery.\u00a0 In reality, the issue could be anything from a dead battery, to bad fuel, to a faulty fetzer valve.\u00a0 But, a battery is the only thing I know how to fix so that’s what I diagnose everything as.\u00a0 If that doesn’t fix it, well, time to figure out how to get it to the shop.\u00a0 So, I hooked up a charger and we drove back home bike-less.\u00a0 For dinner, given the exceptional weather, we fired up the grill and cooked some pork chops<\/a>.\u00a0 We did some green beans on the grill too, and that worked out surprisingly well.\u00a0 After dinner I retired to the computer chair to work on installing a new bulletin board on my web server.\u00a0 The time has come to ditch the old reliable cgi script I’ve used for years.\u00a0 It attracts spam like a friggin’ magnet;\u00a0 I get like 75 to 100 crappy posts every day on that stupid thing.\u00a0 Of those, at least a few make it through and actually get posted, and I’m tired of cleaning them up.\u00a0 So, I decided it would be easiest to instead go with the most popular “forum based” one, phpBB<\/a>.\u00a0 Having a somewhat quirky web server<\/a> though, nothing is ever too easy, and I gave up after a few hours.<\/p>\n

Sunday morning started off very early, when I had an early-morning revelation what was wrong with my server.\u00a0 Naturally this precluded going back to sleep, so I got up and started working on that again.\u00a0 It took a few hours, but it’s up and working now<\/a>, at least at some level.\u00a0 Get to figuring it out if you want to use it, ’cause as soon as I waste some time getting it to look a little better I’m getting rid of the old one.\u00a0 It was still rather early when I got done with that project, but I decided to just get on with the day instead of going back to bed.\u00a0 Incidentally Mom called and said the indicator light on the battery charger had turned green, so hopefully that means my motorcycle will start now.\u00a0 Given the gale force winds and the threat of rain I decided not to go try it out though.\u00a0 After reading the paper and watching a few hours of news on TV, I headed off to loiter at the gym for a while.\u00a0 I like going up there on Sundays because I have time to enjoy some of the “amenities,” like the sauna and the pool.\u00a0 Nobody seemed to appreciate me practicing my cannonball technique in the lap pool, but they’ll get over it.\u00a0 Pools are supposed to be fun<\/strong>.\u00a0 After that moderately healthy activity, I met up with Martin at the Brooksider to have a stogie and watch some TV.\u00a0 Alas, for some reason or another the place was full of college kids, whoopin’ and hollerin’ and making a generally unacceptable racket.\u00a0 I don’t know what the deal was;\u00a0 It’s not Spring Break yet is it?\u00a0 Oh well, we stayed for a while and then went to the Westport Flea Market<\/a> and met the wives for dinner.\u00a0 I had a blue cheese burger with extra onions and fries.\u00a0 Aside from having to sandblast the film off my braces when we got home, it was delicious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Man I like my new coffee maker.\u00a0 I didn’t realize how bad of coffee our old one was making until I tasted a cup from the new one.\u00a0 I’d have cashed in the Braun a long time ago.\u00a0 Plus, the new one has the “schedule” feature, so when you get out of bed you’ve got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}