Category: Jake

Here’s hoping everybody had a good Thanksgiving and stuffed themselves silly. And if you’re one of those nut jobs that is going to get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to get the great deals on Black Friday, good luck (I’m sleeping in, myself). If you’re looking to by one of those dirt-cheap laptops that they’re selling at Wal-Mart, Staples, and Best Buy locally, read up here on the skinny on all of them and which is the best deal (I’d buy one, but don’t have any money nor motivation to get up at 4:00 to get there at 4:45 before they go on sale at 5:00AM). I really wanted to get in on the 200GB Hard Drive they have for roughly $30 bucks at Staples, but again, no money, no motivation to get up that early (but if anybody wants to buy one and contribute to my “I’m dead broke but need a less crappy computer” fund, feel free).

I’m working as we speak on building a couple localized sites that I won’t get into here for a variety of reasons, but I will now have a bit more free time on my hands. I’m still working out the bugs with another developer, but SPNW Supply is live. I was really my first major on-the-side gig that I’ve done, and learned a lot from it.

• Mambo/Joomla is insanely powerful, but it’s obviously built by geeks, for geeks. Doing the simplest of things in there is a royal pain in the butt compared to some less-fancy CMSes. The reason I chose this system (after talking to some developers) as this client wanted to be able to edit his site’s tutorial-type content as well has his catalog all from one interface. So we tied it together with phpShop, and it provides a nice clean back-end interface for doing things (far easier than their old site). It was a lot of fricken work, but I think it looks pretty decent and it’s far more usable than their previous system.
• I need better project management software to manage all communication better between developers, clients, etc… . I have folders setup both in Outlook and in Windows to keep track of this type of thing, but there surely has to be a better way. I’m looking at this Customer Manager software that came with the copy of Quickbooks that I have, and might give that a whirl, but wanted to see if anybody else had other ideas.
• I will never do a job like this again if I have to subcontract a good chunk of the work. While I’m making a few bucks (very few), I think it’ll just be far easier in the future if I can do all the work myself — meaning I probably couldn’t take on a job like this. While some of the developers I worked with on this were fine to work with, some I had to basically say “Screw you” to and move on to somebody else, losing me both time and money. I needed to screen folks better, I guess.
• I need a better, more solid contract. Thanks to a suggestion that Paul made to me a while back, I’m probably going to buy this book and get things a bit more solidified for myself.
• I need to quit doing sites for old friends of mine. This site was done for an old college buddy of mine who is their inside sales guy, so I made the mistake of thinking I’d be dealing with him primarily and that he’d be making the decisions on the site as he came to me. While I was dealing with him for the most part, he had to deal with his boss who was very particular about things, but didn’t want to deal with me directly and insisted on going through my buddy. It was a real mess. But it did make my buddy realize how little respect he got from his boss, so he’s actually already given his two weeks notice.
• Trying to work on this stuff on a computer you’re not used to working on is a pain. My usual workstation — my laptop — is out of commission, and due to be back in my hands later this week (hopefully sooner than later). It was much easier when that was my primary workstation as then I could work just about anywhere (home, work, cafe, etc…).

Just the same, the project is now live, and after I clean up all the dead links, make sure the SSL cert is working properly, and otherwise test, tweak, and fix, I can move on to other projects that I’ve been wanting to get done (that I’ll be mentioning here soon, as there are some locals I know that will enjoy them).

Update at 10:40: I realize that some folks here in Bend (especially folks on BendCableBroadband because they like to take forever to clear out their nameserver cache) are probably seeing the old site. If you see a guy sitting there in a chair, that’s the OLD site. If you see a little baby crawling across the floor, that’s the new site I refer to above. Hopefully within the next 24 hours the DNS will be fully cleared up so everybody can see the proper site.

Wondering where I was the last few days? I took myself offline. I had a few days off from work, and just chilled out at home for a few days. I didn’t have my laptop like I mentioned earlier, and while I had my wife’s computer, I just didn’t feel like getting online.

And you know what? It was nice to hide out for a bit.

That being said, I’m not looking forward to the e-mail onslaught now that I’m finally back online, but I guess there could be worse problems.

I just about destroyed the engine of our van today. I was changing the oil as usual (which I’ve done about 100 times on dozens of cars), tested it on idle in driveway, no obvious leaks (on quick glance, unfortunately), we were good to go.

Drove the car about half mile from the house, and the oil light came flying on, dinging quite loudly. Drove it back home (so maybe a mile, tops of driving), crawled back under with a flashlight this time (in the lovely rain and snow today, mind you), and oil was just pouring out from where the oil filter was mounted. I know I mounted it tight enough, so I opening the thing back up, drained out what little oil was left in the car, and noticed that there was another gasket on the car’s filter mount. The only thing I can think of was it was the o-ring from the old filter that had stuck when I removed it (one of them Oil Can Henry’s generic things), and it was OK on idle, but slipped out when it got some pressure.

So I let the car cool off, got the filter back on the correct way, and ran a bunch more oil into it (unfortuately, just some generic Cheveron oil that I could get at the local store as the auto parts stores around here were closed and I had no car to get to anything that might have other oil). Starts and runs fine now (thankfully), however, there’s a knocking noise that wasn’t there before. It’s not an unfamiliar noise, as it sounds like the same kind of knocking we hear when the car is low on oil, which we’re familiar with as the car has a minor crank-case gasket leak, according to the mechanic, so we keep a quart in the trunk with us (as it’d be expensive to drop the engine to fix that gasket). I’m really hoping this knocking isn’t anything more serious, but since I’m not remotely a mechanic (I’m a computer guy, but a quick learner, and can’t afford a mechanic), I have no clue.

I posted a thread on DodgeTalk (that’s basically a duplicate of this entry) to see if any of the Caravan gurus there can help me out, let me know if I should take the thing out to the desert and blow it up or not worry about the noise. If there are car geeks here, you’re welcome to comment here if you have any ideas (or if anybody local knows a local mechanic who needs some computer help and wouldn’t mind trading, I’d like to talk to him or her).

Update on 11/5: Drove the van around the block a few times, eventually the knocking went away, and hasn’t made a noise since. I’m just going to chalk this up to the car being cold and not lubricated, and call it good. Now I just need to get the snow tires on our cars (especially mine), as it looks like there’s quite a bit of snow at my office:

Just a few of the things that happened yesterday that kept me from blogging…

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