Category: Jake

OK, we haven’t got the car yet, as I need to head to the bank on Monday to get a bit of financing through. Any locals have some good recommendations? I’m probably going to go through a credit union because the rates are better, and I only need a small amount.

Anyway, my mom saw a posting at her work for a minivan for sale. She sent it my way, I called, it was a good deal, and within our price range, and we went for it.

So barring any stupid troubles at the bank, come early next week, I should be the proud owner of a 1996 Doge Caravan SE with right at 100,000 miles that I got for less than $3,000. It’s in great shape, runs great, and even has a remote starter. I’ve heard folks have had trouble with this year’s transmission, but they’ve said they never had trouble with it. But you’re always going to by a used car that could potentially have problems, so what are you going to do?

What that does mean is that I have a car to get rid of: A 1988 Honda Civic Sedan (4-door, 5-speed manual). It’s got 187,000 miles, gets 38+ miles per gallon on the highway, and the engine’s got a lot of miles left. I’ve even got a set of 4 studded tires on Honda rims so you can change thing over yourself. I also put a CD player in it as well. It’d be a great high schooler’s car or commuter car. I put a new clutch and left axle on the car last year, and just replaced the spark plugs and wires and just had the oil changed.

The problem is that it needs a new right axle (actually, it’s the CV joint, but it’s easier to just replace the whole axle). That’ll run you about $200 for parts and labor with most mechanics. It’s also got a lot of little dents as well as a bigger one underneath the right tail light (light still functions).

E-mail me an offer or comment here if you’re interested or need more specs (the car is located in Bend, Oregon, for those who are interested). I can send pictures, if you like (once I clean the thing up).

Why no links today? Because I’ve been stupidly busy, that’s why. That, and I’ve been working on a new project. It’s slow, ugly, and not totally functional yet, but I’m working on it.

Basically what I’m trying to do is create a Central Oregon blog aggregator similar to ORBlogs, but on a much smaller scale. ORBlogs, while a tremendous resource, is getting huge. Since Paul, the guy who runs ORBlogs, has told me on many occasions that his code isn’t ready for public consumption, I’ve had to take my limited programming skills (primarily PHP) and try to wing this.

I’m using lilina as my starting point for this. It uses the MagpieRSS libraries to do it’s work. It’s pretty slick, but doesn’t do exactly what I’d like it to do. I’m trying to get it to output an RSS feed, for example, and it’s caching is really weird so I’d like it to run via a cron job. And don’t like its binary flat-file storage method, but I couldn’t find a PHP script that would work well that I could actually understand (and I don’t have the programming skills to write my own). And for the life of me, I couldn’t get the other solution I found to work for the life of me.

So my to-do list for bendblogs.com (mostly so I have a reference point other than a text file on my hard drive):

• Get the rest of the sites I have stored inputted and indexing.
• Get an informational blog setup over there.
• Figure out a way to sort the sources alphabetically (maybe play with the last updated stuff here).
• Figure out a way to get an RSS feed for the site.
• Figure out a way to smooth out the caching and speed things up.
• Add a “Submit” and a “Removal” request forms, as well as FAQ, About, Contact, etc….
• Customize the CSS quite a bit more (as that’s one of the stylesheets that come with the script).
• Get a credits spot setup.
• And whatever else you guys can think up….

Things I’ve already Done:

• Changed the PHP date variables so that they’re actually readable by normal humans.
• Made it so that entry summaries don’t fill up the entire page (only am take the first 175 characters of the entries, sans HTML code, which I had to strip off as well).
• Fixed it so that systems that don’t store a title in their RSS feeds (LiveJournal, for example) will default to the first 25 characters of the entry as the title.
• Commented out a lot of code for extraneous crap I don’t need (like furl, google, and del.ico.us integration).
• Created a cheesy logo.
• Tweaked where various links were going so that things made a bit more sense.
• Removed a crapload of extraneous javascript code.

Like I said, I’m not a studly programmer by any means, so I’m just amazed the thing is up and running and tweaked (learning a lot during the process here). If anybody wants to help at all with this, they will certainly get credit in the Credits area (which will be on the front page once it’s all up and running). E-mail me (jake @ this site’s domain) if you’re interested.

But meanwhile, test it out, have fun, and let me know if you find something stupidly obvious that’s wrong. Either comment here or e-mail me.

As many long time readers of this blog know, I had surgery on my back just over a year ago. Despite getting the surgeon for free, I still had to pay off the hospital and some other bills. I’m happy to say that my tax return killed off my remaining balance, and I now I don’t owe the local hospital a single dime — and now I have an extra $95/month in my pocket.

Now if I could just get rid of my student loans, then life would be good, and I’d have another $130/month in my pocket.

If you’re interested, you have just under three hours to make your picks on Yahoo!’s tournament pick ’em. If you’d like, I’ve created a group that you’re welcome to join. The group name is “UtterlyBoring”, group ID is “109606”, the password is “utterly”. Just sign up with that information here.

Yes, I know it’s last minute, and my picks probably don’t make any sense, but that’s the great thing about March Madness: I still might be right.

I’ve been busy!

• Dragged 5000-run 4.25×5.5″ and a 8.5×5.5″ postcards (fresh from the printer) to the mail house after compiling some mailing lists for said postcards.
• Designed another half-page postcard to have printed at a future date.
• Had to cover the butt of the boss who neglected to sign a contract and had to sweet talk an ad sales lady into letting me have ad space in the program for some golf show said boss is going to.
• Found out that the ad for said program is due today, and had to bust my butt to get an ad designed. Once ad was designed, had to call the ad sales lady (left yet another message) wondering why her e-mail account is dead.
• Completely re-did a co-worker’s MS Publisher document that she created in the hopes that we could give it to our potential homeowners (it had Comic Sans MS in it, for crying out loud).
• Been blowing up the printer running specialized documents for the front desk.
• Had to weasel my way into getting same day tickets from Mt. Bachelor for one of our guests, and then go into Bend to get tickets.
• Had to design four more items for our property management contract package.
• Called a radio station in Portland that we’ve worked with before to get some spots on the air.
• Called the lady running the aforementioned golf show to see if we can get Internet access at the booth. She doesn’t have a clue, and apparently I’d have to call SBC to get a phone line ran to the booth (this is a pretty big show, and to not have ‘net access at the booth or in the building is crap).
• And a pile of other stupid stuff that takes up far too much time….

I managed to get through my RSS feeds, and I have a pile of links sitting here waiting to be posted, but I’ll be damned if I’ve gotten time to do anything online the last few days.

And as soon as I can get a couple other projects off my back, life will much better. I’ve been trying to figure out some Python permissions issues on one project, and I don’t know a damn thing about Python, and I’ve been trying to just finish this other project for a site’s redesign, but haven’t had time to finish up the final pieces of it.

Backed up at work, backed up at play, backed up with a pile of personal projects. I’ll post more details later when I’m remotely ready to release some of them to the public — at least a couple are getting close to public beta status. I’m just backed up, despite having a bunch of wonderful links to post (sometimes I wish this site had a few other authors so it didn’t sit empty, but I digress).

And it’s just such a frickin’ nice day outside, it’s hard to be motivated to accomplish anything.

Blogging sporadic over the next few days. Maybe I’ll get a few links posted, maybe I won’t — we’ll just have to see (as tomorrow will be a busy day, too). I just need another 10 hours in the day and need to be able to train myself to not need sleep, and life would be good.