Bobbis.net

Friday night, August 26th, my Taurus finally kicked the bucket at I-235 and 19th st in Des Moines. In the last couple years it has been in the shop for numerous cooling system repairs. One of the coolant hoses ruptured and my engine over heated. We had to get an after-hours tow and get a ride back home form my dad who was coincidently in town. Also, many tanks to Gaila's aunt and uncle for entertaining us for the evening.

The shop in Des Moines fixed the ruptured hose and found because of the overheating I had blown the head gasket. A repair that would take over 10 hours of labor, pushing the repair cost to over the value of the working car. I ended up striping the after market audio system and junking the car for $250.

I've driven this car since my leaner's permit back in 1998 and only about 40,000 miles on it. Since then I put it through 100,000 miles of use. As recently as the summer of 2009 I drove it 1,000 miles out to my brother's wedding in Penn Yan, NY. It has been to Kansas City, Chicago, St. Louis and an infinite number of places in between. Almost every other weekend in the fall 2004 I drove it to Yankton, SD through the winding roads of the loess hills to spend time with my future wife. The best way to identify the car was the trailer hitch that was used more for bruising shins than for hauling the fold down camper. The best picture of the Taurus I could find was when a deer ran into it.

Last Saturday I bought a new (to me) car. A 2006 Kia Spectra with only 45,000 miles on it. I still need to get an antenna and cruse control installed as part of the deal. Then I need to figure out how to install auxiliary audio so I can play my podcasts from my iPhone on my commute.

I hope to run this one for at least another 100,000 miles and more than 15 years.

I did a presentation on Search Engine Optimization for the Drupal Corn group. Attached is the presentation slides that include links to the modules and resources I mentioned.

Download PDF Presentation

Articles

• Facebook Login Search Results
• JCPenny Case

Resources

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Google Analytics
• robots.txt

Helpful Drupal Modules

• SEO Checklist
• Automatic Node Title
• Path Auto
• Link Checker
• Scheduler
• Global Redirect
• Node Words (Drupal 6)
• Meta Tags (Drupal 7)
• XML Sitemap
• Google Analytics

I got mod_security from EPEL for my RHEL 5 setup. Apparently the binary you get from EPEL was compiled with the switch -DDISABLE_HTACCESS_CONFIG. I have been pulling my hair trying to get Apache to not throw an error 500 every time I wanted to selectively put in any mod_security directives. I ended up just throwing the directives directly into the VirtualHost or other context and reloading Apache.

Google had a hard time finding the problem, so I hope this blog post will help someone else.

I've seen QR codes popping up in the last few months. When I first encountered it in the wild, I saw a 2-D barcode and thought why it was so prominent on the advertising. I've seen 2-D barcodes on other things such as my at&t bill that turns out to be some sort of reference number. Being a geeky person, I decided to see if there was a 2-D barcode reader for iPhone and actually see what data was encoded in these codes.

Turns out an app I had that scans regular 1-D UPC barcodes could also scan QR codes (I had to enable QR for RedLaser by going to the Settings app). The first code in the wild I scanned was at Jeff's Pizza. I figured it might be a coupon or some sort of interesting information. I was disappointed that it was just a geo-location that brought up a non-mobile version of Google Maps. Not really a good experience.

Later I received a flyer in the mail for Cyclone basketball. On it was a QR code to scan to win a pair of tickets to a game of my choice. I won, but the experience of filling out the information on my mobile browser was not optimized for a mobile device (thank god it didn't require flash).

There are so many things you can do with QR codes. If done right, it can be a positive experience for the user. Since an encoded URL is not really seen by the user on the print, you can easily embed campaign codes to better track your advertising effectiveness. It also makes it much easier for the user to get additional information and engage the user in your message. However, if it is not done right, it may be confusing or even be a detriment a person's opinion of your message as it was for my first experiences with QR codes.

I've put together a few notes that might help people implement QR codes effectively:

• Since a lot of people don't know what a QR code is, perhaps offer instructions and a link to download a scanner somewhere near the code.
• Make sure you label your code with a call to action so the user knows what scanning the code will get them. "Scan this for today's coupon!". Just throwing a QR code up because it's the hip thing to do is not going to be effective.
• If you are linking to a website, make sure it is mobile optimized. You want to make it as easy as possible for your user to find the information they are looking for. If they have to zoom, scroll, and navigate to get the information they are looking for, you are going to lose them.

I'm sure there are other things that can make using QR codes easier and more fun, but following the points above will put you well ahead of most of the implementations I've seen so far.

Here is my plan for accomplishing these goals/resolutions. A few of them, I may need your help.

• Play Xbox on a regular basis with my brother
  • Set a recurring time, hopefully on a weekly basis, to play.
• iPod connection to my car stereo
  • Need to figure out how to get to the back of my deck to plug into the AUX input. If anyone can help me that would be great, otherwise I will take it into a car audio place and have them show me how to do it.
• Do a website for hire (outside of work)
  • Anyone have any leads? Don't really want to advertise on Craig's List. Would like to work for a local small business.
• It has been almost a decade since I've wanted to start learning Cocoa.
  • Set aside a couple hours every Saturday. Let it grow from there
• Give a presentation at Cocoaheads (dependent on above)
  • See above
• Be physically active at least once a week
  • Does anyone want to go bowling or something once a week? Perhaps Frisbee Golf when the weather gets better?
• Be less anti-social. Hang out with friends more often.
  • Could kill this one with the above. Also, now that the bar is done I should just invite people over.
• Get or build a new desk for my office
  • May have to wait 'til spring to be able to work in the garage. For now, make some measurements and look at perhaps a trip to Ikea?
• Get rid of clutter and items we don't use anymore
  • Got a box for things to get rid of. Wednesday nights post things on Craig's List, Freecycle, E-Bay
• Visit my brother in Philly
  • Determine if Gaila is coming with. Main issue is budget. Want to go the week of June 6 to catch Phillies Vs Cubs.

Gaila and I finished a bunch of work on the bar just before New Years. It has been functional for about a year, but we never got motivated to finish. Now, all that is left is a little bit of trim work. The rest of the room still needs some movie posters and the media center area needs some rejiggering. Check out the pics:

It's 2011 and there are still no flying cars. Weren't we supposed to have those 10 years ago?

When I was in school, I used to do a sumer goals list on here. Now that summers are not full of free-time, I've stopped doing summer goals. It has been more than a year since we bought our house and I feel like I've gotten into a rut. So, I guess I'll hop on the bandwagon of doing new year's resolutions. So, without further adieu, a list in no particular order.

• Play Xbox on a regular basis with my brother
• iPod connection to my car stereo
• Do a website for hire (outside of work)
• It has been almost a decade since I've wanted to start learning Cocoa. Set aside a couple hours each week to sit down and learn Cocoa
• Give a presentation at Cocoaheads (dependent on above)
• Be physically active at least once a week (not sure how to do this in the winter)
• Be less anti-social. Hang out with friends more often.
• Get or build a new desk for my office
• Get rid of clutter and items we don't use anymore
• Visit my brother in Philly

I will have to follow up on this to create a plan for how to attain these goals.

My mother-in-law brought her Quicksilver G4 to our place Monday evening to download and install months worth of updates. She is on dialup and doesn't have the most reliable connection, so trying to download all the updates would take forever. She also lives out in the country on a gravel road in an old house. The computer was really dusty.

So, after a good go at it with the canned air, I had to cobble together a display, keyboard, mouse and network for it. The machine doesn't have bluetooth, and the only working mice in the house were bluetooth. I didn't have a VGA monitor easily available, so I ended up hooking it up to my TV's computer input. I used a Dell keyboard and had to make an old Microsoft wireless RF mouse work again by cleaning out the leaked battery crap on the contacts.

To get networking to it (it didn't have AirPort), I figured I could steal the ethernet from the Mac Mini. The cable couldn't reach with the setup, so I pulled out a switch and another cable to make it reach only to find out the ethernet port was not working. I plugged the ethernet back into the Mini and pulled out a long FireWire cable and turned on Internet Sharing on the Mini. Yay, I've got Internets on the G4! Updates installed quickly and she whent home with an updated machine.

I finally got my Exchange account at work moved over to Exchange 2007. This means I can sync nicely with Apple Mail, iCal, and my iPhone. So, today I decided I would start forwarding my university address to Exchange instead of Gmail. I set the forward to go to Exchange and left work. At dinner I find almost 2,000 new messages waiting on my phone, and the number was growing quickly. I soon realized that I had, a long time ago, set a server-side rule in Exchange to redirect my Exchange mail to the university address. Once I changed my university forwarding from Gmail to Exchange, I ended up with an infinite loop:

1. Email comes to netid@iastate.edu
2. Email forwards to exchange server
3. exchange server keeps message and redirects copy to netid@iastate.edu
4. Repeat.

To fix this, I had to remote into my computer at work and fire up my Windows virtual machine so I could access the server-side rules in Outlook. Fun stuff.

A lot has happened since my last update. I got married, bought at house, and my brother got married. I've been kind of busy lately.

The Wedding

The date was May 2nd. The service was excellent and we got to see lots of friends and family, however we didn't have much time to hang out with them. We got lots of nice presents, thank you all. We are working on thank-you's, but as you can imagine there is a lot going on.

The honeymoon in Cancun was great. We stayed at the Sun Palace all-inclusive resort. Being at the height of the swine flu scare, there were not very many people there, which made it nice. Turns out, we were at a higher risk of being exposed in Ames than in Cancun since, at the time, there were no reported cases near Cancun and there were reports from Marshalltown and ISU the night of our wedding. The downside was some of the attractions were closed or on limited hours as a precaution.

The House

As soon as we got back from our honeymoon we got in contact with a realtor to start house hunting. A couple weeks of hunting we narrowed our choices to two. One on a corner lot that had an awesome finished basement with a very nice master suite and wet bar, but the back yard was the size of a postage stamp. The other was also in Nevada on an almost 1/3 acre lot with a basement that had potential. The corner lot house sold before we were ready to put in an offer, so we offered on the 1/3 acre lot home. After a bit of work negotiating on the price and our realtor doing a lot to save us money we closed on July 13th. (Plug for the realtor, Cheryl Eddy).

We are still trying to find a home for a lot of our stuff in the house, but for the most part we are functioning. The basement has already been torn up to make room for our own man cave, with my office, media center and, of course, a wet bar (we got ideas from the other house). Also in the future we would like to put in a back door to a nice deck so we can properly enjoy our large back yard. Looking forward to that nice stimulus check.

My Brother's Wedding

A little more than a week after closing, it was time to drive out to Keuka Lake, NY for my brother's wedding. The ceremony was lakeside at a restaurant and inn. The ceremony was nice and the party was lots of fun. After the wedding day, it was a week of hanging out at a lake side home my parents rented. Gaila and I got to meet a bunch of Jason's friends and Amaris' friends and family. We got a lot of time on the boat and even managed to catch some fish. A nice vacation from the stress of moving.

In case you haven't noticed, I've got the quotes rotating on my page again and added a couple new ones.