I decided I wanted to try two things for my birthday vacation: 
I had seen the Turo app, and saw that you could rent just about any type of car on it, and I’ve been thinking about wanting to see how ready for prime time the Tesla really is.
I ran into a situation where I had a number of resources in a CloudFormation stack that may already exist, or I might want to make creation of those objects optional.
To achieve this it turns out that CloudFormation actually has a nice facility, although it is a bit awkward.
A few weeks back, I was walking to the store. It’s a short walk (about 3/4 of a mile) with a very slight grade. I walk a lot, usually a few miles a day, mostly by choosing to walk while waiting for the train, or when going to the market.
This time, when I got almost to the store, I started having some chest pain. I thought maybe I was feeling the precursor to a heart attack, or that maybe that bug from last week had turned into pneumonia. I hadn’t been walking that briskly, and I was really out of breath in addition to the pain (both of which were odd for me, especially since I had walked relatively slowly).
Naturally, I immediately made an appointment to see my doctor (although in hindsight I probably should have gone to the ER). He saw me, had an EKG machine brought in, and didn’t see anything, but referred me to cardiology to get a stress EKG.
Most of my career was spent in healthcare, working in IT for providers, coordinating third party payments, and being a consumer battling with crazy multi-layered payment systems. I was lucky enough to be healthy in my youth and get by without insurance (although my feet still point in different directions thanks to breaking my ankle and not going for treatment). I have clear experience with seeing how the system is so badly broken, and it seems to me we’re not addressing the actual problems.
I feel like people miss the point of the ACA, which was a first draft at controlling costs and a start to healthcare reform. I also believe that repealing it will do more damage than simply starting to address the shortcomings and work on reforming the actual problem.
I occasionally run into weird permission problems after a restore of files and folders on my machine, I think it has to do with OSX trying to protect me from myself.
Today I needed to fire up my coding environment on my Mac Mini, so I jumped into the folder for the code that I wanted to update using SourceTree, and did (what I thought was going to be) a quick pull, only to get a weird error message.
Sometimes I get my branch in a state where I need to reset things to what is on the server. Most of the time a simple switch of branches is enough to get everything back in shape, but once in a while I need to actually reset to what is in the parent repo.
To reset your local working copy to exactly what is in the remote (typically called origin) do the following:
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git fetch git reset --hard <em>origin/branch</em> git clean -x -d -f |
These should be done in the root of your project.
I needed to do some work on an old Maven project I have that I’ve worked on for years, and when I fired up my handy Netbeans IDE and ran the obligatory “priming build”, I was surprised to get an error on one of the basic Maven plugins. Continue reading
For testing, sometimes I need to validate web behaviors like redirects on SSL, and one of the reasons I love the Mac is that it gives me a ready to roll Apache server. I actually run a local copy of my web site on my Mac, and have it set up as a virtual host so that I can just browse directly to it. Continue reading
Two years ago, I moved to Salt Lake City for work. After looking around a bit for a rental property close to my new work, it became clear that I would be better off trying to buy a new home than renting if I could afford to do so. At the time the interest rates and property values in Salt Lake City were very low, so monthly mortgage payments were often cheaper than rental prices.
Sitting at the Salt Lake Roasting Company after we first moved here, we found a really nice real estate agent (Jaral Ferwerda). I worked with him diligently to find a home while my lovely wife was buttoning up our home in California.
After a while, I started to find it very difficult to keep track of all the homes I was seeing. They started to blur together, and I wasn’t really able to figure out which one I liked best.
I created a WordPress site for a client who needed to support both English and Español versions of their content, which involved using a plugin called MultilingualPress that creates relationships between sites for each language.
I developed the site locally on my server, and then after they created some content, migrated it to their hosting service.