Our power is off again. It’s only our street, again. It’s the same power pole, AGAIN!

As I sit here in the dark, again, and look around at my neighbors down the street enjoying their lights and TV, I wonder what it is about our street that loses power for what seems like every month. Is there a bad transformer that needs to be replaced? A bad circuit breaker? Why can’t it be fixed? Are we overloaded and need another transformer?

It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for my Internet business. Actually, it’s not that bad because I have learned that the power is not the most reliable here. I have eight hours of backup power for my web servers.

Today has been especially trying. ATT internet was down during business hours today and my company lost $30k in revenue because of it. Not even five hours after getting my internet connection restored the power goes out.

It’s been a nice day.

Coming back from wheeling doing like 40 on a dirt road and my front end locks up. That was fun. After stopping really fast we checked things out. Unlocked the front hubs and continued home.

Tomorrow I’m going to put it up on the stands and pull the front end apart. Sucks.

I hope it’s not the R&P, but it’s probably going to be that. All well, I have three more. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.

Things have been going full force lately with work. I have two major projects that I’m currently trying to wrap up. One of them is just about done. I’m doing the last bits and tweaks to it on Sundays and I have a shipping date at the end of the month. So that pretty much takes 10 hours out of my Sundays.

The other is my full time day job. I’m doing sort of a re-write to Rails 2.0 and that’s going very well. I’ve learned a ton about Rails and getting the code to be The Rails Way has been quite interesting. I’m finally seeing how Rails can make a project quicker to develop with Rails.

Anyway, I should get back to work before I run out of time.

The guys came up for Randy’s birthday and we went out to Prison Hill to do a bit of wheeling. Tim was riding with me because his truck is in the shop getting painted.

So we were out at prison hill messing around and they guys wanted me to go up into this one spot to see my rig flex out. As I was getting to the spot there was a few lose rocks that I had to drive over. I was on two rock, passenger side, front and back. There was also a rock wall on the passenger side. While I was on the rocks the front rock rolled out from under me. That made the rear slide out and into the wall. While up against the wall I ended up blowing out my rear passenger window. It just exploded when it hit the rock. Oops.

So after that we went over to Dr. Smash’s shop to check out his rig. While I was there Smash said that he was ready for my buggy. So I’ll have my buggy started next week! That’s cool. I’ll have to load everything up into my dad’s truck and haul it down there.

After that Tim and I went wheeling some more on the way home. We went back into some tails by the river and ended up on some new gnarly trail going up a wash. That was really fun. It came out right into the Bunny Ranch.
It was a long day of wheeling and we had a blast. We will be already to do it again next weekend when everyone has their trucks.

I’ve been waiting for the new release of OS X to come out to buy my new computer from Apple. Well, it finally came out last week. I heard news that there may be new hardware coming out last tuesday, so I waited longer.

Nothing new came out last tuesday, so I went ahead and purchased a Mac Book Pro. It was delivered today.

It’s not a bad little system. It’s way faster than my old system, and it’s a laptop. I purchased the 17″ model with the high resolution screen. Almost 2000 pixels across. It’s actually bigger than my old 20″ screen. But the fonts are a bit harder to see since they are so small. I’m going to have to figure out that way to enlarge everything.

So today I transferred everything over to my new system. I didn’t want to just copy over everything using the migration assistant. I had my old system for almost three years, and a lot of cruft can build up in that amount of time. I didn’t want to end up copying over all that junk to my new system. Not only was it cruft from my old system, but from the system before that.

I just manually copied over the things that I needed. I’ll use the system for a few days just to make sure I got everything. So far so good. We will see how it goes I guess.

So I’m trying to convert a bunch of photos grabbed from a data feed, but It’s just not working in Rails for some reason.

I first tried RMagick, then ImageScience, then using back-ticks to run the command line ImageMagick convert. All of them end up generating corrupt images.

I run the command line from the command prompt and it works fine. I run it from the console, and it still runs fine. It just won’t run from my model.

The command line is:
sudo -u www /usr/local/bin/convert -geometry “1024×768>” -strip -quality 90 o-1.jpg l-1.jpg

I have removed the path for my blog. o-1.jpg is the original photo, l-1.jpg is the large size preview.

The errors I get are:
convert: Premature end of JPEG file o-2.jpg’.
convert: Corrupt JPEG data: premature end of data segment `o-2.jpg’.

It makes a jpg with the bottom half chopped off and all gray.

I’m thinking that Ruby or Rails is running out of memory while processing the image… maybe.. I don’t know.

So I tried and tried to reinstall Mac OS on Jane’s MacBook, but it would not work. Finally after a few tries I ran the Apple Hardware Test. It wouldn’t even pass the first test. Said memory was bad.

So Jane took it to the Apple Store to get it fixed up. They have it now, and it will probably be a few days if not a week to get it back.

But… lucky for me, I was able to get a full backup of her home directory before it went south. Any I hope this fixes the random problems she has been having with it.