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Time to fix the garage door opener
As I noted earlier, our garage door opener receiver died a few weeks back. Rather than get a new, cheap, made-in-China receiver to replace it, I’ve decided to get a couple wireless remotes for our security system and program them to operate the garage door. Now, the original plan was to buy two bidirectional remotes…
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Importing Blosxom data into b2evolution
Made my first attempt at importing my Blosxom data into b2evolution this morning. Looks like it will be doable with just a bit of fussing. The basic strategy is to use this handy Blosxom flavor to convert the Blosxom data to Movable Type export format, then use b2evolution’s MT import utility to bring the data…
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Started the Pool Pump
After a winter of freedom from the big money-sucking hole in the back yard, I bit the bullet and fired up the pool pump today. Now, in the Mid-Atlantic, swimming season runs from roughly the beginning of June through Labor Day. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a couple extra weeks on either end, but for…
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Amended returns..
I filled out amended 2005 tax returns yesterday, to report income from my wife’s investment club. I’m not terribly impressed with how TaxCut handles amended returns.. For federal, you basically save your existing return under a new filename, then update the return to include the changes, and then tell it you want to fill out…
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What a week
Timeline for last week: Monday, April 3: Our second child, Andrew Charles, is born via c-section. Birth weight is 8 lbs, 4 ounces. Length 21″. Tuesday, April 4, really early A.M.: Our older boy, Michael, comes down with the “Stomach Bug Of Death” (hereafter referred to as “SBOD”). Frequent projectile vomiting, diarrhea, malaise, and general…
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Mower blade
I took a first look at my push lawnmower today while my 3 year old rode his tricycle around outside. I reinstalled the blade (which I sharpened over the winter) and looked into a problem I had been having with the deck. Last summer I hit a big chunk of wood (or something similar) and…
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First Mow of the Season
Today was the big day — the beginning of the annual mowing routine. Of course, if it stays this dry, I’m not sure how much mowing I’m going to need to do this year. Today was fairly typical as far as the first mow of the season goes — serving mainly to whack down the…
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XML myUMBC
The new era has begun… Today I hacked our legacy myUMBC portal code to generate XML output for the registration eligibility function. The goal is to eventually get away from the big, monolithic app and separate the business logic from the presentation. Registration eligibility was a good place to start, because (1) it’s a simple…
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mp3act
Totally OT… I got my Maryland state tax refund today — 48 hours after I filed with iFile. Can’t beat that turnaround time. And, I’ve found a promising app for cataloguing and streaming my MP3 collection: mp3act. It’s a web based app that uses PHP, MySQL and Ajax. Setup was pretty straightforward. When I started…
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Maryland’s iFile
Well, I filed the taxes this morning, and for the second year I filed the fed taxes electronically with TaxCut, and for the Maryland state taxes I used TaxCut to prepare the return and then filed online with Maryland’s free iFile system. Net cost: $15.95 fed eFile fee – $15.95 H&R Block eFile rebate, +…