The Dresser Purge

In the brief two years I was on my own, I concluded 15 changes of clothes was the ideal number. It let me do laundry every two weeks, with one extra pair just in case I had to postpone laundry day.

Clothes accumulate, like everything else, and these days I have a lot more than 15 changes. And somehow, laundry day is twice a week—actually, that makes sense. Four people in FAR Manor means four times the laundry, right?

After the Great Closet Purge, I started putting out of season clothes in a storage bin I kept in the closet, to relieve pressure on the bulging dresser. This worked for a while.

De-bulging the dresser

But the warm weather got to Sector 706 couple weeks ago, and I got the bin out to swap stuff around. Being about 35 pounds lighter than last year, I tried on shorts… and if I could pull them off without undoing them, and half of them fit the description, they began the purge pile. Then I tried shorts that wintered over in the dresser (because the bin was crammed full). All in all, I shed eight pairs of shorts, including one that still had tags on it. There were also eight pairs of swimsuits between the bin and dresser… where did they all come from? I decided three pairs was plenty, and added the rest to the purge pile. I got the now-too-big pants out of the closet and tossed them on.

Then came the T-shirts. I weeded them out, and finally the purge filled a large garbage bag. Except for the three remaining swimsuits, my bottom dresser drawer was empty and the other drawers had headroom. And there was plenty of room for the winter clothes in the bin. But I think the shirts in my closet have decompressed, because now it feels as packed as before. I should probably weed them out again; if I lose a few more pounds, I might be able to go from XL to L.

I still have way more than 15 changes of clothes. Even with more frequent laundry, I probably don’t need to cut down to 8 or 10, though.

Charlie, soccer, and a few mini-rants

With a new car in the garage—a 2019 Kia Soul EX—I now have that critical extra seat to take both Mason and Charlie places. I still have the Miata, but I won’t be putting all the miles on it anymore. Of course, that means I “get” to take Charlie to Mason’s soccer practices… which means I don’t get to sit and chat with the other soccer dads quite so much.

The upside is, we bring Charlie his own soccer ball, find an empty nearby field, and let him wear himself out dribbling the ball around. He was, despite his best efforts, completely zorched when we got home tonight.

He’s not terrible at ball control, which isn’t something you can say about many U8 or even some U10 players. His throw-in technique is better than half the players in Mason’s U10 league—ball overhead, both feet planted, no coach could ask for more. His birthday was 8 days past the cut-off for “U4 mini-league” this spring, but I’ll sign him up in the fall. It’ll be hilarious, watching a bunch of 3 year olds swarming the soccer ball… or sitting in the grass and playing in the dirt… (BTW, that’s Mason wearing the red/orange shirt in the background, flailing his arms. He scored a personal-record five goals in last Saturday’s game, although I only saw three because I was busy trying to keep Charlie from bolting onto the field.)

Mini-rant #1: How to get me to sign up for auto-pay
Somehow or another, I missed setting up the payment for last month’s cellphone bill. In a highly uncharacteristic move for AT&T, they didn’t immediately send me a “hey, pay up” email, text, or anything else. I had this nagging “did I pay them?” thing going on, but figured they would let me know if I hadn’t. So I go online to pay this month’s bill, and find the bill is about double what it usually should be. Whatever, I thought, and clicked “Pay My Bill.”

The website immediately started grinding, trying to get its act together, but enough time went by for it to pop up a “hey, are you still there?” notification. I gave up, figuring it was just a temporary glitch. (AT&T’s “up”dated website is gobs slower and far less responsive than the old one, BTW.) Then they had the nerve to pop up a “how are we doing?” notification. I let them know, in spades, then closed the tab. Trying again this evening gave me the same results. I finally went to pay it over the phone using the convenient *729 number. It asked me if I wanted to set up auto-pay… and yeah, why not? Most of my other monthly bills are on autopilot now.

So that’s how to get me to sign up for auto-pay. Conveniently forget to tell me I let one slip, then hose up your website to the point that I can’t get things caught up when I find out.

Mini-rant #2: When auto-pay gives you an Epic FAIL
And then, there’s the credit union’s credit card. I happened to be home last week one afternoon, and the home phone rang. The caller ID read CARSERVICES. Figuring this was a telespammer selling extended warranties, I answered to tie up the phone line (the longer you keep those @$$#0|3$ on the line, the less time they have to bother someone else). To my surprise, it was the credit union, wondering why I hadn’t paid my credit card balance.

“Huh?” I asked. “I had auto-pay set up.”

“Did you pay off the balance?” (I had, two months prior.) “If you pay off the balance, auto-pay automatically cancels.”

Surprise!

I happened to have the credit union website up on my computer at the moment, so I set up an immediate transfer and all was well. Except that I was miffed about auto-pay getting canceled without so much as a “good job, dude, and sayonara” message. Unlike mini-rant #1, I hadn’t forgotten anything—just ASSumed it was taken care of. The other credit cards I have on auto-pay just don’t transfer anything if I haven’t put anything on them, or pay off the balance if it’s less than what I set up on a monthly basis. There’s always a joker in the deck.

Mini-rant #3: Taxing taxes
Unlike many people, I don’t mind paying taxes. They keep the roads paved, provide food and healthcare to (not enough of) those who need it, run schools, and keep essential emergency services going. Are there things I wish they would do instead of other things I wish they wouldn’t? Oh heck yes. But overall, it’s better to contribute to the general welfare and reap the benefits. If you want to see what happens when you don’t have taxes, spend a few months in Somalia.

Anyway. I’ve been pretty good about getting the federal/state tax returns done in recent years, usually in late February or early March. This year was different, through no fault of my own for a change. We got our W-2s (as usual) right at the end of the January 31st deadline… but before I could grab the tax software and get to work, I got an email from work. In essence, it said, “the payroll company screwed up the W-2s, and we’ll get fixes to you ASAP.”

Weeks went by, and then months, without fixes. Some of us would email HR on occasion, and get the same response: “they haven’t fixed it yet, we’ll let you know.”

FINALLY, in the first week of April, they rolled out the fixes. It just so happened that I was out of town that week, so it was the week after before I could do anything about it. The wife and I both have business stuff to deal with, so it’s not just a matter of slapping down a few numbers and sending it off. Fortunately, it turns out the IRS has a way of filing for an extension online… and I wasn’t the only one who was up against the gun. The father in law needed some extra time as well.

With any luck, I’ll be able to finish up this weekend. Even with all the games Ch*mp played with withholding, there should be a refund.


Sound off!
What’s your rant du jour? Or maybe you have a new car you want to tell me about? :) Drop a comment, I love 'em.

Losing a Charlieweight

About six months ago, my weigh-in at the doctor’s office was not a happy occasion for me. I came in around 234 lbs, the most I’ve ever weighed. The doc didn’t give me too much grief about it, but suggested I try to get more active.

Fortune was looking out for me, though. Work and the group insurance team up to sponsor a program called “Naturally Slim.” “Lose weight while eating the foods you love,” the website proclaims. Yeah, by not eating very much of it, I thought, but figured I needed to do something. So I signed up.

Turned out I was right. But the part I missed was, they give you the tools to eat less… or at least remind you of what the tools are. What makes it work is, they tie the tools to their purpose (which in this case is getting to and maintaining a healthy weight without starving yourself). It boils down to three core principles:

1. Eat when you’re hungry (but before you get to that RAW MEAT NOW!!!! stage).
2. Eat slow.
3. Stop when you’re full.

There’s more to it, but all the “more” is to support those core principles.

Yeah, yeah, so how’s it working?

Together, we weigh what I used to weigh
on my own. (Photo credit: Mason)

Quite well, actually. There have been times I’ve fallen off the wagon, but all that means is that you jump back on. I can now wear all the pants I couldn’t before because they were too tight, and have had to ditch some that won’t stay on anymore. My belt is at the tightest notch, and in the last week I’ve been trying to pull it in yet another notch… time for a new belt. I passed my current goal, 199.9, this last week. Since Charlie is 34 pounds right now, I’ve lost an entire Charlie worth of weight.

I had to celebrate with an “oil change,” that is, a chili dog and onion rings from Varsity Jr. I ate it slow and enjoyed every bit of it… and it was just enough to get me full. And that's another advantage: if you go to a restaurant, you can often get three meals for the price of two—or even two for the price of one. Or you can order off the value menu and save about half what you would usually spend. For example, I hit upon a "mini" quesadilla and nachos combo at Taco Bell that costs about $4. I can order it on my phone from the office, and it's ready (or nearly so) when I arrive to pick it up.

Next goal is 194 lb, which is the lowest I’ve weighed since moving to FAR Manor. I’m not sure I’ll be able to reach my final goal of 185 lb, but it’s something to aim for.

Adventures of a #techcomm Geek: Info Architecture

In this adventure, we find that structure isn’t always structure. And sometimes, the structure jumps up and smacks you to get your attention. More geekiness follows…

Image: openclipart.org

As part of our conversion to DITA at work, I shuffled some things around in the huge manual I work on. I moved a huge wad of reference material into an appendix; other content can easily link to it when needed. But the reshuffling got me to take a look at the reference material.

Managed network devices, like the ones I usually write about for work, usually have a way to message the mothership about various issues. Examples include:

• Hi, I’m online.
• The power’s out here. I’m running on my battery.
• Here’s some stats from the last connection.
• One of my components just failed!

The messages aren’t that chatty, of course, and they often include some variable data. Some are more urgent than others, and might require some action by the network operators.

I had separate topics describing each message, and they came out of the conversion tool as concept topics—a lot more generic than I wanted. As I was trying to get everything done at once, I didn’t give it too much thought. Since the messages were reference material, they would be fine as references. I split them into sections (format, severity, cause, action), and moved on.

DITA to the rescue? Um… nope.

Later on, I came back to the messages. “There has to be a better way,” I thought. After all, the sections could get out of order, or end up with different titles—there’s all sorts of ways to be inconsistent with reference topics. My next thought was, “Hey, DITA has hundreds of elements, and its prime purpose is software documentation. There's probably an entire message domain waiting for me.”

In reality, there are three message-related elements in the entire ocean of DITA, and two of them are inline (<msgph> and <msgnum>). The third is <msgblock>, for tagging message output.

Ah, the joys of information architecture. Creating a message domain from scratch was a possibility, but would likely be a hard sell to the co-workers.

We’re in trouble(shooting) now

I gave a moment to the idea of using troubleshooting topics—then it hit me. A message has a condition (the message itself), a cause (why it was logged), and a solution (what to do about it). That’s exactly the structure of a troubleshooting topic!

The only sticky point was where to document the message format, and I quickly decided that was part of the condition. I used @outputclass="message" to tag the topics, and to have the transform use Format: instead of Condition: for the condition part. I converted a few to troubleshooting topics, and it worked as well as it seemed it would.

On to the next thing

Then yesterday, I got a meeting invite with an attachment, a follow-up to a discussion a few of us had last week. One of the groups in our far-flung department uses InDesign to produce actual printed deliverables (how quaint!). The fun part is, the page size is about 4 inches square—so it’s not a matter of tweaking our transform plugin; we need a whole new one.

But when I started looking at it, the structure almost leaped off the screen, despite a couple of misplaced pages. Each chapter contained a single task, and each step used one page for substeps and graphics. Having that revelation made the call go a lot faster and more smoothly, because it was one of those things that are obvious once you see it. I just happened to be the first one to see it.

So I did a conversion dance, involving lots of pixie dust: PDF → Word, then Pandoc converted that to Markdown. After some serious cleanup (and moving misplaced content where it belonged), I used a couple of scripts to break the Markdown file into topics and create a bookmap. DITA-OT gobbled up the bookmap and Markdown topics, and spit out DITA topics. Thus, I had a pilot book we can use as test data for the transform.

The InDesign users also have a couple more formats; one is close enough to a regular book that we’ll have them use the standard transform. The other is a folded four-panel sheet… that one is going to be interesting. I’m going to have to resist the temptation of blowing off documentation work for glorious coding.

Stay writing… until I geek again.

A weekend at Camp Driveway

It has been a wet winter so far. We’re currently getting a few days of dry (and reasonably nice, for late February) weather… in mid-week, of course, when we’re all working or at school. But a couple weekends ago, we had a mostly dry weekend—that is, the rain didn’t arrive until Sunday afternoon. It was seasonably cold—around 50°F for highs, not quite freezing for lows.

Roughing it in style

If you ever end up with a popup camper, Popup Portal is a deep hive mind that can tell you pretty much everything from the most basic tips to walking through complete rebuilds. Now the Starflyer (I can’t improve on the name that Starcraft gave it) doesn’t need anything close to a complete rebuild, but there are a few maintenance issues that the previous owner (and perhaps those who came before) neglected. The Portal has been very helpful in that regard.

One thing the hive mind recommends for new popup owners is to do what they call “Camp Driveway.” In other words, set up the camper in your driveway or back yard, and spend the weekend in it. You get to test it out, and figure out what you need before you go “live.” Mason was wanting to try out the new camper, so I opened it up and Camp Driveway was on!

Fortunately, I’d ordered a bunch of accessories from Amazon—an extension cord, an adapter to plug an RV into a house outlet, leveler, heater, 12V LED bulbs (they’re brighter and draw less power, important if you’re using a battery for lighting) and a few repair and maintenance things. I was pleased to find that everything worked as intended. The interior lights did a fine job of illuminating the camper, the stove fired up once the air got worked out of the lines, the outlets were happy to charge my phone and Mason’s tablet (and keep a night light glowing). The “Little Buddy” heater, which uses the same small propane cylinders as lanterns, was a big help because the electric space heater that came with the camper wasn’t too helpful. With both heaters going, the digital thermometer I brought along inched up to about 67°F at tabletop level (not nearly as warm along the floor, though!). But still, with the beds a little higher yet, I figured that was going to be just fine. Besides, we had the same sleeping bags we used for Mason’s Polar Bear Camping outing a couple years ago. If we kept warm enough in an unheated tent, a popup with (some) heat would be at least as warm.

It was. My first night was restless, with the electric heater kicking on and off every 15 seconds or so, but I stayed warm enough. Mason, wrapped up in the down mummy bag, had no trouble sleeping at all. For us old farts, I think we’ll need a memory foam topper on our bed. The camper came with a literal Porta-Potti, a little self-contained toilet that sits in a cabinet during the day and Only Comes Out At Night. It turned out to be very handy—after I turned off the Little Buddy at bedtime, the temps inside the camper dropped to around 55°F, but that was still better than the 34°F outside. Especially if you had a post-midnight necessity.

In the morning, putting a kettle on the stove and cooking bacon&eggs helped to warm things up. The French press I bought myself for my birthday finally got its first run, and there’s nothing like a good strong cup of coffee on a cold morning. The Starflyer has fairly primitive plumbing—a hand pump at the sink, and no hot water heater—but the Popup Portal hive mind had a solution for that. Get a pump pot, fill it from the kettle in the morning, and you’ll have hot water to wash the evening dishes (and an afternoon coffee, if necessary). Actually, we used bottled water, since I’d put RV antifreeze in the water system to prevent serious issues until spring.

The second night went better for me; I turned around to put my head toward the center of the camper, and for some reason I found that more comfortable. I left the Buddy Heater going until it emptied its canister, which saved me the hassle of getting up and turning it off. It went a little longer than I expected, which is nice. We got to air out the bacon smell for a few hours, and I folded up the Starflyer as the first sprinkles came in mid-afternoon.

Camp Driveway was a success. I came out with a list of stuff we need, and am holding out some hopes of hitting a local campground next month when Mason has another no-school Friday. A 3-1/2 day weekend would be a nice warmup to our Spring Break trip to Mom’s…

Campy New Year!

I think a lot of us are relieved to see 2018 in the rear-view, and perhaps are directing a forest of Meaty Middle Fingers its way. But it had its moments. Charlie’s continuing to learn new signs, even if he isn’t speaking out loud yet, and is starting to put two-word sentences together (often things like “eat sandwich”). At any rate, the year ended well.

I’ve been looking for a popup camper for the last couple months. The wife is on board—she won’t tent-camp, but she actually encouraged me to buy a (far smaller and less-equipped) popup some years back. The money didn’t shake out then, but a couple months ago I had a surprise moneybomb—the workplace is being acquired, and I’d had a standing order to sell some stock if it hit $30. So, all of a sudden, the hunt was on. I set a budget, found Pop-up Portal, and started learning all I could from a deep hive mind.

Searching Craigslist, I immediately found one local to me; it was 20 years old, but solid and a lot roomier than I remembered them being when the parents rented one (the slide-out dinette probably had a lot to do with that). The price was well within my budget.

There were snags, though, and it was probably all for the best. I thought I’d set up a transfer from the broker to my checking, but I hadn’t, and doing the setup (of course) took longer than I wanted it to. I was annoyed with myself, because I felt like I was stringing the seller along, and told them to go ahead and sell it if someone else came by with cash in hand. Meanwhile, I used the time to research what I could. Good thing: turned out our vehicle can pull 2000 lbs, and the camper weighed in at 2600. That wouldn’t have ended well.

Off to Craigslist again. This time, I had a specific set of criteria. Absolute requirements: 1800 lb or less, A/C (Planet Georgia summers can be horrid without it), camp-ready. Nice to haves: 1600 lb or less, a toilet, full 12V setup. The latter is not a given; all the sellers I talked to always camp at places with full hookups and don’t have battery power hooked in.

After tossing obvious scams, newer campers that were way over budget, and big amenity-laden models that blew away my weight allowance, I ran out of local options. Expanding my search radius turned up a promising find that checked all my “must” and “want” boxes, but it sold before I had a chance to go look at it. Another one turned out to be a scam (“I sent it to an eBay dealer in Omaha who will deliver it for free”)… yeah, right. I reported that one to the FTC. There were a couple of promising leads in Alabama and South Carolina, but the logistics (especially around the holidays) and the weather just wouldn’t cooperate. I decided to give it a week and see what happened next, and seriously considered upping my budget.

So Friday, a new listing, um… popped up. It was slightly over budget, but I thought “hey, that map looks familiar.” Turned out it was local! I called to check it out on Saturday, and the seller said “I thought that listing went away. But I’m on my way over to the storage unit now, we can meet there.” It was, like many of the days have been around here, rainy and crappy, but we did crank up the top so I could have a look at the not-actually-canvas (it’s called Aqualon™). It was intact, if slightly grimy.

He said, “the rain is supposed to let up tomorrow, why don’t I bring it over to your place and we can set it up?” Sounded great by me, especially since our car has a hitch but no wiring just yet.

So here he came, in a gigantic diesel 4-door pickup (white, imagine that), big enough to pull a gooseneck trailer, with a 1500-ish pound popup behind. I doubt the truck even felt it. Negotiating our horrid driveway involved him rolling his front wheels onto the grass, which dug some pretty deep divots. Couldn’t be helped. We unhooked and pushed it in front of my Miata, then commenced to setting it all up.

It was less grimy inside than out, except for the floor and ceiling. The upholstery is intact, and there’s already an outdoor rug—one less thing to get. There’s also a space heater and a case and a half of bottled water. I worked the hand pump at the sink, and to my surprise water came out. Turned out the 10-gallon water tank had about 3 gallons in it.

2001 Starcraft Starflyer

Long story short, he knocked the price down to exactly my budget, and I cut him a check. We had a break in the rain today, so I spent much of New Year’s Day attacking the ceiling and A/C unit (I don’t think anyone ever cleaned those filters) with disinfectant wipes while Mason cleaned up the beds with a Dirt Devil.

The dining table is the size it is, because it doubles as a spare bed (spanning the dinette benches), but it makes things a little tight. I’d like to include something narrower for our trips. There are a few minor repair items to address as well, but it’s supposed to be sunny this weekend. Mason is already wanting to set up and sleep in it. Charlie likes clambering around in the bunk ends as well.

I’ve got it folded up for now, because I needed to get the Miata out of the garage tomorrow. Still some cleaning to do—mainly the cabinets on one side, vacuuming under the seating area, and scrubbing the floor. I’m going to have to graft in a battery system, because a couple places I want to take it don’t have hookups. Holiday’s over, but we’ll have a few of our own holidays in the months to come. Sooner than later, I plan to clean up the other side of the detached garage so it has a dry place to live.

For the future, we may do some remodeling. I’m looking over Pop-up Princess for ideas. For now, I’m digging on the geeky model name, “Starflyer.” Not only did it come with a name, the shelf in the king-bed front bunk is called a “Space Station.” I added a bunch of accessories to my Amazon wish list, as much to remind me what to get as anything else.

So we should have some new vacation destinations in 2019. I’ll be glad to share. Maybe I won’t have to burn off a bunch of vacation time at the end of each year…

Adventures of a #techcomm Geek: Blurrier Image

In today’s installment of Life of a #techcomm Geek, we return to a subject that draws this geek like a moth to flame: file conversions. Hazardous, yet compelling. Lots of geeky stuff follows…

I’ve had this particular line in my Tines to-do list for a while. As part of our transition to a new documentation system, I and another writer handled the conversions. We had a high-end tool to help us out, although creating rules was a dicey proposition and the vendor ended up helping (we made tweaks where they could make an obvious difference, though).

In the most recent round, we got to the FrameMaker-based docs. Frame (as its users often nickname it) is unique in that it allows overlaying callouts and other graphic elements on top of images. This is a huge help for translating manuals, because the writers don’t have to maintain a separate set of graphics for each language. Anyway, since the new system isn’t FrameMaker, something else had to happen. The conversion system could be configured to either flatten the images (convert to a PNG, rasterizing the callouts) or create an SVG (Structured Vector Graphics). We chose the latter, thinking that since SVG is an XML format, the new system could maintain them easily.

We were wrong.

Long story shortened considerably, we eventually threw up our hands and decided to convert all the SVGs to “flattened” PNG files. The writers would keep the SVG files on their hard drives to make changes, then upload a new flattened PNG when needed. I wrote a script to do the deed; it crunched through hundreds of SVGs at about one per second, and updated all the links in the book to point to the new PNGs.

All well and good, until one of the writers went to publish. “The images look blurry,” she told me. Taking a look, she was obviously right. It took me about three seconds to figure out why.

You see, our SVG files have a width attribute, which was set to the width in the original FrameMaker files (a typical width is 576 pixels, which at 96dpi is 6 inches even). All well and good, but the original images run about 1200 pixels wide—so in essence, we were throwing away over ¾ of the image data when doing the conversion. No wonder it looked blurry! But we were all weary of messing with it by that point; I had written scripts that:

• extracted embedded images from an SVG, converted them to PNG, then changed the link so the SVG referred to the file instead
• went the other way, embedding images in an SVG
• converted the entire mess to PNG in one swell fwoop

The documentation work that was my primary job function had been back-burner’ed for too long. I added an “investigate this further” item to my backlog list and got back to the bread-and-butter part of my job.

This week, I all but cleared a fairly long to-do list in three days, so I thought maybe I could give this thing another shot. A quick Google turned up some promising code on superuser.com; I divided the image width by the scaled-down width in one SVG, applied the script, and got a nice sharp image! The only problem with that is, it would take about 10 minutes to do each file by hand, and there are hundreds. A script is the only practical way to blast through all of them.

When I tackle a situation like this, I tend to use a shell script to drive awk, Perl, and XSLT scripts. Each has its strengths, and trying to force (say) XSLT to work some of awk or Perl’s string-processing magic is more trouble than it’s worth. And vice versa. So… XSLT to extract the file name and (scaled) width, awk to parse the output of file (a utility that returns the dimensions of an image file) and do the calculations, all wrapped up in a shell script to conduct the Geek Orchestra.

Of course, I ran out of time this afternoon to put the whole thing together, but I have all the sub-script logic down. I just need to score the symphony. That will likely take me to noon tomorrow, then I’ll be back to bugging people already bogged down with too much stuff to lend me their expertise.

I also achieved Inbox Zero at work today… and that’s a rant for another time.