Stunslinger.com Blog

The last few mornings I’ve been eating oatmeal for breakfast (until recently I didn’t realize how easy it is to make in the microwave).  I like a bit of brown sugar on my oatmeal, but unfortunately our bag of brown sugar had turned into two large rock-like pieces that I couldn’t deal with.  Once or twice I was able to rub them together and use the little bit that sluffed off, but that wasn’t good enough.

So I searched the interwebs and found one quite quickly.  I put the container inside a giant ziploc bag with a damp paper towel and let it sit all day.  Today I went to feel it, and it had de-clumpified.  No more giant brown sugar rocks!  I was happy, I thought I’d tell you.

Time to go to work.

So I logged in to my bank account to check my balances and I saw a “non-sufficient funds” notice.  What?  Then I noticed that a major deposit we made was “adjusted” out of my account before the money was to be transferred to my savings account.  So when the transfer came through, the money wasn’t there, and I got charged.  But it shouldn’t have been “adjusted” in the first place.  WHAT?!?

So I called customer service to get this straightened out.  Of course it rang through to what I’m sure is a call center in India.  The woman was nice enough, but unfortunately she wasn’t super helpful.  In fact she basically read to me the information I saw on the internet.  Helpful.  I agreed with the information she read me, and then she said she could open an investigation ticket.

Basically, I called them just to tell her what to write into a form.  I could have done this for myself in less time.  Amazing.

Luckily we had a good experience the only other time we had to contact WaMu.  Here’s hoping for another good experience.

This weekend my wife and I finally watched the four hour PBS documentary, The Mormons.  The first two hours were essentially telling the history of the LDS church, tracing its roots from upstate New York all the way to Salt Lake City, UT.  I didn’t realize the persecution they faced, even having a state declare them worthy of being killed on sight.  While interesting, this wasn’t the part of the documentary I was interested.  At the end of the first two-hour section, they said in the second part they would discuss the LDS faith as it is practiced now.  Living in Utah for this year, this is what I wanted to learn about.

Unfortunately, I felt like the second two-hour segment didn’t really address what I was hoping it would.  Yes, they addressed some of the controversies and social issues surrounding the faith.  But they never really talked about the theology, WHAT they believe, rather than how it works out in their lives.

I was interested when one of the Quorum of the 12 (an apostle) actually said it is not right to criticize the church, even if the criticism is true.  Frankly, this was very concerning to me.  I happen to believe that intellectual curiosity is absolutely necessary to have a fully formed faith.   My belief is that it is crucially important to understand what you believe, and how can you do that without asking questions?

But, my main problem is that I still don’t really understand what Mormons believe.  I have an idea, based on pieces of things people interviewed said, that they believe our souls exist in families pre-birth.  I understand they believe in different levels of heaven, that good LDS men become gods, that God lives on a star named Kobol, and that the original inhabitants of North America were Israelites.  But I don’t know this from the documentary.  At best, there were small references to some of these points, but no exploration of them.

For my money, I would gladly have traded an hour of the history and an hour of the social issues for an in-depth explanation of LDS theology.  But, everyone tells me how great and informative the documentary was, so perhaps I am in the minority.  Interesting nonetheless.

Here are the pictures I referred to earlier from my hike to Lake Mary. (Needless to say my Wordpress hack was successful!)

Hey there blog faithful, just wanted to explain what happened if you had trouble viewing my blog recently.  I just updated to the newest version of Wordpress, and it took a bit longer than I expected.  Then, when I made sure everything was uploaded, I found out I had to update my database to PHP5.  Then I found that none of my plugins survived the update, except Akismet.  I had to remember what all I had installed, then edit the source appropriately.

But it’s finally all set, now I need to make a change or two to make Wordpress create thumbnails for large images, and I’ll be a happy camper.

This week a friend of mine came up from Provo and we went hiking. We initially were going to go up to Alta and hike to Sunset Peak. This plan was derailed because the access road is closed for construction, and I\’m too much of a beginning hiker to add a mile or more of road hiking to the hike. I have a hard enough time with basic hikes right now.

So instead we decided to go hiking at Brighton. We decided to do this on a weeknight, so after work I headed up into the canyon, and we started at 5:30pm. This is one of the things I love about living in Salt Lake City: the canyons are so close, it\’s no problem to get up, get in a good hike, and be back in time to get a good night\’s sleep before work the next day.

We chose to hike to Lake Mary, as it seemed reasonable for someone of my hiking ability. It was around 1.5 miles and 700+ feet in elevation (from a starting point of ~8,200 feet above sea level). The weather was great and the hike was wonderful. It really helped me realize why people do this sort of thing. Even though I\’m so involved in the technical/urban world, it\’s really great to get away from it all for a few hours and just enjoy nature. I\’ve been getting stressed at work quite a bit recently, and this was exactly what I needed. I felt like it sort of reset my stress levels. The next day at work, I was much happier and engaged than I had been for a couple of weeks.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to more hikes in my immediate future. It’s a big part of the culture here, so I figure I can find others to hike with, in addition to my friend from Provo (he can’t always make it all the way up here on a whim). I was going to put some pictures in here, but they’re too huge for Wordpress to create thumbnails, and I don’t have the time right now to edit them down (nor hack Wordpress). Perhaps in the near future.  Check out the pictures here.

So I finally went to the Apple website and watched the movies showing OS X - Leopard. I’m pretty impressed with some of the features. I’m really looking forward to the release in October.

This will be my first OS upgrade on a Mac. I’m used to the normal hassles that go along with upgrading versions of Windows, and I’m hoping Mac upgrades are much simpler (I’ve been told they are). On my PC I’ve always had to worry about drivers being mixed up, software incompatibilities, and buggy first versions with “service packs” released months later to make the OS fully functional/secure.

All I know is…features like desktop stacks, the new finder, and page-view (like iTunes’ album view) and quick view in spotlight/finder look amazing.  I actually showed the movies to my wife, who was reluctant to watch them (assumed it would be boring).  When she saw the page-view feature, she just sat there open-mouthed!  I think she may be turning to the Mac side!  If you haven’t seen them, go watch the presentation.

Ok, it wasn’t really a problem at all.  But yesterday I imported 490 pictures into iPhoto over my wireless network.  It was a snap.  No problems at all.  But I left iPhoto open and started working on a website.  So I opened Firefox with several tabs, and Photoshop, and TextMate.

And then it happened…lag!  This is the first time I’ve had anything be less than snappy in responding.  So I figured it had to do with iPhoto, and I closed it.  Everything worked fine for the rest of the evening.  But still!

So today I researched adding RAM to my MacBook Pro (it only has 1GB now).  And I realized it’s pretty simple, and relatively cheap.  So I plan to add 2GB more, taking it to the maximum 3GB of RAM.  If you have a MacBook and are at all used to working with computers, I’d strongly recommend adding RAM yourself.  I haven’t done it yet, but you basically just remove the battery, unscrew a panel and slide it in. 

Forget paying a “genius” so much to do that for me!  I’ve read it can cost up to $500 for an Apple Store to do it, versus $140 for me.  Of course, if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t bother.  But I’ve built a computer before, so I’m sure I can handle a RAM upgrade.  It actually looks easier than doing it on my desktop PC.

Now if only I could find a cheap Apple Cinema display….drool!

I’ve been working on a redesign of a website, and I was reminded of how much of a pain in the neck CSS can be at times. Most things are simple to me now, I just get it. But sometimes I’m mystified and pull my hair out.

For example, the site I’m working on has three main vertical sections (head, content, footer). Now, I had to add two extra divs immediately before and after the content for a graphical effect (yes, I hate doing this, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the look without them). Inside the head section is an h1, where I used the text-indent trick to replace the text with a background image. Everything looked fine until I added a margin to the top of the h1 (since I want it spaced down from the top of the page). I guess it was actually once I added 50px of margin…all of a sudden the next div (the “top” of my graphical effect) moves down. Even though I specified the height of the head div. Argh. After trying one or two things, I found that adding any border to the head div solved the problem. Yep, even though I added a 1px border to the top of it, it held the div to it’s specified size.

So everything’s fine, right? Wrong! It’s been eating away at me all day at work. Just hanging out in the back of my mind: What is causing this? I develop in Firefox because I’m not supposed to have these problems (assuming my code is valid). And I did realize I need to validate my code…but still, there’s not much XHTML there in the first place. Sigh.

But you know what? When I figure it out, I’ll be the happiest person alive. That’s the curse of the programmer, I think. It’s the most frustrating and rewarding thing. I spend my day working with people, which is nebulous and inexact, and then I escape at night into my computer world, where everything is logical supposed to be logical.

Update: I realized I had to float the h1 to properly place the logo, and this cleared up the problem.  No more border hack!

I can’t go into specifics really, but my heart is heavy right now.  I am stuck between two sentiments: Wanting someone to get the help they need, and wanting that same person to not feel as if their rights are being violated.

How do we balance when it is better for someone to be forced to receive treatment than it is to let them keep operating in the world?  It’s hard for me, being a treatment provider, to see patients forced to do something they don’t want.  But at the same time, I see families and friends suffering when the person is doing what they want.  And the argument is made that this is in the person’s best interest, that they really aren’t well enough to know what is best for them at this time.

For me, this is much easier when the person is a direct threat to themselves or someone else.  Sure, at that time they need to be protected from themselves (or the other person needs protection).  But when it’s a more chronic issue, and the person seems to act in a destructive way, but differently, it’s difficult.  My heart goes out to people, and I want to be as helpful as I can.

My job is rarely easy, but this is even harder.