I’m on a cut diet, so that means limited condiments.
Limited condiments means I start using tons of hot sauce again.
Tons of hot sauce means I get into a weirdly passionate state of being towards different hot sauces.
Right now, Sriracha.
I’ve got a few technical posts I want to get written up as soon as I can find some time. Until then, remember, “it’s only after we’ve lost everything that we are free to do anything” lol.
On the very early morning of December 27th 2007, my wife became more than herself. She became a mother.
She worked, and toiled to do everything she could to ensure that this new life dependent on her had everything he needed. Her self interest and importance became a secondary drive towards that of the new calling she found in Will. Even leaving her job to become a stay at home mom to care for this new addition to our family.
Then again, on a very early morning of Sept 7th 2010, my wife moved forward to become a mother to yet another child. Our sweet little baby girl Maggie. Our daughter however had special needs; and my wife, the mother, heeded the heightened call and began working continually with her to try and better her. Reaching to a place in her heart, and physical being to produce an endurance that surpasses my understanding. To show interest to our son, to let him know that he too is loved, and that his little sister was a joy, not a burden to take his mommy from him.
When we thought we could take no more, that our line was running short; this beautiful woman found she was pregnant with our next child. Born Sept 17th 2012 was Jake, and she again found a level of endurance and ability that makes me feel as if I’m hopelessly left behind as she runs this marathon. Catching but a glimpse of her dust as she carries on in this race. Carrying the burdens of bottles, therapies, dinners, diapers, discipline, she shows a compassion and a heart that could only be found in a mother.
Amanda, you are amazing. I’m thankful to God that I have a wife like you, and am ever impressed with you, the mother.
I love you.
All that remains.
So last week we lost our second dog to cancer. My corgi Keenan who’s been with us for 9 years has left us. I’ve not really been able to talk or write about it but my wife has done a good job with it here: http://thebelcherfamily4.blogspot.com/2013/03/farewell-friend.html?m=0
I loved that dog, and am thankful for the time we had with him. He’s been with us a relatively long time.
There is definitely something missing in our home now.
Ok, brief introduction on this. We are moving, and in the process of selling a home among other things. So in the process of staging our home we’ve packed up our desktops and servers here. Not a problem, we have 3 laptops, 1 is my personal, 1 is for my work, and the other is a shared one for the family. Recently while testing some stuff with hyper-v installed on the shared laptop I had imaged the machine then saved it to a portable drive. Well what does that have to do with anything? My wife wanted to use the shared laptop as a stand in until her desktop could come back out, and I’d since deleted the image and packed all my windows 7 discs etc. Ruh roh.
So being the FOSS guy that I am (outside of work), I decided I’d use this opportunity to throw a very user friendly Linux distribution onto the laptop and see what my wife thought of it.
The distribution:
Now this was a fairly easy setup to make for my wife. She is what I would consider an average user with some advanced usage areas. Primarily with video editing and photo editing (some graphic design stuff). However for her day to day she needed web, office suite, and email. Since I’m going to be on the road a lot, I needed her to have Skype as well as other chat programs.
I installed from a USB key using the live iso image. From windows this is easy to achieve, download Windows 32 Disk Imager and the desired ISO file, rename it to a .img then apply it to your flash device and viola.
After a very light crash course on navigating the system and the passwords I setup for her she was off and rocking. Our first hurdle however was the native mail client with KDE, Kmail. It’s functional, but she was having some issues with the large volume of emails she has on one of her accounts so I opted to install one of my favorite FOSS mail clients on their instead, Thunderbird.
We both are avid Chrome users, and have our accounts and profiles linked for easy setup across platforms, so that was a breeze for her. I imported her windows profile data to her home directory which got her back up and running with the data she needed as well.
For her Office needs we went with (and she’s adjusted quite easily to) using LibreOffice which has usurped OpenOffice as the FOSS Office Suite of choice with most Linux distros these days.
For her photo editing there is of course Gimp which has been an amazing free image manipulation application for over a decade. For her video editing needs there is Avidemux and OpenShot, neither of which she has made use of yet. Her video editing needs are slim at this time anyway.
Now, here is the mind blowing part for some of you Linux timids or FOSS nay sayers. Up until this point, I’d done everything from install of the OS to now without once going into the terminal. I had made it a point not to. If I was going to give this to my wife to use, regardless of my feelings about the console, she shouldn’t have to use it. All the application installs were performed from default package stores as well using only the Linux Mint Software Manager. Being a long time Linux user (since 97~98) I was personally blown away by this. I normally run to the console out of habit, but found that it was at a point where I genuinely didn’t have to. However there was a problem for usability for my wife that I felt needed to be addressed, and it would require me to script something for her.
In Windows, I have a PowerShell script my wife uses to pull file system object information for her pictures and looks to the creation date then renames the files for her. So this was something she of course wanted, and even though Dolphin and Konqueror have a really cool built in rename feature, this date method wasn’t possible for her out of the box. I’m not going to lie, I was personally elated with this task, but finding the best method was tricky so I went with a simple iteration script she could drop in the folder and double click to run. If she chooses to use Linux longer I’ll work on a possibly building her something a bit more robust, but here’s the existing code:
#!/bin/bash
#Script to rename jpg by create date and number
x=1
for i in *.jpg *.JPG
do
y=$(stat -c %y "$i" | sed 's/^\([0-9\-]*\).*/\1/')
file=$y"("$x").jpg"
mv "$i" $file
x=$[$x+1]
done
So there is a bit of regex usage here, but the end result is each jpg file in the existing folder has it’s date information pulled from the file using stat, then piped through sed to chop it down to a preferable string. That string is then concatenated into a file name with an incremental integer and extension then the existing file has it’s name changed to that newly created string.
So what did my wife gain from this interim transition? A new appreciation for another operating system and the flexibility and eye candy that comes with Linux environments? I don’t know, but it’s allowed us to retrofit some old hardware with her level of desired functionality at 0 additional cost. All in all, I’d say that’s pretty cool, and I’m still stoked my wife is rocking out with Tux.
Little feet, marked for measurements, and a smiley face. Round one of my little girls corrective equipment collection begins.
Spun up another blog dedicated to her crafting:
and from my understanding is willing to craft things for other people as well if they are interested…
I’m not sure how the female readership is to my blog, but men if you have wives or kids, it might be worth showing them so they can follow it. Thanks.
Here’s the link to her announcement post.
To say I’ve been a bit busy lately would be the understatement of the year.
Finalizing critical content packages to allow the decommission of our previous systems management software. Transitioning our infrastructure to the new systems as well, and performing software rationalizations in our environment has put me at a limit to sitting and writing.
Oh, did I mention general systems integration for a new company that I’m not certain I have a future with still?
I do thoroughly enjoy the work though as it’s largely technical and requires little (or allows for little) theory crafting sessions on the best possible way. Don’t get me wrong, I love planning, but planning without action to me is just a miserable existence. I don’t thrive on anarchy, but I enjoy doing work as opposed to talking about it; and I enjoy clutch situations at times.
In other, life altering news; our daughter was officially diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy last week. I’m not really sure where else to go with that outside of the fact it is what it is. It was a rough day last Monday when we got the news; but I think I am past the diagnosis and back to looking at my daughter for what she is, not what she will or will not be.
I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world. – John 16:33
When I see my beautiful daughter smile, I’m reminded how lucky I am that she’s alive and in our care. Even if that burden is great, I gladly bear it; as would most parents. I’m sure there will still be anger, and pain dealing with this so please, if you have been then continue to pray for us.
Will on the other hand, my main man. He’s absolutely digging “getting muscles” lately and is continually asking me if such and such builds muscles, or telling me how or where he got some new muscle. He’s also been doing a really great job lately with being a responsible big brother to his sister in her trials. Admittedly he still gets frustrated at times with the amount of attention his sister receives, but his love and encouragement for her continues to amaze me and makes me proud to be his father.
So back to the building muscles thing. I came home last night from work, and my son comes yelling “DADDY COME HERE I WANT TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING”. So I walk into the family room, and he’s taken a toy shopping cart and pulled it up to the mantle, and proceeds to do wide grip overhand chin ups. It was a rest day for me too so I just did some yoga that night as well, which my son was MORE than eager to get involved in; the entire time explaining to me how or why it builds muscles. That kid is awesome.
Hah, well I ended up writing a lot more then I expected; I should quit while I’m ahead. Take care until next time.
I just wanted to make a brief post to let all my readers and loved ones who read my blog know that I am ok.
My wife was a bit shook up as she hates tornadoes, and we count ourselves lucky that this one missed us as well. We’ve already begun to hear reports of fatalities in the town/suburb just north west of us.
Prayers for those affected.
I had thought to have more time to blog and post things of interest now that the holidays had passed and the core portion of my logon framework was completed but something(s) unexpected happened. We arrived home and decided to go out to eat dinner when my wife received a phone call that her closest cousin’s 7 month old son had died suddenly at the sitters. This passing was followed by the news of 3 others close to me; 1 co worker and 2 old family friends.
There is hope in their passing that I will see them all again. With that I find peace, but continue to pray for their loved ones and those who feel the immediate loss in their life. One of my favorite analogies of death is that, it’s like losing an arm. Things will never be the same, but eventually you learn to live without it.
To those learning how to live again, my heart goes out to you, sincerely.