This is the preface to a series of posts I will be making about my Grandfather, William B. (McLean) Falconer. They are direct excerpts from the book, “Rhymes of a Pioneer, A Burleigh County Pioneer” that he wrote.
William B. (McLean) Falconer, son of Daniel A. Falconer, an 1871 Dakota Pioneer, and Effie McLean, also a Pioneer, was born on April 23, 1889, on Section 26 in Lincoln township, Dakota Territory, where he has lived for over 70 years.
He was married to Kathryn Lewis in 1918. He voluteered for service with Company A in 1917, but was rejectd.
Father of three boys and one daughter, three of whom served their country in the last World War, and one son in Korea.
Attended grade school in Lincoln school District and high school in old William Moore school in Bismarck.
He served ten years as a member of the North Dakota State Legislature, where he made a vigorous effort to support legislation that would do the greatest good for the greatest number.
He was state purchasing agent for two and one-half years. Served as clerk and director of Lincol School District for thirty years and as Burleigh County Judge since February 2, 1949.
A thought struck me last night, about the apocalypse.
It seems like there’s a fair number of people that would “like” to live in a world with zombies. Or something like the world of Mad Max. Where things are simpler, albeit more brutal.
But those are post-apocalyptic settings. After the apocalypse hit.
Nobody wants to live at the start of the apocalypse. Or during it.
Because the apocalypse means lots of people die. It means watching friends and family get sick and die. Or become monsters of one sort or another.
Getting to the post-apocalypse means people had to live through it. It means people had to witness the apocalypse happening, survive through it while everybody was dying, and come out the other side.
But hey, maybe I’m wrong. It’s not like this pandemic is really an apocalypse. Right?
It’s pretty clear I haven’t updated this site in a long time. Time to change that.
There’s a couple of things that I need to do. On this site, on my server, and maybe in life: limit the things I’m using, and use those things more often.
I’ve removed a couple of my websites. Not very well, honestly, but they’re gone now. I’ll work on giving them a more graceful “death” when I have more time. I don’t think they were getting that much traffic anyway.
More updates!
I’ve been writing a bunch of sh*t in my journal (a.k.a. diary). Which is fine, whatever. But a lot of that stuff could have instead been posted online, because it’s interesting, and it’s not really what I consider journal-worthy.
It’s clear I need to get back into programming on the side. I’m not sure how I’m going to get that done yet… but I’ll figure it out.
I’m going to be making some changes to the server. I recently had my server “hacked”, which was basically just some skiddie finding a way to post one of those pharmaceutical spam ads on a couple of my WordPress sites.
Hacked – I do not think it means what you think it means.
I’m taking this time to figure out a couple of things. The plan is:
find a way to deploy + update WP sites via git (including initial setup)
work on a better CMS for Crazed(Sanity) sites
update my “deploy” system to work with GitHub and generic git (not just BitBucket.org)
That’s actually quite a bit of stuff. It’s going to take a while to get this all setup. It’s equally possible that I’ll post about impending downtime as I am to simply just do it: pretty much all my sites are (extremely) low traffic. So, there, I said it.
There’s two kinds of family. There’s the kind that you’re forced into at birth, and there’s the kind that forms out of close relationships.
Some people think that “real family” somehow are more important than anyone else. They believe that the family you’re bonded to through DNA–your blood relatives–should be held in the highest regard, forsaking everyone for them.
Sometimes blood relatives have a strange sense of entitlement. They think that because DNA connects you, that somehow they’re automatically more privileged. They deserve more from you, and should be given more slack. That they automatically have a place in your inner circle.
But here’s the truth, at least the way I see it.
The family that has formed around you are sometimes more important. They don’t have the same sense of entitlement: in order to get into your inner circle, they had to prove themselves. They fought for you. Bled for you.
I love using Pidgin for… well, pretty much all my IM’ing needs. And I’ve come to depend on the little icon in the system tray to show me what’s going on.
For a long time, though, the icon has only sporadically worked. To “fix” it, I killed & restarted it a bunch of times until the icon finally showed (or until I finally gave up).
UPDATE [October 6th, 2015]:Halt the presses. This doesn’t seem to work all the time, at least not on an alternative machine… I should have known not to publish based on a single success.
I posted something on Facebook the other day, with a couple of pictures (last year vs this year) and a brief statement that I’d gone from 324 lbs to 287 (37 pounds lost). A co-worker asked me how I’d done it, and I gave a short answer… which later I realized was far too short.
So what has changed? What did I do to get here?
That’s a good question. And there’s a lot to think about, and I probably won’t give credit where it’s due, but I’ll try.
First, I drew my line in the sand. I was in the fight of my life, for my life, a fight just to survive. My health was spiraling out of control, and I needed to do something, not just plan and think, but DO something.
I started going to the gym. I got a membership at the YMCA, went there with a buddy (thanks, Prophet), and put my nose to the grindstone.
I logged every trip to the gym, with very few exceptions. The only way you can see change is if you track it.
I started seeing some changes, added some muscle and lost some weight…. but I needed more.
I added racquetball to the mix, because it was fun and got me moving. Even though Prophet (and later my son) kicked the snot out of me, I had fun.
I learned to sweat, and to enjoy sweating. I learned that it was okay to huff and puff, to have to stop to catch my breath, because that pounding in my chest was my heart telling me I was still alive.
Nerd Fitness – Join the Rebellion
I found this awesome website jam-packed with information, called Nerd Fitness. No pushy sales, no need to buy anything to get help. It actually took me a while to figure out what there was to buy.
I started investing in my health: I gave up going out to eat every morning so I could afford a gym membership. I asked for–and received–a membership to the “Nerd Fitness Academy”, a one-time fee that’s turned into the best investment I’ve made.
Logging stuff was a huge thing, so I finally took an interest in an awesome little app called My Fitness Pal. I used it to track food intake, and to track carbohydrates, so I knew how much insulin to take. Insulin and blood sugar levels have all been logged religiously in a cool little app called OnTrack by Medivo.
The graphs above show what tracking progress really means. The one on the left has all the individual readings, while the one on the right uses daily averages. They cover slightly different time frames, but that little gap–the funny little line between October & January–is when I started caring. When things started turning around. That was the end of 2013, into the beginning of 2014.
I started walking more. I embraced the Walk to Mordor challenge, going so far as to start work on my own app to track it (yeah, it’s still in the works).
When my knees started giving me problems from walking too much (especially with stairs), I got myself a bike. When I started, I could barely get around the block… now I feel like I’m slacking if I only get 15 miles a week. I only feel really accomplished when I hit the 4 mile mark on a single ride, though I generally limit myself to an hour a night.
So that’s what I’ve got so far.
It wasn’t a simple thing. It wasn’t some crash diet. No “juicing” or 90-day crash diets.
I hope you enjoyed reading about it. Feel free to ask questions or whatever in the comments below.
It’s not abnormal for me to be lagging behind updates by a day or two. I don’t check social media on my phone–Facebook Messenger slipped through the cracks, but it hasn’t gone off more than once every few weeks–so I usually don’t know if Stan Lee posted something about me (yeah right) or if there’s some crazy new Mime-related humor.
I’m having a hard time keeping up on the things that matter. Coding projects. Paying attention to my wife. Beating the kids on a regular basis. Keeping bills in line.
Bear with me. I’m going to spend some time re-organizing things over the coming days and weeks, hopefully to get a better line on the top priorities. I’d like to get Project Hobbit Walk to a better place. I’ve got doodles to upload to Deviant Art. I’ve got pictures to force upon the world (or at least my friends). And TTORP needs to get to a better place (the website blows).
That’s right, there’s an actual, honest-to-goodness technical term called “Spaghetti Code.” Basically, it’s code that’s all tangled up in itself, not elegant at all. It does not look or smell tasty… imagine the worst experience you’ve had with that stuff they served back in school. You know, with the green “meat.”
I avoid that shit like crazy.
I’ve written some of that shit. Somebody smarter than me once said, “in order to make good choices, you must first have made plenty of bad ones.” And I’ve made plenty of those.
Anyway, down to the point. As a programmer, every time you build something with spaghetti code, or in some way that is ugly and difficult to maintain, you acrue technical debt. And that adds up FAST.
So, for PHP, you should separate code from HTML–you can use a Templating engine to do that. Or a framework like CS-Content, or CakePHP, or a myriad of others. Test on different servers, different versions of PHP, and/or do the continuous integration thing.
I’m in the midst of a fairly large code refactoring–which basically means that I’m changing some of the code and cleaning it up. A lot of the changes are done so that I can get unit testing done, including some automated testing.
The idea is that, whenever I make a change to the code, there will be an automated process happening that ensures nothing broke.
The major part of that is done. I’ve still got some updating to do, but a major milestone is out of the way.
