Last week Brian Parish and I took a Ruby on Rails class at the Big Nerd Ranch. Big Nerd Ranch offers immersive software training in a retreat environment and is owned by Aaron Hillegass, a friend of Brian’s from high school. Rails is an open-source development framework for building web-based database applications using the Ruby interpreted scripting language. The course was very well done and helped to build a solid foundation for working with Rails and Ruby. The experience was memorable, especially the canopy tour, and the people were great.
thanks to Eugene Chan & Marilou Lim for the pictures
Posted on May 14th, 2008 by Ken
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About a month ago, Carter and I had our house painted. Since we were not big fans of the original house color we decided to change it to blue. The folks at Hughes Painting did a top-notch job with the painting and we couldn’t be happier with the results. If you ever need to have any painting done I highly recommend Hughes Painting.
Posted on April 14th, 2008 by Ken
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After a year of inactivity the on-line store project is back on track. Although I have enjoyed the respite I am getting excited about the prospect of having the store up and running. My stepmother, the proprietor, is selecting the color scheme and images to define the brand while I am putting the finishing touches on the e-commerce application. We have a new name, Vera’s Vintage, and a new logo, below (thanks Cindy). We hope to have the store operational some time this spring and I will definitely post something here when it is available.
Posted on March 27th, 2008 by Ken
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I decided to upgrade my website and replace my hand-coded home-grown pages with some fancy new software. After a little research and testing I settled on WordPress, an open-source personal publishing platform, aka blogging software. After only a couple hours of playing around with WordPress I am already a huge fan. Installation and configuration was a breeze thanks in part to Fantastico De Luxe and my web host, BlueHost. Now that everything is up and running adding new posts should be so much easier than updating the old hand-written HTML entries. Hopefully now I will actually update my site every once in a while. We’ll see.
Posted on March 26th, 2008 by Ken
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We had another nasty storm Thursday night and woke up Friday with a couple of tree limbs through our garage roof. Luckily only the garage roof was damaged and not the main house. Most of the stuff in our garage is fairly rugged so the little bit of water that leaked in didn’t cause any real damage. The holes are relatively small so they shouldn’t be too difficult to fix and we now have a big tarp covering the roof so I can take my time with the repairs. Notice the half-inch hardwood board, next to the light in the lower left picture, that was obliterated by the limb. If the board wasn’t in the rafters to slow it down, that limb could have gone clear through the roof and caused some real damage.
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Ken
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My latest project is building an on-line store, Aunt Vera’s Vintage Linens. In my spare time I have been learning about php, mySQL, open-source e-commerce software, and on-line marketing. Our goal is to become one of the top 5 sites for antique linens by the end of next year. The site should be up and running by December.
Posted on September 16th, 2006 by Ken
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