Author: Joe

Categories
Adventure Design

Lionel Ritchie Pumpkin Carving

I carved a pumpkin for work last week of our school’s logo. It turned out pretty nice and I had a lot of fun doing it as well. So I really wanted to carve another pumpkin. I really can’t explain why, but I decided to carve Lionel Ritchie. While I can’t say I’m a huge fan or anything like that, he is a solid artist and if by myself have belted out a Ritchie tune from time to time.

So the first step was to create a stencil. As luck would have it my co-worker Chelsea happened to have a pretty perfect image she came across a while back that would be perfect for a pumpkin carving. I scaled it and printed it out and step one was done.

Next I needed a suitable pumpkin. I stopped at Ronnie’s after work and after inspecting close to every pumpkin in the place finally found one that I felt was just right. I’m sure I looked like an insane guy picking up all those pumpkins, but well if I’m going to carve Lionel Ritchie I might as well do it right. There was also a very nice dog hanging out at Ronnie’s as a side note.

I got home and got straight to working cutting a hole in the bottom of the pumpkin and gutting it out. This guy had a lot of seeds, a whole lot of seeds. I took that as a sign of good luck by the pumpkin gods.

I then traced the stencil onto the pumpkin and began to saw it out. The fine lines in Lionel’s face were pretty tough. It’s really not much pumpkin to work with in many spots, but I was banking on him really shining through once lit up.

Categories
Adventure Development

Drupaldelphia 2013

Drupahdelphia 2013Decided to attend my second Drupaldelphia, I also went to the 2011 one as well. I do enjoy being around some like minded folk everyone now and again, and usually I walk away re-energized and eager to try developing new things as well.

This year’s was held in the Philadelphia Convention Center. I decided to take the PATCO train to 8th and Market from Lindenwold. I fully navigated the entire trip without getting lost a single time! This is pretty amazing for me!

The train tide was pretty simple. The whole experience made it seem like more of an exotic trip for me. Plus it was only $6 round trip, which seemed pretty cheap to me to get there and back.

I took in 4 sessions, most of which were pretty interesting. My favorite was the Intro to Migration session.

At this very moment I’ve been working on migrating much old data into Drupal, so the timing of this session couldn’t of been better. The speaker did a great job covering the various approaches and the pros and cons to each. I think it will be a very useful session moving forward.

Another treat of my Philadelphia adventure was meeting up with Honey Badger Hall of Famer Lauren for lunch. She works a few blocks from there and was kind enough to meet me for lunch and gave me a tour of the Reading Terminal Market.

It was pretty insane in there, with tons of dining options. We were a bit overwhelmed and couldn’t make a decision on what to get. Eventually I got a chicken parm sandwich and it was messy but good.

The ride home was a bit wet walking to the train, but besides that pretty easy. Just got on, got to my car then drove home. Again I didn’t get lost at all! So impressive!

I’m always impressed with the Drupal community, and this was no exception. Very well done, and very affordable! $25 and I got a t-shirt too! A great experience and I’m glad I went!

Categories
Development

PhoneGap with jQuery Mobile iOS 7 iPad Broken Display

I made a little iOS app using PhoneGap (Cordova 3.0) and jQueryMobile 1.3.1. All was working well in my xCode simulators as well as when testing out on my iPhone with iOS 6.x. But when xCode 5 and iOS 7 arrived I sadly noticed that my app was now not displaying correctly on the iPad simulators when running iOS 7.

Broken Avalon AppThis one had me stumped for quite some time. I hadn’t changed anything, so clearly something had changed with the iOS 7 update. After much research and quite frankly guessing it appears that the iPad under iOS 7 is measuring the device width and height a bit differently than it had in iOS 6, thus throwing off the CSS that was laying out this app.

Luckily a fairly simple change to the meta viewport tag was all that was needed to set things bad in order.

Removing  ‘width=device-width, height=device-height’ from the viewport meta seemed to set things back in order for me.

I’m not sure if this causes any conflicts elsewhere, but so far I haven’t found any (it’s quiet, almost too quiet).

 

 

Categories
Sports

Dodgeball Fall 2013 Opener

Few things get me as excited as opening week of an SJSL sport. It’s like the first day of school, when you are bombarded with catching up with so many friends who you haven’t seen in a while. Lots of handshakes, how’ve you beens, and nods going around.

This season was particularly exciting for me as we had a lot of new free agents assigned to the team. I kept practicing their names and did my best to stalk them online beforehand (that sounds so much worse now that I read it) so that I had an idea of what they looked like and I could give them a proper greeting to the team. So I was eager to meet that and hoping that they would be a good fit for the team.

It turns out that they were all pretty great and team first players. Couldn’t of really asked for a better new bunch. They fit right in and brought our team much needed youth to our squad. Their energy and enthusiasm is a much needed addition to our seasoned vets (and I’m getting pretty old and gray).

We got beaten pretty handily against a very strong That’s What She Said team, but as the night went on you could see great improvement on our side, and we were able to win several of the later matches. I was really impressed with how our girls played against a very strong girl team, keeping those throws low and making some catches. I think on most nights that will win us a good amount of matches.

Our guys were very solid too. While we don’t have any extremely strong arms on the court, we made up with it with some smart throws and good teamwork. We really did a pretty great job playing together, especially considering all the new guys on the team.

Honey Badger of the Week Kevin had one of his better games I’d ever seen him play. Not only did he play great and went for catches, he also really stepped it up as a leader on the team! Constantly pointing out tactics to our new guys, he really made us all play better.

Very excited with our new energetic squad and can’t wait to see how the season unfolds.

Categories
Books

Inferno

InfernoSince Inferno was released a few months ago, I was checking each visit to the library if a copy was available. I did enjoy The Lost Symbol and everyone knows about The DaVinci Code, which Dan Brown has authored as well. Well a copy was in so I figured I’d finally give it a read.

It was pretty good, very similar to both books I mentioned above. Sticking with the now familiar script of scholar who decodes clues in awesome cities and ancient or really old things. Still a pretty solid formula which hasn’t gotten old to me at all.

The book has a couple of twists and turns, several of which did surprise me. However, the coolest thing about it was the whole topic on the potential of human extinction and how overpopulation is what would most likely cause it. I’ve long pointed to overpopulation as the problem of most problems we face as a society today. There’s some interesting ways that it gets addressed in this book.

Very good book, and I especially enjoyed it towards the end as things really started picking up.

Categories
Video Games

SteamWorld Dig: A Fistful of Dirt

SteamWorld DigWhen I saw that IGN had given SteamWorld Dig a 9.5, I figured I’d download it and give it a shot. Could use something new to kill some time with, plus I do like my trusty 3DS.

It was a very cool and addictive little game. I always root for the smaller game studios and their content on the eShop, and this one was pretty impressive. I’d have to agree with the reviews that compared it to a Dig Dug with some Metroid thrown in.

Power-ups are always great to get, and mining for treasure to buy them is very simple yet fun at the same time. A very simple but effective formula.

The pacing is what really made this one great to me. You’d sit for for small chunks of time and didn’t have to invest hours at a time to make progress.

Great little game.