Atypical Homeschool

Home again

February 2, 2013 By Ron

January went by fast. Part of the reason for that was that both Andrea & I had a nasty cold that lasted two weeks between the two of us. In my last post I mentioned we had rented a space big enough for all of us. I didn’t mention that it was barely big enough for all of us in that it’s the upper floor of a small house.

We went from 19 rooms in Lakeville to six here. The kitchen which is an okay size for a kitchen serves as both a kitchen and laundry room. The living room is serving triple duty as a workspace/office, dining & living room. Our bedroom had a dresser serving double duty as a standup desk for my development server & as a small sewing area for Andrea.

Needless to say we didn’t rent it with the intention of staying longer than the one year. In addition to being quite cramped we picked the area which would give Meaghan the best access to potential jobs vs a location more suited to Andrea & I.

When we were looking for places to rent last year, many of the places that sounded better (size, location, etc.) for us were being listed anywhere up to six months in advance. Once we were through Christmas, I started checking for rentals that were for an entire house and in locations where we would feel more at home. Within a few days I found three houses that all looked like they might fit the bill. We signed a lease on one of them about two weeks later.

We got our keys on Thursday night and will be moving on Monday. Andrea uploaded a few pics of some of the interior. Except the last eight months, Andrea & I have had a water view of either a lake or river since 2001. Our new back yard has waterfront on the Saint John River. The two pics on the right are up & down river.

One of the things I’ve been doing over the last year has been sketching out plans for eventually building a new house. Interestingly, this house has roughly the same floor space as many of those sketches. We both expect that living in roughly the same square footage will help us with morphing those sketches into plans.

We’re both very excited to feel at home again.

Filed Under: Us Tagged With: family, home

2012 in Reverse

January 1, 2013 By Ron

‘Tis the season for year in review posts. I didn’t write one of these last year. I thought I would change things up and cover the highlights of our year in reverse.

25th Christmas

This Christmas was number 25 for Andrea & I. We had officially met 2-3 weeks before Christmas 1988. I gave her roses that year. This year I surprised her with 2 dozen long stemmed roses for the 24th anniversary of officially meeting.

I had a second romantic surprise for her on Christmas Day which was a sterling silver pendant with a birth stone for each of the children and grandchildren. Click through for the rest of our Christmas fun.

Sans Teenagers

In 1990, Addison turned 13 years old. This year Meaghan turned 20. We have another year or so until Emma turns 13. Time flies when you are having fun. It’s amazing for us to see our oldest three all adults, all working & seeing their lives unfold

WordPress Community Summit

In October, Andrea & I attended the WordPress Community Summit on Tybee Island, Georgia. It was our first WP community event since WordCamp Toronto in 2011. It was awesome to get together (again in many cases) with folks that we work with online in the WP Community.

Meaghan

Early in the year Meaghan let us know that she wanted to move to Fredericton to look for work. We rented a place for her so that she would be within walking/bus distance to business/retail areas of the city. She’s been enjoying a job at Costco for about 3 months.

Ayla

We were right on hand for welcoming our second grandchild Ayla this summer. We did lots of Izzy babysitting while Mom had doctor’s appointments, ultrasounds, etc. We’ve gotten used to seeing them a couple times a week. The next best thing to being a parent is being a grandparent

Renovations

Once Meaghan let us know that she was planning on moving out we started thinking about 3 of us living in a five bedroom, three bathroom house with two stairways and when it would be time for us to put it on the market. We decided we wanted to start the final renovations right away. We rented a storage locker and started working our way through all of our stuff. We ended up splitting our possessions into three categories: need to keep with us, want to keep but don’t need right away & we can part with this. Moving the things we wanted to keep but didn’t need right away to a storage locker made things easier for us in a few ways. First, those items were the easiest to pick out (ex. Christmas decorations). Second, it gave us space for both renovations and sorting through the remaining stuff. Finally, it helped crystalize the line between this is something we want to keep and this is something we can part with.

Moved

One of the renovation items that had been on the list since we bought the house was cleaning up and painting six tin ceilings. Tin ceilings need an initial coat of metal paint before being painted with regular house paint. Because metal paint is solvent based, it’s not safe for breathing. That meant that we would need to vacate the house while the metal paint in each room was curing. Given that we work at home that was going to be rather disruptive. We decided that a workable solution was to rent a place for Meaghan that was big enough for all of us.

We rented the place we have now in Fredericton and had fiber optic Internet installed. Within a couple weeks we realized that the speed of our Internet connection significantly improved our work environment. By the end of June we had pretty much switched over to spending the entire work week in Fredericton.

South by Southwest

In March we went to our first SxSW and met the rest of our Copyblogger co-workers. both andrea & I love the autonomy of working for a distributed company but there is no substitute for meeting up the people you work with. We have already booked our flight and hotel for SxSW 2013.

That kinda covers the highlights of the year. We did have a setback or two, but overall a very positive year for us

Filed Under: Us Tagged With: family, marriage, renovations, wordpress

Snowy Walking Trail

December 11, 2012 By Ron

Yesterday morning I took the car to get winter tires installed. It started snowing around 8:30. By the time I got there they had a few hours booked so I walked back home instead of waiting. When I went back I decided to go through the walking trails in Odell park.

Filed Under: Us Tagged With: Odell Park, winter

Storm a brewing

September 6, 2012 By Ron

Storm brewing to the east

I made a Lakeville/Fredericton return trip earlier today. I stopped at the Subway in Woodstock to grab a sub for supper. Even though it was bright and sunny at the Subway, some folk not too far away were getting a good soaking. By the time I left Subway 5 minutes later it was overcast to the point where the shadows had disappeared.

Filed Under: Images Tagged With: clouds, storm

One down

June 23, 2012 By Ron

Three coats of paint later

Today I finished the first tin ceiling. I wanted to get the one in the hallway done first because our carpenter neighbor (Vince) is doing some reno work for us. The 2x10s that I was using for staging were destined to be a carrying beam in the dining room. the span across the dining room is 18 feet and the second floor joists are 2x8s.

Vince built and installed the carrying beam on Monday

Just primed (2 weeks ago)

I have two more tin ceilings partially done. Both have their coat of metal primer. The ceiling in the lower picture now has two coats of white on about 2/3 of it. The remaining 1/3 has one coat. The third ceiling looks pretty much like the lower picture except there is a ceiling fan in the center of the room.

The good news is that the latex paint goes on much faster than the metal primer. So much faster that two coats of the latex takes less time to apply than the coat of primer does. I’m hoping that by the end of next weekend I’ll have primer on a fourth ceiling and the other two ceilings completely done.

Filed Under: Us Tagged With: paint, tin ceiling

Tin ceilings

June 9, 2012 By Ron

Our house has six tin ceilings circa 1900 or so. The house had been left unheated the two winters before we bought it. The combination of cold and moisture separated some of the paint from the tin ceilings.

When there were five of us living in the house it was a bit difficult to free up a room to scrape the ceiling. After Sarah moved out about 3 years ago we had been able to cycle things around and empty a room at a time. While the room was empty, we painted, repaired walls & scraped the ceiling if it was tin. One of the six rooms is one of the upstairs hallway (and stairs). To do that ceiling I needed to block off the stairs plus put some type of staging over the stairs so that I could get the ceiling above them.

In addition to picking a time to block the stairs I’ve been waiting for warm weather where we could leave the upstairs windows open for a couple days at a time. The exposed tin cannot be directly painted with latex paint. The tin needs a coat of metal primer paint. The grey areas are the areas with metal primer.

Had to prime the whole ceiling

Metal primer is solvent based so when I’m painting it gives off quite a bit of fumes. I have a respirator mask so I’m protected but that doesn’t protect anyone else in the house. Every time I paint a ceiling we vacate the house for 1-2 days while the fumes dissipate through the open windows. I’m hoping to get five of the six ceilings primed and painted this month. It is going to make for some busy weekends and few days away from home each week.

Of the six ceilings, almost all of the paint on two of them had mostly separated from the metal. I have one of those primed. It took about 5 hours with a brush. We can write a couple hours of that off to education & learning what techniques do and do not work.

Filed Under: Us Tagged With: metal primer, painting, tin ceiling

Cleaning out

May 22, 2012 By Ron

A week ago, Andrea wrote in her blog

Meaghan is moving out and going to Fredericton for work, so we are cleaning out all kinds of crap that I’d been keeping “just in case” When you’re down to one kid, there’s a lot you suddenly realize you don’t need any more. We’re motivated to finish up a few things on our house too, with room to shuffle around.

This weekend was a long weekend & we had a two-day yard sale. Interestingly, the most appropriate post shows up in that post’s related post list.

I never want to move all my crap again.

After that last move I had said I didn’t want to move again until the kids had all moved out. When Meaghan told us earlier this year that she was planning on moving out we started giving thought to the day where we would put our house on the market.

Even though we had had a few clean out sessions we still had (and have) quite a bit of stuff that we were mostly hanging onto just in case. This is a big house and we have lots more room than we need. Keeping most of that extra stuff wasn’t inconveniencing us much at all. So, there wasn’t a great deal of urgency in trimming it down.

What we decided to do was work our way through the house and put everything into one of five categories: things to keep that we are currently using, things to keep that we won’t need for six months (ex. winter tires), things to sell (hence the yard sale), things to donate to charity, and things to toss.

A couple months ago we rented storage space for six months. As we’ve been working our way through the house, we’ve accumulated stacks of each category. Once we get a carload of charity items or storage items we load up the car & off it goes. Now that we had the yard sale, Andrea has a list of the “to sell” items that are going to go to charity.

It’s been really good for us to go through and decide on the things that we really want to keep and the things that we can let go of. I’m glad we decided to do this now rather than wait until Emma was in the range of thinking about moving out.

A side benefit to this is that once Meaghan moves we’re going to have enough empty space that it’s going to be relatively easy to empty some rooms to do some renovations that we’ve been postponing. To date we haven’t applied a fresh coat of paint to any of the tin ceilings. With just the three of us here we’ll be able to move sleeping quarters to one half of the house or the other and keep the fumes out of the half we are sleeping in.

Filed Under: Us

20 years of Internet

April 25, 2012 By Ron

I realized last night that I’ve been using the Internet for about 21 years. I had access to it through work before it was publicly accessible anywhere in Canada. We were among the first people to sign up with NBTel when they offered dial up service to their customers. We had almost a month’s worth of free service because they gave out accounts before they had the usage tracking systems in place. Initially, the rate was $.16/minute ($9.60/hour), but within 2 or 3 months it dropped to $.10/minute and the basic service fee included 30 hours of usage.

To mark the occasion, I thought I’d list a few memorable highlights of the last 20 years:

1992 – Obtained Internet access in January, bought our first computer (486DX33, 4MB RAM, 32MB HD, 1024×768 XVGA monitor). Later in the year Meaghan was born.
1993 – I started working with Ultrix (Digital Equipment Unix variant) & SCO Unix at work.
1994 – Upgraded to a 56K modem, I left my full time contract with the provincial government.
1995 – Incorporated my consulting business, signed on with Digital Equipment as an OpenVMS Systems Specialist.
1996 – Diversified my business – Andrea also had a business which needed funding. My business bought hers. That was the beginning of us being business partners as well as life partners.
1997 – Signed on with StarChoice Television (now Shaw Direct TV) to be the IT lead through the startup phase. This turned out to last much longer than initially anticipated. I remained involved in the enterprise until they hit about 400,000 subscribers.
1998 – Another diversification year – we had 3 part time employees each doing different jobs.
1999 – Pretty well all the year was spent on Y2K projects. For that year most of my clients had their normal spending restriction removed if the purchase order had Y2K in the description of what was being purchased. A busy year for me.
2000 – I did a lot of Y2K followup work, late in the year Emma was born.
2001 – We moved to Miramichi & bought our first old house.
2002 – I started a programming instructor position at NBCC Miramichi.
2003 – I bought my second motorcycle (Yamaha 535 Virago).
2004 – DSL service (1.5 Mbps) came to our neighbourhood and we promptly upgraded (from 56K).
2005 – My position at the college came to an end.
2006 – I took a job here. Initially, I was hired to work on an business optimization project involving the Hungarian Algorithm.
2007 – After a year of unsuccessful searching for a decent rental with 4 bedrooms, we bought this house, got our first taste of satellite Internet which was the only option other than dialup.
2008 – Sold the house in Miramichi, left the position that we had moved here for, started working with Andrea again.
2009 – Merge of WordPress and WordPress MU was announced, we shifted our business plans accordingly.
2010 – I worked extensively on the merge, switched from Satellite Internet to fixed wireless, our first grandchild Izzy was born.
2011 – Andrea & I started working with and later joined Copyblogger Media.

I’m looking forward to what the next 10-20 years has to offer

Filed Under: General

SOPA – About Copyright & Trademark violations

January 25, 2012 By Ron

The author of the original, now nearly dead, SOPA legislation in the US was Congressman Lamar Smith. As word spread about the draconian measures in the bill, someone decided to check Lamar’s website and found that his site used a Creative Commons photo without attribution. That means his site was infringing on copyright. Shortly after the news broke Lamar’s site was taken down. It reappeared later with the images removed from the background and banner.

Legislators in Ireland are under pressure to pass a SOPA like law from the subsidiaries of the same companies that lobbied the US for SOPA. Earlier today, news broke on Twitter that Sean Sherlock’s (the man behind the Irish version of SOPA) site also contained copyright infringement. This site was also taken down today and probably we can safely assume that it will reappear without copyright infringement.

In Canada, there is pressure on parliament to pass Bill C-11 (Canadian version of SOPA). Can you guess what’s coming next?

The party currently in power in Canada is the CPC party. Lo and behold, In the lower right of the CPC website is a fake Youtube Logo:

Youtube does provide a terms of service for using their logo. Youtube also provides the approved logos in downloadable form.

Yes, those three sites only had minor infringements. But, they are infringements nonetheless.

How many websites currently have accidental fake logos?
How many websites currently have an image downloaded from a photo hosting service (ex. Flickr)?
How many websites currently have an icon the developer borrowed from Windows, OSX or an application?

The answer is probably millions. Is there a point at which technically illiterate politicians will clue in that the laws they are proposing will negatively affect millions of existing websites?

The additional irony with the CPC instance is that Youtube might end up being blocked from Canada if C-11 is passed.

Filed Under: In the news Tagged With: censorship, copyright, SOPA, trademark

SOPA & PIPA Blackout

January 19, 2012 By Ron

I wanted to give a brief non-technical explanation of why we participated in the Internet blackout in protest of SOPA & PIPA. To start, here is a great TED talk:

Under current law (DMCA), you & I are allowed to incorporate existing content into our own works so long as it falls within “fair use”. Fair use means you can use short clips from movies, short music clips from other artists, quotes from other written works, etc. without it being copyright infringement. SOPA & PIPA eliminate fair use.

Further to that, the proposed laws also make linking to web sites that contain copyright infringement (under the new definition) illegal (on the grounds of aiding and abetting copyright infringement). What that means in practical terms if SOPA & PIPA pass into law is that most existing blogs both foreign and domestic would fall into the definition of a copyright infringing website and/or intellectual property theft.

A person who has a site offering free yoga videos and instruction is technically taking revenue away from the traditional entertainment and broadcasting industry. However, most like the person running that site is making money from advertising and/or creating a customer base for one on one consultation. From an economic standpoint, the site may be eliminating a job at News Corp or one of the other media conglomerates but it is not costing the economy a job.

The media conglomerates cannot get legislators to shutdown the distribution infrastructure (the Internet), so they drafted legislation that targets the content producers (ie. you & I). If you have not already done so, I encourage you to contact your representatives to let them know that you do not want the Internet to be censored.

Filed Under: General, In the news Tagged With: censorship, Internet, PIPA, SOPA