Jonathan’s Universe

Archive for April, 2009

Wow, It’s been a while.

I’ve been extremely busy the last couple weeks.

First off, the most recent thing. My dad had a pretty bad fall on Sunday. He fell about 22 feet off of a tree (doing maintenance). He ended up shattering a vertebrae and fracturing another. The possibility of him being paralyzed was very, very real. Luckily the doctors and nurses at Christiana Hospital took good care of him, and the surgery was a success. He will walk again! For the next couple months he will need a back brace to give his back some support while walking. If he does well these next couple days walking around the hospital, he won’t even need a wheel chair… which is good because the apartment he will be living in is not handicapped-friendly. There is an elevator but you still need to go up (or down) one flight of steps to get to it. It’s silly.

Also, in the hospital rooms they had these computer touch screens (running a modified version of linux!!) which allowed you to watch TV, go on the internet and watch a movie pay-per-view/comcast-on-demand style. The TV feature took signal straight from a standard coaxial cable (from what I could tell). The internet was a standard ethernet connection, but I couldn’t use this feature, because you had to plug in a USB keyboard, and I think the USB slot was broken since it didn’t work. The movies.. well.. meh. You were allowed one free movie if you filled out a survey about your stay. So I did that (for my dad! ) and I selected to watch Hancock, since I hadn’t seen that in a while. The quality of the movie was horrendous. There were lines through the picture — old VHS tape quality; this was still watchable though. The sound was even worse. Even at full 100% (40% audio on the TV feature was really loud) it sounded like they were whispering. About 30 minutes into the movie, I got bored and fell asleep. Oh well, it was free.

The project at work I’ve been working on for the past couple weeks is getting some nice opinions about it. I made this web application that allows authorized users (school board, senior officers, their secretaries, etc) to post documents and reports that are normally submitted to the district monthly. For example, a personnel report, finance & budget report, et cetera. The system is pretty cool and due to the sensitivity of some of these documents, I made sure the security was tight, too.

At the moment, I’m updating my work development server to the most recent release of Debian. I started the update process via remote SSH, which was kind of stupid. I don’t like performing big system-wide updates remotely. Last time I updated (from debian 4 to debian 5) remotely, it was updating the ethernet drivers, which broke the connection I had.. so I had a halfway updated operating system. It wasn’t pretty. Thank God it’s linux. If it was windows, the hard disk would be permanently corrupted or something (hint hint, Microsoft!).

That’s really about it. I’ll try to update more often, I’ve just been busy with helping my parent’s move and such.