Things have been crazy the past couple months as Holly and I ran in 10 different directions trying to decide where we were going to live in the coming months/years.  We considered building our new “dream house” but suffered from a case of sticker shock, then thought about buying a house but suffered from thoughts of “that’s all we get for that price?,” while all along fixing up our house with the intention of selling.  That was until we heard what the Realtor thought it would sell for.  So, I think the plan at this point, as of today, is to live in our house for a little bit longer while making a plan to build soonish.  We’ll also likely take advantage of the crazy-low mortgage rates to refinance into a 15 year mortgage in order to pay down the principal faster; believe it or not the low rates make this less than $100 more than our current payment.  Now…if you ask again tomorrow and you might get a different answer.

Somewhere during the process of looking for money under various rocks I decided to sell my old Polaris snowmobile.  It gave me years of hassle-free use but it was getting to the age where I just felt a big problem wasn’t too far off…so I decided it would be better in another person’s garage.  When I got nearly as much as I paid for it years ago I immediately started looking for more stuff to throw on craigslist.  If it isn’t nailed down it might be for sale soon!

Onto the dog…it seems like a couple months can’t go by without a trip to the Vet for Bailey.  This time was a bit more concerning though as Holly found blood in his “stool.”  The diagnosis this time is Colitis – swelling (inflammation) of the large intestine (colon).  This was better than other things we thought it might be and should be controllable with food more suitable for a dog his age.  It seems that his old food just isn’t bland enough for his aging digestive system, but with his lack of teeth soft food probably isn’t that far off!

As a general public service announcement: don’t ever try to make a “sparkler bomb!” Sure it looks fun in the youtube videos but playing with something that sounds and acts like a stick of dynamite really isn’t a good idea.  Some minor property damage and a close call with some flying “material” left my brother and I in a state of shock, and me with a solid resolve to never put one of these together again….seriously; never.

Finally…I bought a used Howard Miller mantle clock (pictured above) today from someone at GVSU today.  You might not think that is very cool or exciting but I was pretty thrilled to find such a treasure at such a reasonable cost.  My dad must have passed his odd desire to collect clocks and pocket watches onto me, but there is just something about winding an old clock and hearing real chimes and gongs every 15 minutes.  After hearing this even Holly agreed that she’d like to get a full-sized grandfather clock whenever we do end up in a new house!

If you didn’t catch it you should try to make some time to watch it here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38382773/ns/dateline_nbc-america_now

Let me first say that I am a big fan of Ann Curry…I watch the Today show almost every morning while getting ready for work and I think she brings a lot to that show.  I liked her so much I was rooting for her to replace Katie Couric, and most mornings while watching Meredith Vieira, I wish that she had.  That being said, I thought Ann was too nice, or simply chose not to ask hard questions while covering this story.

The story started with a local food bank that is supporting a growing number of people who rely on assistance to feed their families while operating on a shoestring budget.  It was really sad seeing the many people who probably couldn’t feed their families without this food bank.  The depiction of poverty in this rural area was surprising and Holly and I decided that we’d like to send a donation to the Friends & Neighbors Food Pantry.

While feeling very bad for the people covered in this story, I kept getting frustrated that more questions weren’t asked about what the individuals were doing to help get themselves out of poverty. Had these individuals considered moving to another area? Have they looked for ways to make themselves more employable? Have they contacted state agencies to take full advantage of programs setup to assist them? Do they think they’re making it possible for their children to rise out of poverty? I know these are easy questions to ask from my vantage point and there are countless hurdles for poor families to overcome to change their situations, but I felt the story glossed over everything that might involve the families helping themselves.

I tried to focus on the bigger picture, but it was hard watching a woman get upset about not being able to feed her children while smoking a cigarette…this after explaining that she pinches pennies to buy the cheapest groceries because even the pennies saved counted.  Even if you smoke the cheap brands, I’m sure that the money spent would equate to a couple more cans of food for the kids.

A similar moment came when Ann was interviewing a young mother of 3 who had lived in her van with the kids during the times that she couldn’t stay with her grandparents after fighting with them.  Ann questioned whether this woman had ever learned about birth control…she said that she had, but retorted: “accidents happen.”  There were no other follow up questions despite so many opportunities to go into more detail; instead they moved onto talking about the woman participating in a singing contest to win 50 dollars.  After dropping out of school when she had the second child before she would have graduated I had to ask myself at what point she thought a 3rd child was a good idea.

Judging by the comments left on the dateline page I saw that many others experienced the same frustrations.

Somewhere in the middle of all this the governor of Ohio was interviewed and stated that at some point “it became stylish to be selfish. It’s almost acceptable to be prejudiced against poor people.” I then wondered if my frustrations were just my prejudice and selfishness coming out.  I’m still thinking about that, but I think a little more in depth coverage was still warranted…

As an aside…throughout the story I was reminded of Jeannette Wall’s book, “The Glass Castle.”  I imagined that the people being interviewed were somewhat like Wall’s parents, and wondered if the kids had some of the same feelings/experiences that she had as a kid.  If you haven’t read that book I’d recommend that too!

The project started with 1 55 gallon drum, 1 30 gallon drum, PVC plumbing parts (for a drain), and 4 cubic feet of two-part expanding foam. Someday I’ll try to post a complete how to, but for now here are some pics of where I am currently.

Next I’ll be adding the tap and running hoses for the keg coupler and CO2 tank.

Desired output:

Have you ran into a situation where you want to combine several rows of data from a sub query in a concatenated string while querying another table? It seems to come up for me a lot, but I’ve historically addressed it in code while using Oracle.  I found a way using Oracle functions to do this fairly easily and thought I would share.  If you’re running Oracle 11g release 2 I’ve been told there is a LISTAGG function that would replace what I have done here, but this will work for the rest of us.

First, you have to create a function for the sub query:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION "GET_COLORS" (ITEM_ID VARCHAR2)
RETURN VARCHAR2
IS
color_string VARCHAR2(2500) := NULL;
BEGIN
FOR cur_rec IN (SELECT C.COLORNAME FROM COLOR C, ITEMCOLOR IC WHERE C.COLORID = IC.COLORID AND IC.ITEMID = ITEM_ID) LOOP
color_string := color_string || ', ' || cur_rec.COLORNAME;
END LOOP;
RETURN LTRIM(color_string, ',');
END;


Once the function is created, compliled, and execute permissions granted, etc. you’ll be able to call the function like so :

SELECT ITEMNAME, GET_COLORS(ITEMNAME.ITEMID) AS COLORSOFFERED FROM ITEM


That’s it… Granted this could be tedious if you needed to do this often, but it is a fast solution

here is a quick snapshot of what we’re looking for:

To apply, or to find more information visit: http://bit.ly/9Qsp5R

Really Good Soft Pretzels

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon yeast
• 1 table spoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 cup warm water
• 2 3/4 cups flour
• 4 cups water, boiling (for water bath)
• 4 teaspoons baking soda (for water bath)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 475 degrees
2. Mix butter, yeast, sugar, salt, hot water, and 1 cup of flour until smooth & bubbles form
3. Gradually mix in remaining flour until dough is no longer sticky, add additional flour if necessary.
4. Cover dough and allow to rise until it doubles in size (and hour or 2)
5. Once dough has risen knead for 1-2 minutes, adding a bit of flour to make dough less sticky if need be
6. Divide dough and roll out pieces of dough until strips are 1/2″ in diameter and long enough to form your pretzel shapes
7. Let shaped pretzels sit for 2-3 minutes
8. Drop pretzels into boiling water bath (4 cups of water and 4 teaspoons of baking soda, boiling) and let float for 1 minutes on each side
9. Let pretzels drip dry on a wire rack and then transfer to a greased cookie sheet
10. Cook for 13-15 minutes, or until pretzels reach desired brown-ness.

Once you start cutting the dough and shaping the pretzels it is helpful to have two people to keep the process going.  The pretzels will start to accumulate on greased cookie sheets after the water bath and then you’ll just have to wait for everything to bake.  To speed things up I usually skip the shaping step and just cut into 2 inch chunks which are great for dipping in something like a spicy or honey mustard sauce.  Enjoy!

For sale: One well used old farm house on 4.3 acres with a stocked pond, a dozen or so fruit trees, blueberry bushes, horse pastures, a little barn complete with a couple horse stalls and a big garden ready for planting.  Inside the house there are 5 bedrooms, two bathrooms, and two basements (the Michigan basement consists of fieldstone and logs with the bark still on them supporting the house!)  The second basement is the foundation for the addition that was added when I was in Junior High (I think) that doubled the size of the original house.  The original house is very old and  the neighbor’s house was one of the original school houses in the area.  Down the road is the old Holloway railroad station…

How could you pass this up:

My mom is finally selling the house that me and my siblings grew up in.  She hasn’t lived there in over a year as she has been busy with travel nursing assignments, and the place wasn’t getting the attention an old house needs to stay intact.  I spent the past couple days in Tecumseh trying to get everything organized, meeting with Realtors, carpet installers, and doing all sorts of general remodeling.  I was shocked how much better the house looked after updating all the light fixtures, updating one bathroom and replacing a lot of wall paper with more modern paint colors.  I hope a new family enjoys all the hard work, and I hope it means the house sells a lot faster.

And then there was the barn…  My dad was a collector of everything it seems; after he passed away a couple years ago we went through the barn and cleaned and organized the best we could.  This time around I had to have a dumpster dropped off to finally purge a lot of the stuff that wouldn’t be wanted/needed by anyone else.  The items he accumulated over the years ranged from flat out junk to the nicest antiques, including set after set of wrenches and ratchets, more hand saws than any one person could ever use, box after box of mismatched nuts and bolts, and random pieces of scrap metal that doesn’t seem to have any real purpose.  After cleaning and purging I think I finally have the barn ready for the county’s biggest yard sale/flea market.

If you live in southeast Michigan and are looking for a great place to live let me know and I’ll gladly give you more info!

If I wanted to grab the left portion of some data in SQL Server I would do the following:
select LEFT(theField,10) from theTable

If I wanted to grab the left portion of the data that preceded some character like the ‘@’ in an email address I would do something like the following:
select LEFT(theField,charIndex(theField,’@')-1)

For reference, here are the Oracle Equivalents:

To grab the left 10 characters:
select SUBSTR(theField,1,10)

To grab the right 10 characters:
select SUBSTR(theField,-10)

To grab the characters to the left of the ‘@’ sign like above:
select SUBSTR(theField,1,instr(theField,’@')-1)

Bailey at about 8 weeks old:
(the banana toy was about 6″ long)

Bailey around 4 years old:

Bailey about 4 or 5 years old:

Bailey tonight:

Picture “Video Killed the Radio Star” playing in the background…  I am hardly a star but it is what I thought of yesterday while hearing people discuss Twitter at the AIMWest Social Media Confab yesterday at the Grand Rapids JW Marriott.

In my case, it seems increased usage of Twitter has led to decreased blogging and the trend seems to have spread to others in my office.  Maybe I’ve had less to blog about, less time to blog in general, or perhaps less interest…but in any case it usually comes down to the redundancy between what I might blog about and what I am talking about on Twitter.  The “What I’m Doing” widget on the right captures just about everything I am up to via a Twitter feed so is it at all helpful or interesting to summarize or rephrase it here?

The other issue of late has been my desire/need to separate work and personal life.  I equate this to taking two distinctly different groups of friends out to the bar and then watching the awkwardness that ensues.  You know some old friend is going to tell the most embarrassing story or pick the most inappropriate youthful indiscretion to relive…

As my professional contacts grow on my previous largely personal social media outlets I find myself censoring or at least very carefully considering what I post for general consumption.  For instance, my trip to Key West, FL during Fantasy Fest was an amazingly fun time with a group of friends that I’ve known since college, but most of the photos I took “documenting the madness” are hardly safe for work. As I’ve told people, the most popular Halloween costume was just plain nude with a little body paint.  (Don’t worry, me and my group of friends remained clothed at all times) I tweeted about it, but I resisted all temptation to “twitpic” the events. Maybe a year ago I would have posted pics on flickr, blogged about the craziness and shared more realtime with Twitter.  It’s not like I have a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde dichotomy going on between my work and personal/social life…its just easier not starting meetings with Deans or the President with a conversation about something crazy I see/say/retweet outside of work.

I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts on this, any solutions, insight, best practices would be appreciated! I know from conversation yesterday others are in this boat as well!

I was able to help with a couple projects around the farm – the first of which was to move the “hunting camp” from a spot by the river to higher ground.  The original camp was also built on tree stumps which had moved so much over the years that the structure was no longer stable.  A river also runs about 50 yards from the camp and the water often rises so much that someday the building could float away.  For those wondering what a hunting camp is, it is basically a shack with a wood stove and cots where people go and don’t emerge until they run out of food, beer, or until they shoot a deer.  Here is a picture from ’05 showing the camp in its original glory.

The process of moving the camp took many hours and its a sheer miracle that we were able to complete the process.  Essentially we had to back a trailer under the building, secure the building to the trailer then cut the building from the tree stumps and supports that were securing it about 6 ft in the air.  Its also a miracle that we all walked away with life and limb considering we were using a 3 ton automotive floor jack and logs to support the place while cutting the supports with a chain saw.  I wish I had more pics documenting the madness.  Well into the project, once the camp was on the trailer, the trailer sank into the thick U.P. clay/mud and the tractor couldn’t pull it out.  So, we hooked one, then two, trucks up the tractor, which was in turn connected to the trailer and pulled.  Finally after jerking the tractor and camp loose with the truck and tow straps we moved it 1000 yards to its new location.  Here is a picture of the tractor and camp on the move, not in the picture are the trucks connected to the front…it was something to behold

While in town for breakfast we stopped at the local thrift shop we jokingly call the “shit shack” they have everything you never knew you wanted until someone else was ready to throw it away.  While looking around I came across this unique display holding all varieties of condoms.  Upon close inspection I found that they had all expired last year…  They seemed to be a good deal, but the population of Pickford may accidentally increase by a couple more this year!

Later that day I snapped this pic of someone who came to the farm to pick up an old bed off a pickup truck.  You can’t see it very well in the picture but he brought his old truck out hooked up to a boat trailer which now has another old bed on it…  Again, only in the U.P.

Finally, this morning after breakfast this morning we noticed a unique shed in someone’s backyard.  It was an ingenious design and so well put together that you could barely tell that it was nothing more than a couple walls made out of 6 foot fence segments with an aluminum truck topper on top as a roof.  Amazing!

So, that was my last 24 hours…can you top that?