Cursive - a poem

Maybe I can learn to write in cursive,
even all these years later.
I've always been more comfortable with block letters.
I AM THE COMIC in COMIC SANS
A joke
in my stilted,
crippled
writing voice.
What if I can write?
What if I have a beautiful poetic mind from which beautiful poetic thoughts may flow
if unfettered?
Would I then... Must I then... have an obligation to send my voice out into the world?
to cast my bread upon the water?
Even if---
Derailed by the voices in the room.
Feeling the need to hear and listen to the voices in the room.
Hating the voices.
Unable to shut them out.

Car Stereo Install Part 1

I bought a 1994 Mitsubishi Might Max pickup truck a year ago.

I got it so that I could teach a couple of kids to drive on an (increasingly rare) stick shift vehicle, so my requirements list was pretty small.

This was a year ago, October 2016.

Among other problems, the truck had a mass of dangling wires where the radio should have been.

My friend Jeff commented that he got a radio for $30, and instead of being proud of my cheapskatery, I found myself feeling embarrassed that I hadn't bothered to check.

I decided to install a stereo in the pickup. This $20 bluetooth radio from Walmart

I pulled on the wires, looked at the ragged hole the previous owner left when they removed whatever was there. And I shorted out the instrument panel as I started looking at the wires. I drove the truck with no visible speedometer after dark for several days. I was left feeling a lot less confident in my abilities.

Then I drove home to Richland Washington for a couple of weeks to visit with wife and children, leaving the

When I returned I determined I would man up and get the radio installed. And discovered that My parents don't have any of the tools for this job.

Undaunted, I bought a soldering iron, heat gun, heat shrink tubing, wire stripper and a multimeter. (At this point I'm not sure, but it might have been cheaper to pay someone to install it, but I get to keep the tools, so still a good deal, right?)

I found a wire color diagram online, but EVERY SINGLE wire color was wrong, I assumed I would have to probe them all with the multimeter. I found persistent 12V. I found the "accessory +12V", I eventually figured out the ground, dimmer and illumination wires, which sadly had no matching wire on the radio I bought. I watched a video on Youtube about tinning your Soldering Iron (I really suck at soldering. I guess I've never really learned how it is done).

After soldering and heat shrinking the power wires, I replaced 3 burned out fuses. It was time (late really) to leave for work. I made a real effort to put away all my tools and supplies, making me late (since I was pushing my time). As I was doing this I thought "I should always put everything away when I have to stop in the middle of a project. How many times have I left things out and then returned to the project much later than intended, only to find that the things I left out have been damaged or lost because I left them out?"

When I pulled in to the parking structure at work,  found that the instrument panel lit up again! This was much appreciated.

A day (and several hours of soldering later) the radio worked, but only out of one speaker (the right speaker has a broken wire, I have no idea what the deal is with the internal speakers if they are even still in the dash).

But I did it myself. I learned something. And I made my little truck a little better.

Missing mens wedding ring "My love, for eternity, Amie"

A few weeks ago, I misplaced my wedding ring. I've looked everywhere I could think of and asked at the gym, at work, and anywhere I could think I might have been dumb enough to take it off, but to no avail. On the slim chance that someone might find it and search, I'm posting here. It is a plain rounded band with an inscription inside, which says "My love, for eternity, Amie"

I really didn't want to publicly out myself for being such a fool, but after nearly a month of being gone, it seems like being found by a stranger is as likely an outcome as any other, and after almost 18 years of marriage to my sweetheart, that ring represents the most precious things in my life. I hate to replace it.

Splitting a single monster git commit

Sometimes for whatever reason, you are working on a change or a new feature, and
one thing leads to another, you find a bug and fix it here, you need some new structure
there, you need to change the return value or the parameters for another existing feature,
you change something, only to find out you didn't need it, etc, etc.

This goes on along as you hack out the details, and finally, the shiny new thing is complete.
You commit it. but when you sit back and look at your new feature, or worse, when your team
gathers around the table for code review, they note that it includes a huge amount of stuff which
isn't part of the feature.

"How are we supposed to even review this? Fix it! Split up the commit."

This post is a guide to how I prefer to split a commit.

1. create a new branch to keep the old branch around until we're sure the new one is good
   git branch original_monster_commit
2. If your commit is the most recent one, skip to step 4
3. OR if it is not the most recent commit: do an interactive rebase on a commit before the monster, and mark the monster commit with "e" for edit 
1. git rebase -i some_commit
4.  do a soft reset to the previous version (This is technically a dangerous thing to do, but remember, we're safe because we created that branch in step 1)
1. git reset HEAD~1
5. Form a strategy:
1. Look at the changes with git diff.
2. Ask youself:
1. What changes go together?
2. What changes are dependent on other changes
3. What changes might require temporary changes to stand alone?
4. Are there a class of cleanups or whitespace changes that should be bundled
6. Repeatedly Add and commit your changesets
1. git add -p
2. git add <new_filename_if_applicable>
3. git commit
4. git stash 
5. make sure your tests pass, compile succeeds, etc
6. git stash pop
7. finish the rebase (if this was not the most recent commit)
1. git rebase --continue
8. When there are no uncommitted changes, check it against the saved branch (You did create an extra branch in step 1, didn't you? DIDN'T YOU?!!!!)
1. git diff original_monster_commit
9. If they are the same, you're done!

New Music to an LDS Hymn

... So, this blog was created with the intent that the "Play" in play paint code, would be music, but I have never posted anything. Well, after several years of ignoring it, I have finished the hymn I started. Please download it, print it, play it. Tell me if you like it.

Lean on My Ample Arm (sheet music)

Feedback is encouraged. Its my first 4 part harmony since the one semester of music theory I took (and failed) at the University of Utah in 1998, so be gentle.

All it took was a good reason to finish it.

I signed up to sing it at a church talent night last month, knowing that I had nothing but a melody. I worked on it as many nights a week as I could find the time, and finished the first draft of it with two hours to spare. My piano skill were not up to playing (especially playing and singing), so I took my draft to the show, thinking I might just need to sing it unaccompanied. I nervously asked a friend if he would be willing to play it, and he did. Since then, I found a neat music drafting program called Lilypond (lilypond.org), which I really liked. I was able to write my music like source code for software and compile the pdf.

Now I just need to rekindle my art habit, so I can fulfill the "paint" heading.

Force google image search to use safe search with Dansguardian

I use dansguardian on my firewall at home to keep out offensive stuff from the Internet.
I downloaded blocklists a couple of years ago, and because it is mainly content based, I have adjusted it a little, but it still works very well.


It came with a set of regular expressions to force major search engines to use safe search when searching for images, but I noticed recently that some recent changes at google broke this feature.

 I got a new one working (it does catch all searches, and not just images. If someone were to narrow it to work on image and videos, feel free to post a comment)
In the process I noticed that there was nothing filtering bing searches, (heaven knows why one would use bing, but best to be thorough).
Also important is that this method helps with ssl encrypted searches, which are otherwise hard to block.

In the hope that this will be helpful to someone else:

add the following to /etc/dansguardian/lists/urlregexplist (it might be in a different folder, but the name of the file will be  urlregexplist)


#for google
#we add &safe=vss to the end of every search
 "(^http[s]?://[0-9a-z]+\.google\.[a-z]+[-/%.0-9a-z]*/search\?.*)"->"\1&safe=vss"


#for bing
#similar, but &adlt=strict is the keyword
"(http[s]?://[0-9a-z]+.bing.com/images/search\?.*)"->"\1&adlt=strict"

hope that helps!

New Job in tri cities WA. Temporarily homeless

It has been two weeks since I accepted a job in Richland Washington. I start tomorrow.

The past two days I have driven over 600 miles in a the largest U-haul truck AND with larger car carrier trailer behind. What an experience that was! After a while I got used to the way the trailer sort of pushes you from behind going downhill. On the other hand, driving up some of the mountain grades of Idaho and Oregon at maybe 45 MPH with the pedal to the metal... there is a terror that comes as you lose speed even while pushing as hard as you can.

My 10 year old son and I have checked into a motel in Pasco WA, where apparently everyone speaks Spanish. It seems we are fortunate to get a room at all, as the tricities annual boat races, which are the biggest event of the the year here, are today!

We attended a church meeting, which, as it happened, was en espanol. We did our best to sing the hymns, but did not stay for the whole service.