On Sept 27th 2010 I was married to the love of my life, Jenney Marie Richards. My best man David Burns, wrote a speech that was both moving and heartfelt. I record that now for all eternity (assuming the internet is immortal and all):

For those of you I haven’t had the pleasure of being introduced to, my name is David Burns. I have know Jerad since the early days of high school.

I’m not here to tell you the funny stories of a 27 year old man who thought it was a bright idea to buy a skateboard to ride to work having never ridden one before and so fall a fracture his arm and be too stubborn to go to the hospital and get it fixed, nor about the time he put honey in the microwave and dropped it on the table because the plastic bottle was too hot which then exploded leaving me with second degree burns and minor scarring. Luckily they seem to be fading finally.

I am here to tell you about my best friend whom I’ve been hardest to get to do all the stupid stuff I’ve wanted to do in life. But luckily for him has an excellent mother, father, grandparents, brothers and rest of his family to thank for instilling within him such a strong moral compass. So strong, in fact, that while I was trying to get him to be bad, just the opposite happened and it turns out that hanging with him has made me a stronger, better and more successful individual.

At the same time I feel I have gained a second family. So I thank you Jerad, Cody, Christopher, Bryant and most importantly, Evy. You all mean the world to me.

Today I’m lucky enough to extend that family to include Jenney. Sorry Jenney,but you already said, “For better or worse” so you’re stuck with me! I look forward to that excellent cooking which Jerad so eagerly speaks about.

The night that Jerad met you, he and I talked about our ideal girlfriends. Again Jerad’s moral compass lead the way. He wanted a beautiful, caring, funny, trustworthy, generous and loving woman that would bare him 12 children and cook well. To that I said “Good luck fina girl with even one of those qualities! I’ll be happy with a girl that just isn’t crazy!”

And here I stand today eating those words because here you are. You’ve not only met, but exceeded all his expectations. I knew the second week into your relationship that he was in love. I could see it in his eyes and I saw it in yours too. You are both so blessed to have found eachother. I joke and try to take credit for the introduction, but obviously there was a much more powerful force at play.

So I’d like to ask you all to raise your glasses and join me in a toast.

Here’s to you Jerad and Jenney Bitner. May the stars shine down on you from above and bless you for eternity. May your success and love grow. May you be blessed with many beautiful and healthy children (and if you run out of names I won’t be offended if you name one of them David).

To Jerad and Jenney Bitner. Salute!

As a child I learned how to speak. The sounds I heard my parents produce helped to form coherent thought patterns in which to relate with the world around me. No, yes; good, bad; dog, cat; hot, cold; all sounds that came to mean something to a normal human being. I replicated their sound and shared.

As I grew, I heard birds, singing in the fields. I learned their whistles and they came to me filling me with the wonder and joy of nature. I replicated their sound and shared.

As I grew, I heard songs at church, worshipping an ideal that was greater than oneself. I learned to sing with the choir and through my song, shared those ideals with more people. I replicated their sound and shared.

As I grew, I heard songs on the radio. I learned them and played my instruments. I learned enough to join a band where we played the songs we had learned for people to enjoy. I replicated their sound and shared.

As I grew, I heard songs on the internet. I learned them, learned to love them, and shared them with my friends so that they could love them too. I replicated their sound and shared.

When I went to jail, untried by my government, for doing what has come naturally to me since I came into this world; replicating the sounds I heard, I cringed at the cries of those around me. I replicated their sound…

I found a great way to transfer photos from Flickr or Facebook to Picasa/Google+ quickly and easily, keeping albums intact using Mac OS X iPhoto ‘11.

Step 1:
Download and install the Picasa Web Albums Uploader.

Step 2:
Within iPhoto, select iPhoto > Preferences and then the Accounts tab to connect to your Flickr account.

Step 3:
Within iPhoto, select the Flickr icon in your sidebar.

Step 4:
Within iPhoto, select the Flickr album you want to move and double click to open in order to make sure iPhoto retrieves all of the photos.

Step 5:
Within iPhoto, select File > Export and use the “Picasa Web Albums” tab to export your selected Flickr album right into Picasa.

Upon signing into your Google Plus account, and viewing your albums, you should now see the exported album available.

2.9.12 - 11:45pm Jenny wakes me up with, “I think my water broke!” I groggily look over at her and ask, “Are you sure?” “Yeah, pretty sure”, she says. “What time is it?” I ask her. “11:45”. “What? Uhg.” I had gotten about two and a half hours of sleep by this time, having gone to bed early to try and kick my oncoming head cold. “Did you call Katie?” Katie is our birthing companion, whom we took HypnoBirthing courses with months earlier. “I am going to now”, Jenny tells me. “Do you want to go to the hospital?” “No, let’s just see what happens. Go back to sleep.” I promptly fall back asleep, but hear her stirrings through dreams of a strange birth in which the baby is born in a tub and no one at the hospital cares. I hear snippets of a conversation on the phone, the tub water running, a hair dryer blowing, a shower, and repeatedly telling the dog, Dante, to go back to bed when he wined because Jenny was in a different room.

2.10.12 - 5:45am Jenny laid across the bed, obviously in pain and emotional. I asked her a few questions about how she felt, and how often her surges were. They were about 3 minutes apart. Hating to see my wife in pain, I decided we should go. “Let’s get going hun. Do we have everything ready?” “Everything is already in the car,” she tells me. I started to pack my computer and some cords, books and my baoding balls, put the dog in his kennel, grabbed the keys and we got into the car and started on our way to the hospital, texting work, friends and family as we went. Almost to the bottom of the mountain, Jenneys says, “Crap! I forgot the HypnoBirthing materials on the coffee table.” “Should we go back?” I ask. “Yeah, we better get them.” So we turned around at Manitou Springs and headed back to the house, about 25 minutes away at this point. When we get there, we grabbed the books and immediately headed back down the mountain pass.

On the way to the hospital, the morning sky was just amazing.

Sitting in traige the nurse (whose name was also Jenney, with wonderful sparkly shoes) tested dilation and for amniotic fluid but we were only a little over two centimeters and couldn’t find evidence of amniotic fluid. Katie, our birthing companion who was also our HypnoBirthing instructor arrived and we took a walk to the cafeteria. Going was slow as Jenney’s surges were pretty close together and she had to stop and hold onto me until they passed.

We got some breakfast and ate and then walked around the hospital for a while. An hour after sending us out for a walk we returned and re-tested. Still no fluid and still under four centimeters, which is the minimum dilation for admittance. So we walked again, found some steps, and walked all over the place. Another hour later, they decided we should go home since we apparently weren’t progressing. So Katie, Jenney and I all left.

We decided to go to the store, Costco, and walk around. My mother called and wanted an update so I gave her one and asked her about her own pregnancy with me. Jenney had a pretty nasty cold for the last three weeks, and the nurse had mentioned that the baby would have a bit of a boost because of Jenney’s anit-bodies, which could contribute to a very healthy immune system. I have always had an amazing immune system, about three times as strong as Jenney’s, so I asked my mom if she had a cold or anything of the sort while pregnant with me. She said she hadn’t, but that she has also always had a very strong immune system. It will be interesting to see how strong Viola’s will be.

Jenney was wearing her “I grow humans. What’s your superpower?” shirt as we walked around the store, and she got quite a few stares, and some comments about her shirt. However, after increased stares, and after standing still together after another surge, I took a good look at her shirt and realized that her left breast had leaked through on her shirt, causing a wet spot. I told her and she said, “No, I must have just leaned on something.” In any case, I’m sure we looked very white trash at this point and just wanted to leave the store, though I also thought it pretty funny.

We left the store and started heading back home, but the surges started coming more frequently again, and stronger, so we decided to instead stop at my friend John Ferris’s house. I felt bad just dropping by unannounced, but he had already mentioned that if we needed anything to just let him know. Plus I had been planning on working from his house that day, so I knew he would be home. John has a great little spare room in his finished basement, so we stopped, put a four pound bag of frozen berries that we had picked up at Costco in his freezer, and put on some relaxing music for Jenney in the spare room.

We stayed for about two hours when the surges started becoming more than Jenney could bare. After reading some HynoBirthing materials to her, and being unable to calm her, we decided to go back to the hospital. I called Katie and had her meet us there.

Back at the hospital, they checked Jenney again, but she still wasn’t admittable. And so we walked some more. Her contractions were very strong still, but without being far enough along, we had to just bear with it, walk for an hour, go back and get checked.

Finally, around 4:30 or 5pm, they decided we were far enough along to be admitted. I’m not sure if dilation was enough, or they could see that contractions just were not going to stop, and that they were still intense, but it was s huge relief to just be admitted to a room and know that we were going to be there until the birth.

A while ago I changed all of my domain names to Namecheap and migrated my Drupal and Wordpress sites to Linode. I followed some excellent instructions from James Sansbury (soon to be a Lullabot article) and some of his Nginx configuration files. This worked great for my Drupal site (heh - which was this site that I then converted to Jekkyl) and my wife’s WordPress site.

However, when my wife started using her blog on my fancy new Nginx setup with PHP-FPM, she noticed that when she created posts one after the other, they were overwriting eachother, effectively creating a new revision of the same post instead of creating a new one. I knew that this was because of the caching, but was still too new to Nginx to know exactly what to do about it.

Again, James to the rescue! He pointed me in the right direction and I got it working. Here’s what I did.

One of the relevant pieces of James’ setup, is this line within his /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:

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http {
...
  ##
  # Virtual Host Configs
  ##

  include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
  include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

And then within /etc/nginx/conf.d/session_cookie.conf he searches for the cookie that Drupal sets when you log in:

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# Determine if a Drupal session cookie is present
map $http_cookie $logged_in {
    default 0;
    ~SESS 1; # Drupal session cookie
}

To this, I added a search for the wordpress cookie as well:

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# Determine if a Drupal session cookie is present
map $http_cookie $logged_in {
    default 0;
    ~SESS 1; # Drupal session cookie
    ~wordpress_logged_in 1; # Wordpress session cookie
}

The last piece is telling your site to bypass the cache if $http_cookie is set:

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location / {
  ...
  # If client is logged in we bypass cache
  fastcgi_cache_bypass $logged_in;
  fastcgi_no_cache $logged_in;
  ...
}

A quick sudo service nginx restart and our WordPress site is working much better!

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Angel of fire, wings of light
  Visit me in my dreams tonight
  Tell me of love and burning desire
  Caress my lips, set me on fire

Angel of fire, eyes so bright
  See through my soul, feel the fright
  Singe my heart and look for the liar
  Scar on my sould cleanse with your fire
  Transcendance lost on the blackening shame
  Licked by lips that are black from the flame

Angel of fire, cleanse me just right
  Leaving your mark steal through the night
  Tease my mind leaving desire
  Tease my heart scarred by your fire
  Knowing we'll never ever be the same
  Learn from our past, never do this again

• AUG ‘04

I’ve long had a quick shell script that was a simple todo list based on Jerod Santo’s Minimally Awesome Todos. It’s very minimal, and quite awesome indeed. Even more than loving how minimal it is, I really liked displaying my todos on my desktop through GeekTool.

Then I stumbled onto a Node.js version of a todo list and thought I’d give it a shot. I got it setup, but when I wanted to try to display the output through GeekTool, I failed. So I delved into todo list code a bit more and learned quite a lot!

My first attempt was to simply write the output of the todo ls command to a file. I got an immediate response from the maintainer, Veselin Todorov and was encouraged to change the command from write to export and write up a test for the new command as well.

I succeeded in converting the write command to export, and fixed up a small bug with the path of the file I was writing to by default, but thus far have completely failed at writing a test to confirm that the file was written.

The project is currently using Sinon.JS for testing, and even though the API seems pretty robust, and the examples coherent, I’m simply failing at figuring out how to test file creation with it. So far all I have is a stub:

However, it is working well without a test at this point, and I have a pretty todo list on my desktop! :)

I love Github. The more I use it, the more I love it. As a form of endearment, I’ve updated the style of this blog to look a little more like Github than default Octopress. Simple, clean, fun.

I’ve also been looking for a quicker way to blog on a whim, and having to switch into my octopress directory, and then type new_post["title of my post"] was still just two steps too much. So I pulled up my .bash_profile and started scripting. Here’s what I came up with:

After reading an article about the experimental support for WebRTC getting put into the latest version of browsers, my buddy David Burns was inspired to write a quick app called HTML5 Photobooth.

Code can be found here: https://github.com/davexoxide/HTML5-Photobooth