You know that when Jen has two posts in a row on the blog, something must be up with Steve! (Just kidding, honey! Hahaha.) Anyway, it would seem that my blogging and photo gallery activities have fallen victim to other endeavours as of late. What have I been up to, you ask?

Well, as expected, with Evan around we’ve been spending a lot more time at home. You just don’t have the freedom to take off for hours at a time (e.g., to run errands, go diving, etc.) when you’ve got a little one in the picture. That will change in time, but for now, that’s the situation. So, I’ve made sure to have some projects to keep me busy….

• Exploding Whale website: As most of you know, I run a website dedicated to Oregon’s infamous Exploding Whale. It’s been on the web (at one address or another) for longer than most people have had email addresses. It’s time for an overhaul and update. I’ve got a dedicated domain for the site, and I am in the process of creating an all-new, blog-like layout. All the old stuff will be there, but I also want to be able to feature new content. I am continually amazed at the number of whales that explode. (I am being 100% serious here!) If you don’t believe me, just wait until the new site comes out. I’ve been collecting stories and photos for several years, and the new site is going to feature all of that content. There will also be a section for other things that exploded on the Oregon coast. (Hint: Can you say, “New Carissa”?) Ok, that’s enough… I don’t want to give away all the fun!
  Update 10-Nov-2005: The new site has launched at TheExplodingWhale.com
• Reality show web game: As some of you know, Jen and I also operate an online game that centers around reality TV shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race. While the site is publicly accessible, we do not publish direct links to it for security and possibly legal reasons (i.e., we just don’t want any problems; if you watch either of those shows and are interested in the game, just drop us a line and we’ll get you hooked up.) Anyway. That site has also been up and running for quite a while now. While we’ve made piecemeal improvements along the way, it’s been begging for its own overhaul. So I’ve been devoting a lot of my “home time” to that as well.
• Dive computer connection: Another little side project that I’ve been working on is getting my dive computer connected to my Mac. This one falls under the category “If you can’t go diving, the next best thing is to play with your dive gear.” Anyway, a long time ago, I thought it would be a good idea to do some application development in Mac OS X. I bought a couple books, installed all the developer tools, and set about learning Objective C and Cocoa. I picked as a goal for my efforts (you’ve gotta have something to work toward for this kind of thing!) the development of a Mac-based dive log that would communicate with our (PC-only) dive computers. Well, to make a short story even shorter, I never really followed through on my plan and it became easier to just wait until someone did the work for me. (And yes, I feel slightly guilty about that…. Sigh.) But someone else did eventually do it!

  A little more background… We use Suunto Cobra dive computers. Suunto makes PC-only software that allows you to download your dives to your PC. Some people use that as their logbook (lame!), but the main reason most people do this is so they can “see” their dive profiles. That is, the software converts the data stored in the dive computer into a nifty graph. Well, it turns out that there are least a couple other Mac-based Suunto dive computer users out there who were felt deprived of their dive profiles. And one of them, an enterprising and helpful guy named Mark Rosenstein, followed through and created his own dive log software, called Mac DiveLog, that can “talk to” Suunto computers (which reminds me, I need to register my copy! Sorry, Mark). Anyway, the tricky part is getting a USB/serial cable that works. (Ok, I confess, I made it a lot trickier than it had to be!) Rather than following Mark’s advice and buying the (slightly more expensive) brand-name cable, I tried to find a cable like the generic one I had borrowed from our dive shop which, it is important to note, worked fine. But after two failed attempts at finding a similar or identical cable — and then paying the shipping charges to send them back — I caved and bought the recommended one. (Boy, was Jen ever relieved!) And of course it worked fine the first time. Of course. All this so I can see how often I violate my Suunto’s touchy ascent rate limits!!!

• Yard work: Well, yes, there is always yard work. I wish I could say that I’ve been working on a great walkway for our sideyard, or sprucing up all of our shrub beds, or dethatching the lawn, or planting a Fall crop of salad greens, or … well, you get the picture. But mostly it’s been keeping the lawn cut, pruning a few shrubs, and trying to prevent Gauss’s toxic streams from killing our shrubs! Of course, we’ve been talking about some yard projects. We might see some of those come to fruition later in the Fall.
• Work work: Last (and least!), there is work. Over the past few weeks I was having to do a lot of work from home during the evenings. The nature of the work (a 1-month long rollout of a new executable to our production environment) required it be done in the evening. So on an almost daily basis, I was spending minimum 45 minutes and on some days up to a couple hours testing the changes and making sure that everything would be fine the next day. That rollout finished last week thankfully.

Ok, so that’s a long-winded explanation for why I haven’t been posting to the blog as much. But just look at all the fascinating and compelling content all that busy-ness provided me for that post! Hahaha.

This entry was posted by Steve on Monday, September 19th, 2005 at 11:36 am and is filed under Computers, Diving, Dog, Family, General, House, Yard/Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.