Posted on February 13th, 2010 by Ryan Reed
So, I thought I'd post something I came across but appear to have lost the link to. It came from somewhere online, that's all I can garauntee.
It's surprising how many of these hold true for me
- More often than not, when someone is telling me a story all I can think about is that I can’t wait for them to finish so that I can tell my own story that’s not only better, but also more directly involves me.
- Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.
- I don’t understand the purpose of the line, “I don’t need to drink to have fun.” Great, no one does. But why start a fire with flint and sticks when they’ve invented the lighter?
- Have you ever been walking down the street and realized that you’re going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you’re crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.
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Posted on January 18th, 2010 by Ryan Reed
I recently won an all expenses paid trip to Key Biscayne, FL at the 'ol job. No real details yet but should be a lot of fun and was quite the surprise. It's always interesting when you start receiving messages from people congratulating you when you have no idea what they are talking about.
Recently, George updated his site. I think it looks pretty good. His previous version of the site wasn't too bad at all but it had a few small display issues.
Also related to George's update, I released version 2.4 of ReedGal. This version brings a few nice additions including making it easier to integrate the gallery into a pre-existing layout. George's gallery and Mike Aubin's gallery are good examples of how it looks when integrated. I will say that Mike's gallery reminds me that I need to add a pagination style setup for the gallery so all images aren't on one page.
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Posted on January 2nd, 2010 by Ryan Reed
I decided that after a lot of work in my free time, I'd finally release my gallery script. I recently allowed George Simons a chance to test it out. George told me he was really impressed and it did make me want to work a little harder at getting the script out there.
The gallery still has some ways to go, adding some sort of authentication for the "admin" page, etc, but I'm pretty happy with how it is currently working right now.
Check out the ReedGal page or go directly to the SourceForge page.
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Posted on December 31st, 2009 by Ryan Reed
Another year gone, 2010 is now upon us. Should be an interesting year, but then again, every new year looks interesting when looking ahead.
Some New Year's Resolutions (that are bound to be ignored like everyone else)
- Stop procrastinating and earn my CCNA
- Actually continue working out every week instead of stopping and starting 20 times a year
- Possibly look into new job opportunities more toward the south (I'm not a cold weather kind of guy and wouldn't mind changing things up a bit)
That's all I can think of off the top of my head but I'm sure I'll add a few on by the end of tonight.
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Posted on December 29th, 2009 by Ryan Reed
I've been thinking about it a lot and would really like to take a vacation to Europe while I'm still this dashing, young guy. I mentioned this to one of my friends at work, Chris Teekema (Teek for short). Teek has family that actually lives in Amsterdam and said that he was looking to take a trip out there sometime this year. Definitely an opportunity has arisen.
Teek mentioned his granparents would likely allow a few of us to stay at their place in the city for free, which would be awesome. So now we're planning a trip to out to Amsterdam for sometime in late March, early April. I know it is going to be a tad pricey but I really think it'll be well worth it and an awesome experience.
So yeah, that's the plan. Should be fun if we follow through with it. Updates to come in the near future.
Note: The Gallery is back up. Yay...
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Posted on December 26th, 2009 by Ryan Reed
So, just a few pictures from my vacation to Knoxville this year. Nothing too exciting but I like how some of these turned out.
I am a tad disappointed in the bird picture. The shot could have been a lot better but the lighting was pretty crappy, I wasn't really ready for it, and I didn't really mess with the settings enough on the camera. Next time I'm in Knoxville, I hope to grab a better shot.
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Posted on December 26th, 2009 by Ryan Reed
So, out of boredom, I've been working on this new design. I am definitely liking this design a tad more. It's cleaner then the old design and much easier to modify. There are a few things I need to update a tad but so far, it's looking good. I did also upgrade from WordPress 2.7 to the newest version 2.9 while I was at it.
This was also the first design that I modified on my home server first so that I knew exactly what was going to happen when I implemented it. It was a lot easier then the previous design where I was editing in notepad, uploading, and refreshing to see if the desired effect took hold.
If you notice any issues, definitely email me. I've been trying to check everything but you just never know.
Note: I am aware that the site doesn't display perfectly in Inter Explorer 6. The sidebar shows itself below the body. I think I know why but I don't care enough to fix it. IE7+, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox are currently supported
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Posted on December 21st, 2009 by Ryan Reed
So, I recently took a trip to Tennessee to visit the family, but that's really a story for another post. This story is about what happened when I returned to that non-island of a state, Rhode Island.
Before I left for TN, I decided that the best place for my car was the parking lot at work. It would be pretty safe from vandals as the place has security almost 24/7. But I did recognize that it could snow and I was not there to move the car for the plows. I decided that I would leave the key in my locker at work and ask a friend, Jason Lomba, to move the car if needed. This may have been a mistake.
When I got back from TN, Brian Roy had offered to pick me up. Pretty cool as otherwise I would have just grabbed a taxi. When we got to the parking lot, I noticed my car was in a different spot and the plows had packed me in pretty good. I chalked up the new parking space to having to move the car for the plowing, nothing weird.
I end up grabbing a shovel from work and starting to shovel out the front of my car. Brian suggested starting the car up just to get it warm. Not a bad idea, I thought. I hop over to the driver's side and notice 4 of my friends, Joe Webster, Jason Lomba, Chris Lomba, and Jim Stergiou, hiding behind the car. I immediately knew something was up. I looked in the car and saw that my car had been completely filled with packing peanuts.
Now when I say "filled with packing peanuts," maybe you're thinking "must have filled up the seats and floor." Not sir/madam, that is not really what I meant. The peanuts filled up the entire car and were put in place through the sunroof of the vehicle.
A couple things to note:
- Joe spent $120+ on biodegradable packing peanuts.
- My boss, boss's boss, and boss's boss's boss were all aware of the prank. They were concerned I'd be upset. I definitely was not.
- The name Operation Blockhead came from George Simon's son. I went to a BBQ at George's and his son asked him "why does he have such a block head," referring to me. Yup...
- The peanuts start to biodegrade as soon as water is introduced. This causes them to get really slick and stick to the bottom of shoes. They were really annoying to get off.
- I had to drive around for a while, looking for a gas station with the large nose vacuum hoses and not the narrow, easy to clog noses.
I must say, it was an interesting experience. Check out the pictures after the break. (Higher quality pictures will be uploaded later this week)
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Posted on October 21st, 2009 by Ryan Reed
I got around to working more on the gallery that I've been putting together. Currently, it's hosted on my home server, mostly for ease of modifications but also because the thumbnail creation requires php to not timeout in the default amount of time (I believe 30 seconds).
So, what's so great about the script? Well, I'm actually proud of making it myself. The script has a few key features:
- Just upload a new directory to a defined image_gallery directory and it'll automatically be displayed on the gallery page
- The icon for each album is automatic. It uses the icon.png file that is placed in the directory with the new images
- The "rebuild script" will create the thumbnails for each album
- The "rebuild script" will also extract the exif data from the images (currently, only date, title, description, camera type (not displayed), and apeture (not displayed)
- If no exif data, the filename is used as the title of the image
Unfortunately, there are some minor "limitations" to how I'm doing things but I don't think they're a problem
- Limited to jpg files. This is more by design and wouldn't be too tough to fix
- Using the GD library to create the thumbnails takes a bit of time. It took about a minute to complete the thumbnail/exif-file creation. Unfortunately, php by default will stop a script from running after 30 seconds. An easy fix if you have access to the php configuration file but not all hosts will allow modification of it
- The album icon is not created automatically. I'm considering a way to do this but it would probably be the toughest part of the script
- The sorting of the images and albums is done by filename. I could probably find a different way to sort but I like the current method. I leave my images with their default names (DSC_0001.jpg, DSC_0002.jpg, etc) and the album folder names always start with the date (20091021 - Something).
Who knows if I'll put the script online for others to use? It was mostly just created from boredom. I'll have to think about it.
Check Out The Gallery
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Posted on September 25th, 2009 by Ryan Reed
I just passed my certification exam for my Security+ cert. Honestly, the only reason I took it was my boss had extra money that was going to disappear at the end of this week and I knew I could pass it in a couple days. It was definitely pretty easy so I can't complain. Mostly logic question anyway.
More updates to come in the near future, I would hope. Been pretty busy with a few projects at work and home so sorry for the lack of updates.
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