Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Excelsior Day 2

In the morning, we got up from the hotel and found that there were no bath towels. We had to dry off with only hand towels, of which there were two. We managed to dry off and get out in the morning and decided to head to breakfast.

There was a location called Juneberry that was touted as the best breakfast place in Cleveland by some places anyway, so we headed in that direction. When we got there, the wait for Juneberry was an hour, which was a lot more time than we wanted to spend waiting for food before we got on with our day. Since we had passed a donut shop called Goldie’s on the way there, on the same block, we went to Goldie’s, and both got long johns, chocolate covered top with vanilla cream filling, and I got a coffee. It was totally fulfilling, and as we walked past the Juneberry on the way to the car, we laughed at the people standing around waiting for their truly frou-frou and bougie experience in their fancy breakfast place.

Excelsior Day 1

We set out on our cross-country road trip in our rented Jeep Compass. We used RoadTrippers.com to set a trail through using all of our destinations. We chose several destinations for our first day on Saturday. We thought we would stop at Hershey Park to see Chocolate World, not to go into the park itself, but just the making of chocolate, as a quick stop between our destinations to break up the long travel day. We also added a couple of other stops, including Falling Water, Ohiopyle State Park, and the abandoned PA Turnpike Tunnel with a stop in Pittsburgh, just to have seen Pittsburgh. There could be another stop on the way to Cleveland, our final destination, to see a co-worker race his car in a demo track run.

Unfortunately, we could not get tickets for Falling Water on such short notice, and having Ohiopyle as a destination took us an hour out of our way on an already long driving day. So we skipped those two destinations and instead hit some of the other sites we intended to see that day. We did make it to Hershey. Hershey’s Chocolate World has changed a lot from when I was younger. Riley and I had a good time walking around their gift shop, looking at some of the t-shirts with old Hershey ad campaigns, like “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” Ultimately, we got on that ride to see how they make chocolate. There were samples available at the end of the ride. Riley got a chocolate bar, and I got some Twizzlers, a company that Hershey had apparently acquired a long time ago.

Blind Pull

It’s been a pretty challenging couple of weeks. Saturday before last, I returned home from a work trip to Columbus to celebrate my birthday with the family. We went out to Founding Farmers in King of Prussia with my mom and Nana, and it was generally a good time. They gifted me a bidet. That’s a whole thing, and a story for another time.

On the Sunday after, we found out that the hot water heater was leaking. Thankfully, the heater itself was still under warranty, but the basement carpet was soaked, and tons of random things on the basement floor were steeping in soggy carpet. We spent a good bit of Sunday and Monday moving things to the dry half of the basement and sucking up the water with our now-copious wetvacs.

S3 Images

I’m working on a feature for the site that allows you to use an S3 bucket to host images. Presently, I’m expecting to use Digital Ocean’s S3 hosting to hold the images for this site, primarily because the setup is simpler.

The challenge is that this site is static in a git repo, but I don’t want to put the images into the repository. I want to reference the images in S3, and have it serve them via a URL that points directly to the bucket (or really the CDN proxy that sits in front of it). What I’d prefer is to specify where the image will be in the post content via URL, and then if the image doesn’t exist, I would be able to drag and drop an image onto the placeholder on the page. The server that serves this site would automatically upload the image to the specified destination and when you reload, the image appears.

Give Good Pets

The secret to giving good pets to your dogs is simple. You need to pet a little harder than you think. Most people just run their fingers through the dog’s fur, which dogs do enjoy, but it’s not the best way.

After many years of petting my dog, he has learned that I give the best pets. I believe this is because I am willing to dig in and give him more of a massage than just touching his fur. You need to find some muscle groups and really massage them. It’s more about getting past the fur and touching the actual dog.