Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Excelsior Day 1
June 22, 2024
excelsior Riley vacation

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
June 18, 2024
house home

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
June 12, 2024
blog s3

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
May 22, 2024
care dog 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.

Gunn Island
May 20, 2024
camping story island

Over the weekend, Riley, my dad, and I went on a weekend camping trip to Gunn Island via HipCamp. We had to take a canoe and a kayak to the island with all of our gear to set up. It was a pretty neat experience, both in the doing and that I got to spend time with Riley and my dad together.

I put some details into ChatGPT about the trip and asked it to make up a story. We all thought this one was pretty amusing, if not entirely accurate. Riley suggests that it should have provided more detail on the mollusk attacks, and I completely agree. Nonetheless, enjoy.