Trevor Gerzen's Blog

SpaceX's Falcon 9 Rocket Launch

Tue, 22 May 2012 08:17:44 -0700

@lonseidman

@simonesyed

@markott

@bryaningram

@elonmusk

@4cal

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched early this morning from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, carrying what could be the first commercial spacecraft to visit the International Space Station.

Made with Paper When my wife and I arrived in Vernazza on our...

Mon, 21 May 2012 23:33:00 -0700

Made with Paper

When my wife and I arrived in Vernazza on our honeymoon it was before sunrise. I watched the sun come up while she slept on my shoulder.

I have been looking at Apple’s store for an order I will...

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:12:28 -0700

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

I have been looking at Apple’s store for an order I will be placing very soon and I keep seeing these Ask Now buttons. They look nice and CSS-ified, except they’re is this little thing up in the top right corner that has been bugging me.

I looked at Web Inspector in Safari and noticed that the fallback text (presumably for IE) is still visible even though font-size:0; line-height:0; and text-indent:-2000em is set. I noticed it was positioned absolute so I just shrugged it off to the right -10px because overflow:hidden is set on the containers.

The whole button seems a bit wonky and overkill if it’s trying to look good in all browsers, but I’m also not getting paid to make those decisions. Now, if anyone knows any front-end guys at Apple…

Photo

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 23:48:38 -0700

In awe (Taken with Instagram at Marine Street Beach)

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:06:38 -0700

In awe (Taken with Instagram at Marine Street Beach)

The Naive Optimist: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:52:01 -0700

The Naive Optimist: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m:

ryanleecarson:

I think there’s something messed up about the startup culture in the USA. The belief is that you have to work 6-7 days a week and spend all your mental cycles on your company. Nothing but pledging your soul to your startup yields success, right?

Not in my experience.

We work a 4-day week at …

I really appreciate Ryan’s thinking on this and agree with him. I’ve often thought that the culture I’ve seen around me of Go! Go! Go! just to Go! Go! Go! is not healthy. There is a difference between working on a computer where you are focused on this one device, either sitting or standing, but you can’t really write code or create designs while jogging on a regular basis.

When I was working from home I really enjoyed being able to do simple things like swap the laundry out in-between coding or designing, having my kitchen available to whip up lunch, going out for a quick exercise and not having to worry about how I was going to handle showering or whatever. Maybe those are somewhat superficial but I realize the importance of breaking up your day so it’s not just the “daily grind”, because it seems in my opinion that’s exactly what it is. A grind that yields dust.

It’s primarily mental activity for hours. I’ve noticed that it’s tremendously important for me to get away from the computer, get away from technology, put down the cell phone and just talk to people. Ask my wife what she is thinking, ask my friends what they’re laughing about. The same goes for me at work. I’ve found myself laughing with my co-workers more and not just clocking in, clocking out.

I think about start-up culture only because I’ve been part of it, a little bit, and have looked from the outside, in. You see that there is a lot of the same thing you see in manual labor happening. People get burnt out. I’ve had to watch this in my own life, coming dangerously close to being ground to dust.

I agree with Ryan, I want to have time and energy for my family. No kids yet, but I do have a wife, friends, the family I grew up with, responsibilities. I have plenty to encourage me to be wise about my time and energy so that I can enjoy my life with all of them and be reliable.

Discovering The Serif Fairy, Garamond Forest, Futura City, and...

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:58:23 -0700

Discovering The Serif Fairy, Garamond Forest, Futura City, and Shelley Lake (Taken with Instagram at The Gillispie School)

#vacantplaces (Taken with Instagram at Coronado Playhouse)

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 19:04:17 -0700

#vacantplaces (Taken with Instagram at Coronado Playhouse)

did-you-kno: Source

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 17:43:22 -0700

did-you-kno:

Source

My wife gets me (Taken with instagram)

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:46:36 -0700

My wife gets me (Taken with instagram)

Photo

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 22:19:32 -0800

Bonsai Tree Houses by Takanori Aiba | Colossal

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:21:29 -0800

Bonsai Tree Houses by Takanori Aiba | Colossal:

(via Instapaper)

While waiting for a tow truck on the freeway this morning I...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 09:21:15 -0800

While waiting for a tow truck on the freeway this morning I decided I’d upload this lion pacing video from the San Diego Zoo

It’s good to see @Path delete all data and then give the option to opt-in or opt-out. Wish it...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:53:29 -0800

It’s good to see @Path delete all data and then give the option to opt-in or opt-out. Wish it wouldn’t have happened in the first place, but at least there is proactive damage control happening http://blog.path.com/post/17274932484/we-are-sorry

essentialsof: The Essential of The Life Aquatic by Kyle...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:25:23 -0800

essentialsof:

The Essential of The Life Aquatic by Kyle Steed

The start of awesomesauce

wordslessspoken: London, 1940s, in hi-res color. These...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:06:03 -0800

wordslessspoken:

London, 1940s, in hi-res color. These photographs were taken using Kodachrome film by the improbably and wonderfully named Chalmers Butterfield, probably in 1949. Via How To Be a Retronaut.

This is amazing!

Saw this photo posted a while back some where else but it is totally worth posting again. I love the idea of being able to see a bit more what life actually looked like at that time.

UNTITLEDmagazine: 23.5 Hours

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:15:18 -0800

UNTITLEDmagazine: 23.5 Hours:

wiredinsider:

Image via YouTube

I can’t remember how I came across this video, but I’m glad I did. Feel free to watch the whole thing here if you’ve got a spare ten minutes, but if you don’t, here’s the point in just a few sentences. Dr. Mike Evans, the narrator of the clip,…

Seems like a theme, again, right around the new year. I think there’s something to this whole exercise thing…

staff: We’ll be rolling out Fan Mail — a new interblog...

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:03:15 -0800

staff:

We’ll be rolling out Fan Mail — a new interblog messaging service — over the next few days for everyone.

You’ll be able to send Fan Mail from your Inbox, avatar menus, or with the icon in the top corner of the blogs you follow.

Have fun!

Interested to see if/how I use this. I’ve often thought I it would great if I could communicate directly with other authors but I’ll have to see how this goes to decide if it’s actually useful

I’d also be down to see those “So-and-so just started following you” emails actually direct you to the user’s blog rather than just blurting it out and leaving me to search Google for it…

MCX Records, Printing, and finagling

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:03:00 -0800

Disclaimer: This is super nerdy/technical stuff for those who don’t know, for those that do know it’s probably going to sound like I’m a total n00b

Edit: I found this snippet to remove MCX cache on your machine

sudo dscl . -delete /Computers
sudo rm -rf /Library/Managed\ Preferences

If running it with ARD leave out

sudo

and run it as the user root

I’m a n00b. Just gonna go ahead and get that out. I’ve been an I.T. Manager since January of this year and have had to learn so many things, it’s mind-bottling. I’ve worked with Windows machines around my church and learned a lot from a really smart dude. As far as Apple goes, I switched from Windows to Apple in 2007 and have never looked back. I had to figure out a lot about Apple computers on my own, so I did. There’s a wee bit of background from me to you, with love.

Now, what just about anyone on the planet will tell you is that printers are evil. Before you get all excited and think that I hate puppies and wanna destroy the belief in unicorns, I just want to say that printers are made to suck so that you buy many of them as well as spend a fortune on ink refills. There. I got that out.

One issue I’ve run into is setting printing policies and user management through Workgroup Manager on Mac OS X Server. I found that when the kids started using their machines at the beginning of this school year that I needed to learn a pretty big issue. I had to learn how to correctly manage many user accounts, their associated devices, and their policies and I had to do it efficiently with minimal input from a human being.

I didn’t do that very well, but I did understand how I could do it and begin remedying the effects of not doing that correctly from the beginning. In Workgroup Manager there are Users, User Groups, Computers, Computer Groups. The idea is that you can set many different policies from many different situations if you so desire (but don’t go too cowboy or you’ll regret it). Personally, I have found that creating Users, Computers, and Computer Groups allows me more than enough flexibility.

At the start of this school year I had to prune our directory. Students left, we got some new students, all of the classrooms were different. So I create a Computer that corresponds to a user. For example, if I have a student named Joe Smith I would create the Computer Joe Smith Joe-Smith. Then for each classroom I create a Computer Group and the Computers that are in that class. Defining policies by machine versus defining policies by user has allowed me the flexibility I need from year-to-year, as every school year devices switch users and even grade levels.

One of the issues that came up was that a lot of students had the wrong printer associated with their machine. What I found is that a lot of the Computers I had set up for each user weren’t getting a corresponding Hardware UUID automatically so that it knows which machine it needs to talk to. Some of them still had the UUID from the machine but they were holding on to the policies from the previous classroom the machine was used in, but was moved around to a different classroom.

Using Apple Remote Desktop I grep’ed for the UUID using this UNIX command as the user root:

system_profiler | grep 'Hardware UUID'

I take that string, copy & paste it into the Hardware UUID field in Workgroup Manager for the Computer object corresponding to the machine I grep’ed. Save those changes.

This step was important for me. I don’t know the exact time at which Workgroup Manager or Open Directory or whatever service it is decides to check if these machines have the latest policy but it’s not instantaneous, I can assure you of that.

That in mind I remove the MCX plist file with this UNIX command in ARD as the user root:

rm /Library/Managed\ Preferences/com.apple.MCX.plist

Once I’ve removed that plist file I can restart the machine and it will look for new orders from the server. This worked great for me for a group of kids just this morning so I will be working on refining the process and making it work more seamlessly so that I don’t have to so much hoop jumping. The trick for me is managing them correctly from the beginning ;-{D

Instagram: The Week on Instagram

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 10:20:56 -0800

Instagram: The Week on Instagram:

instagram:

Year in Review

Top 15 Locations to Take An Instagram Photo

2011 in Photos

Who Joined in 2011?

2011 in Numbers

Get Involved

This weekend’s Hashtag Project is #cornered. Check out last weekend’s #collectionorganizedneatly photos.

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