Everything posted after the migration to Wordpress
My previous kitchen progress post showed everything in place and working, but with the final painting not done and nothing actually in the kitchen. We’ve since had all of the trim (skirting boards, doors, door frames) repainted in white, as well as all those unpainted kitchen parts, and it all looks magnificent!
Last time, Leo came over to our house, so this time we visited him. It was quite a warm day and Beanie and Leo were just trotting around outside not really doing a whole lot of playing together, but as soon as we went inside where it was noticeably cooler they started absolutely rampaging around! (The full set of photos is here).
After 12 years of service, I’m shutting my Dreamhost account down (for those unaware, Dreamhost is a website and email hosting service).
My very first—extremely shitty—websites were hosted on whichever ISP we happened to be using at the time—Spin.net.au, Ozemail, Optus—with an extremely professional-looking URL along the lines of domain.com.au/~username. I registered virtualwolf.org at some point around 2001-2002 and had it hosted for free on a friend’s server for a few years, but in 2005 he shut it down so I had to go find some proper hosting, and that hosting was Dreamhost.
The biggest thing I found useful as I was dabbling in programming was that Dreamhost offered PHP and MySQL, so I was able to create dynamic sites rather than just static HTML. Of course, looking back at the code now is horrifying, especially the amount of SQL injection vulnerabilities I had peppered my sites with.
Around the start of 2011, I started using source control—Subversion initially—and finally had a proper historical record of my code. I used PHP for the first year or so of it, then ended up outgrowing that and switched to a Perl web framework called Mojolicious. The only option to run a long-lived process on Dreamhost is to use Fast-CGI, which I never managed to get working with Mojolicious, but fortunately Mojolicious could also run as a regular CGI script so I was still able to use it with Dreamhost, albeit not at great speed.
At the same time I started using Subversion, I also signed up with Linode who offer an entire Linux virtual machine with which you can do almost anything you’d like as you have full root access. I originally used it mostly to run JIRA so I could keep track of what I wanted to do with my website and have the nifty Subversion/JIRA integration working to see my commits against each JIRA issue. I slowly started using the Linode for more and more things (and switched to Git instead of Subversion as well), until in 2014 I moved my entire website hosting over to the Linode.
At that point the only thing I was using Dreamhost for was hosting Kristina’s website and WordPress blog, and the email for our respective domains. Dreamhost’s email hosting wasn’t always the most reliable and towards the end of 2015 they had more than their usual share of problems, so we started looking for alternatives. Kristina ended up moving to Gmail and I went with FastMail (who I am extremely happy with and would very highly recommend!), I moved her blog and my previously-LiveJournal-but-now-Wordpress-blog over to the Linode, and that was that!
Moving my website hosting to the Linode also allowed me to move over to Node.js and I’ve been going full steam ahead ever since. Since that posted I’ve moved over from callbacks to Promises (so much nicer), I wrote myself a HipChat add-on to keep an eye on the temperature that my Ninja Block is reporting, and I moved my dodgy Twitter image upload Perl script functionality into my site and added a nice front-end to it. Even looking back at my code from 6 months ago to now shows a marked increase in quality and readability.
So in summary, thanks for everything Dreamhost, but I outgrew you. 🙂
One of the dogs at Beanie’s dog training, Leo, got on particularly well with Beanie, so we exchanged phone numbers with his owner and they came over for a visit today! There was a lot of butt-sniffing and humping and general running around. Of course I took some photos.
We had the tiler out this morning to put the backsplash in, and the kitchen is basically finished now. The bits above the cupboards still need painting, but in terms of every day use, it’s done, and looks brilliant! The plumbing and electrics were all hooked up yesterday, and you have no idea how delightful it is to actually have a dishwasher now after three-and-a-half years of not having one.
We’ve not used the new induction cooktop properly in anger yet, but we made pasta last night, I put the “Boost” mode on, and it took the water from cold to a roiling boil in five minutes flat. I also seasoned the stainless steel frying pans that we bought from IKEA and had written off as being useless because they stick (apparently seasoning is essential) though they’ve not been put to the test yet. The only casualty in the change to induction is the wok, which despite having a fridge magnet stick to the bottom of it, isn’t sensed by the cooktop. Kristina did a bunch of reading and the best type to get is a carbon steel one, so we’ve got one on the way.
I also saw Lacuna Coil live last night, for the first time in seven years (due to them not having toured here in that long), and they absolutely ruled. They played all the songs I was hoping for. ? I saw them back in 2007 as well, and was a fair bit closer then but with a significantly crappier phone camera (and also a far far higher tolerance for shitty photos, evidently). 😛 Irritatingly, I had to leave half-way through the last song or I was going to miss the last train home due to there being trackwork this weekend. I’m currently running on about five hours of sleep because I didn’t get home until just before 1:30am, and woke up at 6:40am because the tiler was coming. Note to self, don’t schedule things early on a Saturday morning in future.
The benchtops were installed today, and the sink and cooktop put into place, though neither were hooked up.
You guys, it’s starting to look like we have a real kitchen now!
The cooktop was about the same size as our previous one, perhaps slightly narrower due to not needing the control knobs on the side, but it looks hilariously smaller since the benches are so much larger.
The kitchen people were finished with the cabinetry today so we’re back at home!
And OH MY GOD, they have done an unbelievably good job. The kitchen looks amazing and they haven’t even put the benchtops on yet, nor done any of the tiling for the splashback (the blue and purple stripes in the picture are tape that they haven’t taken off yet).
It really shows up how shitty the old kitchen was (compare how this unfinished kitchen looks to the old one in my last post), and how utterly wasteful with space it was. There’s a bit less floor space than the old one, but so much more storage!
We’re getting a new kitchen, and today the tradies came around to rip the old one out. Naturally we had to take some before and after photos (well, I suppose more “during” since the “after” will be the finished new kitchen).
The original kitchen seems to have been done as cheaply as possible. Nothing quite fit properly and there were several places where there was just a piece of particle board to fill a gap between a cupboard and the wall. The oven is new because the glass door on the old one (a Bunnings “Homebrand”-equivalent that was here when we bought the place) exploded all over the floor and Kristina last year. The fridge is also staying because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. I bought it over eight years ago and it’s never given us the slightest bit of trouble.
And then there’s now the total lack of kitchen! The space actually feels smaller without the kitchen in it.
Everything except the benchtops are being put in next week, as the they have to wait on the carpentry to be done so they can be properly measured and ordered.
On a lark I did a Google search for “virtualwolf”, and once I got past the first handful of pages (links to main things like my Twitter, Flickr, etc.) I was fascinated to discover just how many of my photos were being used in news articles and the like. I’ve always obsessively tagged my photos so they’re pretty easy to search, but a couple of years ago I went and changed the licensing on most of them to the Creative Commons “ShareAlike” license. The thought process was mostly, I’m never going to earn any money from my photography and have no desire to anyway, so why not! Flickr has the ability to search for images with specific licenses, so I suspect that contributed a lot as well.
There’s quite the range of subjects—
It’s pretty gratifying, really.
We went to a doggy training class today, on the suggestion of the dog trainer we had over a couple of times. She thought that he would do fine whereas we thought he’d just melt down as soon as he saw the other dogs and we’d immediately have to leave.
We’ve never been happier to be wrong! He was initially extremely barky when the first dog arrived but as soon as he got a good butt-sniff in he settled right down. It was quite incredible! I took a few happy-snaps on my iPhone, of course. At the end the next class arrived, which was a puppy class, and Beanie was happily running around and snuffling them as well.
The actual “training” part didn’t go quite so well, mostly because he was more interested in running around with the other dogs than paying attention to us, but still!
