Curtis Bridges

This is in response to: http://www.myextralife.com/sitenews/my-favorite-tv-shows-of-all-time/ The Simpsons Friends The Cosby Show Cheers House Mash Family Ties Nova Tonight Show (with Johnny Carson) Law and Order This Old House Alias As you can see, I was a kid in the '80's.

I'm currently reading the book, Upgrade Your Life by Gina Trapani in order to refine my life, specifically my efficiency at work.  It has 50 "Hacks" from the website Lifehacker.com to help you become a much more efficient person, to take back control of both your personal and professional life. Since I am a software developer, 95% of my time is spent on a computer and over the years, I've found a lot of informational sites that I LOVE but spend entirely too much time browsing while at work and my work has suffered accordingly.   Therefore, I've decided to implement one of the suggestions in the book, Hack #36, "Limit Visits to Time Wasting Websites" by using the firefox plugin LeechBlock ( developer site ).  This allows you to place websites into categories that you can than block access during specific hours on specific days or even limit the time per hour you are allowed to visit them. Pure genius!  I've already installed it on my work machi...

Sometimes in life, you just need to switch things up. You realize you've been doing things either just a little less efficiently or outright wrong and you just need to make a jump into something different... I hit this point over the last year and finally had the guts to make a major change. Yes, I bought a Mac Book Pro. Some background: I've been a Windows (and DOS before that) user since roughly the 5th grade (that would be 1984/1985-ish, eeek) and part time Linux user on and off since 1994.  Other than two years in college, I've used those platforms (and a little Solaris) exclusively -- that's 25 years of experience.  Twenty-five years of learning shortcuts, time savings, and overall comfort on a computing platform. All that experience, shaken up and shelved for now.  Well, sorta.  This is what I think so far: Pros: I LOVE the hardware.  Seriously. Dual video cards (one for low power, one for high performance) Upwards to 8 hours of battery life...

So I came to a decision the other day -- I've decided I am wasting away entirely too much of my life in worthless, no value for time spent activities. My vices are many and combined with all the things in life that you do, there simply isn't enough time to be sane.  I decided that I have to live a much more efficient life and I am appraching the problem like I would any problem I would face in a professional setting: break it down into manageable mini-problems, resolve each methodically, move on. So here are three lists; (1) Things I need to do.  (2) Things I want to do/do more of and (3) Things that I need to remove from my life so I can do more of (1) and (2). Need to do: Spend more (quality) time with the wife and kids. Work more efficiently at my job. Make more progress on my house and property. Exercise. Things I want to do more of: Read (both fiction and non-fiction technology books) Blog and even begin some creative writing. Research technology and pr...

Don't worry, I'm still alive and have a bunch of new projects on the horizon. I'll be posting a lot more in the coming days.

Just checking out a new plugin , to help with my Twittering .

I had a few old websites kicking around and no desire to maintain them separately from this site. To fix this problem, I decided to redirect them here but had no idea how. After some searching, I came across this tool .  It is a nice, online .htaccess generator.

Yes, it can be done. In fact, should be done if you have a reasonably large house. Here was my problem: My network connection (cable modem) comes into my basement on one side of my house and I connect a wireless router to it as any home user would. To this router, I have the usual things connected; my wife and I both have laptops, I have a home server with lots of media shared from it and a home theater pc hooked to my big flatscreen and a TiVo with a wireless adapter in the bedroom. The home theater pc (htpc) and the laptops are the real culprits here. I use my laptop just about everywhere in the house and my wife uses hers most often in the bedroom which is on the complete opposite side of the house, maybe 100 feet, two floors and 3 walls away from the router. Needless to say, the signal strength is around 10% at best by the time it reaches the bedroom. I fixed part of the problem by running a wired line to the htpc in the living room, directly below the master bedroom. I also h...

So last night, I was messing around with a lot of server side stuff, apache2 and subversion. I figured after so many years (and years?) of CVS use, it was time to do an upgrade to a more modern source control software. I got apache2 installed, added in the webdav mod, enabled server certificates and all that running fine. Installed subversion but couldn't seem to access my repository. Very aggravating. Then it occurred to me -- why am I spending all this time to get subversion running when my whole plan is to use a modern source control package? Enter in the new contenders: Git, Mercurial and Bazaar. I ruled bazaar out for no particularly good reasons and focused on Git and Mercurial. There are a lot of hard hitters using both technologies and in the end, I chose git. Git has the benefits of being similar to cvs at the command line and I found Linus Torvalds arguments very compelling when researching these tools. Later this week, I'll get my house repository running and ...

Finally got around to installing WordPress and getting this site up and running with a new theme. I have installed Gallery as well, eventually I will get some photos up on this site of the family. Now I'm going to have to get some real content up here.