Mornings getting cooler

Time: 0615

Temp: 10°C

Distance: ~2.2 km

Time: 25 min

A brisk walk with the dog this morning. Back to cool mornings for the rest of the week. I’m sure if anybody was out this early and saw me walking, they’d be wondering why I’m not cold or anything. Going to have to break out a sweater soon for these morning walks.

There’s a new HOA

Went to the first organizational meeting for the homeowner’s association for the development we live in. There seemed to be a pretty good turnout for this first meeting. Learned a few things about the neighbourhood too.

  • There are 34 houses in the development
  • The two builders that built most of the homes still own most of them and rent them out
  • The big black dog with the white patch on his chest that roams the area barking and growling at everyone is apparently a stray.
  • A pediatrician lives here
  • Most people are upset about all the cars blocking driveways and sidewalks, just like we are
  • One of the people living here is the son of one of the builders
  • One couple are New Jersey transplants

Overall it seemed to be a reasonably productive meeting. Picked a few ‘volunteers’ to serve as the HOA officers and architectural review board, set up a few rules for the neighbourhood and set the HOA dues. They dealt mostly with where cars could and couldn’t park and noise regulations. I think there will end up being another meeting in a month or so to work on more organizational things.

mod_rewrite oddness

Yesterday, I finally got around to upgrading the department photo gallery from Gallery 1.5 to 2.0. I’d upgraded my own photo gallery about a month ago with no problems, and wasn’t expecting too many issues with this one.

Installation went fine, and importing the photos from the old version went fine. Can’t seem to get the URL rewriting to work though. It works fine in my personal gallery, but doesn’t work right in the department gallery. The mod_rewrite directives in the .htaccess file don’t seem to be getting processed or something. I’m suspecting some strange interaction/non-interaction with some directive in httpd.conf and the Gallery-generated .htaccess, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet. No doubt it’s probably something simple that I’m overlooking.

In the meantime, there’s another mystery: why is httpd always giving me SegFaults when an error occurs. It started happening after the upgrade to PHP 4.4.1? Yet another thing to dig into.

Update: Figured out the mod_rewrite oddness. Turned out to be an AllowOveride None directive that was messing things up. Once I moved the .htaccess contents into the main httpd.conf, everything started working properly. Knew it was something simple.

Halloween apples!

That was the traditional cry at the door when we went trick-or-treating as a kid. We used “trick-or-treat” too, but mostly it was kids shouting “Halloween apples!”. No idea where it came from, but that’s what we did.
I’ve never been much of a Halloween person, and was never really into getting into costume or going trick-or-treating as a kid. Most of the time there was snow on the ground already, so there wasn’t really much point in dressing up because you had to put a coat on top of the costume anyway. We always had lots of kids at our door though back home and usually stayed pretty busy handing out candy and dropping change for UNICEF into the little orange boxes.
Last week, we bought a couple of bags of candy to hand out to the expected trick-or-treaters. A few days ago, the wife bought some more, having forgotten that she already bought some several days earlier. I know there are a few families in the area so we were expecting a few kids trick-or-treating yesterday. Only 1 kid showed up at our door last night. Perhaps we missed them because of coming home a little bit later than usual. Perhaps kids don’t go trick-or-treating anymore like we used to. It’s definitely become a much more paranoid time than it used to be when I was a kid. I remember when I was back home working at the hospital during my undergrad, the x-ray department in the ER would be busy x-raying buckets and bags of candy that kids and their families brought in. Nothing was ever found though. But the paranoia remains. Kinda sad, I suppose.
In any case, we have a bunch of candy left over now. Darn 🙂

A warm morning

Time: 0645

Temp: 15°C

Distance: ~2 km

Time: 25 min

Just went for a brisk walk with the dog this morning. Much warmer today compared to the past couple of days. Mornings around here are nice and quiet. Might see a few other people out for an early morning stroll. Didn’t see anyone today though.