Once upon a time, we soared into the solar system… for a few years… then we hurried back. The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space–each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

via XKCD

My lease was up in June so we started looking for places to live. The places we looked at renting were too expensive, so we started looking at buying a home. After lots of searching and open-houses, we put an offer on this one and it was accepted.

It is a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom home built in the 1930′s. There is a porch on the front and a deck/patio on the back. We’re currently doing some renovations that I’ll post some pictures of later.

I have redesigned JeffBaier.com to help me be more productive. The long posts I write are now located under “Articles.” These are mostly Howto’s, tutorials or long recaps of events or trips. I am reserving my front page for my 3 latest tweets and recent blog posts. My goal is to keep the ‘blog’ posts shorter and more interesting. They will most likely include pictures and may end up being more personal in nature. Becka and I just bought a house and we are remodeling. Expect lots of pictures of that.

I was also tired of my old design. Hope you enjoy the new look and content of JeffBaier.com!

Friday, November 9th, I woke up around 4am shivering uncontrollably. I got up and got more blankets and went back to sleep. I woke up later in the morning to go to class. My right leg was hurting badly. It felt like I had pulled a muscle. I also felt nauseas, had a high fever, and also still had chills and shivering. I decided to skip classes, and just sleep all day.

The next morning I woke up and my leg still hurt. I had trouble walking and noticed that my leg was developing what looked like a rash. I eventually went to the Emergency Room, and this picture was taken shortly after I got done.

They diagnosed me with cellulitis, prescribed me some pain medication and Bactrim antibiotics, drew a blue line on my leg, and sent me home.

This photo album is of my leg slowly healing.

Christmas 2006 on Flickr

Becka’s mom has a food dehydrator. We were able to get the internal temperature at a constant 150 degrees fahrenheit. I was hoping the hot, dry air would fix the phone.

For most of the drying we had the phone open on its front or back, with the lid on the dehydrator. But at the end I left it open with the phone on its side.

For about 4 hours we let the phone dry out. Then we took it out and put the battery back in and turned it back on. It booted up fine and everything seemed to be working. The screen was not damaged and displayed everything properly. However, a few buttons did not work. The round “ok” button and numbers 5, 7 and 9 didn’t respond when you pressed them.

Unfortunately my experiment in drying out a phone was a failure. Luckily I pay for the insurance so we were able to get it replaced for fifty dollars.

Manhattan Trip set on Flickr

I joined the millions.

I made a blog.

I had been going back and forth in my mind concerning the domain ‘JeffBaier.com’. I’m still not sure whether I like the vanity domain names, especially the email addresses – ‘jeff@jeffbaier.com’. However, I’ve had a notion to start writing in a blog for some time now. It seems everybody has one now a days.

I’ve also been working on a photo/video blog for Becka and Emry at EmryGrace.com. Originally I had been writing my own blogging software using PHP and the CakePHP framework. I really like using Cake, and I will probably continue using it for any of my future web programming projects. But after the basic post/edit/delete/view blog functions, I got to the point where I felt like I just kept re-inventing the wheel. I was putting lots of effort into something thats already been done well. Thats when I decided to try out WordPress.

I have been very pleased with the features and configurability of WordPress. Previously I had been biased against WordPress and blogging software in general. Most blogs you see are not very well done and don’t stand up to lots of traffic (like the digg effect). But now that I’ve used it for a while, I’ve seen that WordPress allows you to code your own features into it, have nice looking themes, and optimize the blog to be able to stand up to lots of traffic.

This is getting long for a first post, so I’ll wrap up. My goal is to blog about mostly computer related stuff, with sprinklings of my personal life. I have some projects I’m working on now that are linux/server related and I hope to post some writeups about them.