The sTate of Things - Personal

Red hots! Get Your Red Hots!

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:07:08 +0000

When I was in high school, I sold drinks and hot dogs for the University of Utah home football games to earn a little extra money*. I walked around the stadium with a big tray of sodas or an insulated box of hot dogs. I'd call out "Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite" or "Red hots! Get your red hots!". Ten years later, I find out that Red Hots are a real product, and they are awesome. Red Hots are stubby, thick hot dogs, colored red, with a bit of spiciness. I sat down to have a couple for lunch today with 'kraut and brown mustard and reminisced about cold Utah Saturday mornings at (then) Rice Stadium walking up and down the aisles and circling the stadium. If only the hot dogs I sold as "red hots" 16 years ago had been real Red Hots, I would have been able to sell twice as many.

* I say a little, but as a vendor, you started out selling drinks. A hard working vendor could make between $50 and $100 in about 2.5 hours (they stopped refilling trays at the end of the 3rd quarter) and you could watch the end of the game anywhere you wanted to. If you had been there long enough and worked hard enough, you get promoted to hot dogs. A hot dog vendor could make $150 to $200 in the same time frame. As a high schooler in the early 90s, that beat working at Hires.

Proud Papa Times Three

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 04:55:54 +0000

Friday at 7:53 PM, a little girl was born to us. She's adorable, and will most definitely be a Daddy's girl. So we named her Abigail Sue; Abigail means "Father's Delight". Here's a link to Nichol's blog post, which has a couple of pictures.

Announcing Teagan Colby Tate

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Sun, 20 May 2007 13:07:28 +0000

Partial family photo

Nichol gave birth to a beautiful baby boy weighing 10 pounds 8 and 3/4 ounces, measuring 22 and 3/4 inches with ruddy blond hair and dark blue eyes the evening of May 19, 2007. I am amazed at the resilience and stamina shown by Nichol as she brought this new life into the world. Participating in the birth was such an amazing and emotional experience for me. I'm very glad to have Teagan as part of our lives. We'll take Alex to meet him today. More photos in Teagan's Gallery

Catching up

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:24:42 +0000

I realized today that a lot of people haven't heard that Nichol is pregnant with our second baby boy. In fact she's 36 weeks along already (though the baby is measuring at 40 weeks). Alex was 10 lb 3oz when he was born so there is some concern for the baby's size. Alex only measured 2 weeks ahead of schedule. Nichol is due May 13, but we have a second ultra sound scheduled for May 5 to see if he should be evicted, er, born earlier. We haven't really decided what his name should be, but if you know good Gaelic, Germanic, or even Slavic names feel free to list them in the comments below.

Catching up

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 11:58:33 +0000

First of all it sucks to be sick. I don't know what I caught, nor where I caught it from, but now I'll be coughing for at least a week and my lungs are already sore from the last two days of hacking. I just hope that my wife and son don't catch it. Alex already has ear infections and a nasty cough coinciding with the arrival of four new teeth. At least his black eye is better.

A lot has happened since December, and I won't even begin to enumerate it all, just to tell you that I was working feverishly to get VMware and QEMU/RAW Hard Drive images working in rBuilder Online. With that task completed I am no longer working on rBuilder, instead I'm working with Ken VanDine and Xiaowen on something to be announced soon.

Yesterday I modified the PHPAppPackageRecipe class to make it more friendly to sofware upgrades. Previously the tarball containing the PHP application was extracted directly to /srv/www using whatever root folder was in the tarball. Then the recipe made a link connecting /srv/www/ to whatever folder was extracted. The problem with this arrangement is that if that directory contained the version, as many php apps do, the next version would be installed to a different location causing a manual step to move settings and data to the new folder.

Now the recipe extracts the application as most other packages do to the conary build folder. Then I copy the contents to /srv/www/ and eliminate the link. Hopefully this will ease upgrade pain. I rebuilt Gallery bumping its version to the newly released 2.1 and Serendipity in the LAMP rBuilder project so if you're running either of those be aware that there will be some one-time transitional pain. Feel free to contact me for help in upgrading to these new packages.

Announcing the arrival of the first Tate baby

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 03:22:33 +0000

Alexander Burton Tate was born on Wednesday 29 June 2005 at 11:44 PM EDT. He measured 22" long and weighed in at 10 pounds, 3 ounces. His cranial circumference was an astounding 14 3/4". He was discharged from the hospital today along with his mother. They are both doing very well. I have established two galleries with pictures and hope to post a video or two soon.

Continue reading "Announcing the arrival of the first Tate baby"

Serendipity Update

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 05:06:38 +0000

I've upgraded my blog software from 0.5.1-CVS to the latest release version: 0.8.1. Looks nice doesn't it?

New Job Started Last Week

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:55:29 +0000

I began working at rpath, Inc. on June 13, 2005. rpath works on a next generation packaging technology for Linux called Conary. I'm excited about the opportunity to work on Linux full time, and to step away from the world of Windows for the foreseeable future. I'm also getting my feet wet with Python. I think I'm up to mid-calf by now.

In more personal news; no, Nichol hasn't given birth yet, but it will be announced here as soon as I'm able after the baby is born. In the mean time, we have a gallery set up for "X". "X" is the unknown quantity, we don't know when he will come, or what he'll look like, or what he'll do to our sleeping habits, and we certainly don't want to give him a name prematurely. Plus, I figure it's better than Ira Tate.

My Rolling Wish List

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 20:07:00 +0000

This is my rolling wish list at the request of my lovely wife and her family.

Continue reading "My Rolling Wish List"

Employment found

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Mon, 24 May 2004 13:25:15 +0000

I've found a new position contracting for IBM in their Imaging Technology Center. I started at the end of April, and have been enjoying it so far. I'll fill this in later with more information.

Seeking employment

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Sun, 11 Apr 2004 17:47:05 +0000

As of April 16, 2004, I will no longer work for Mi-Co. As such, I'm actively seeking new employment in a programming or system administration position. My resume is available at http://www.dragonstrider.com/resume/ feel free to pass it to whomever may be interested.

Web page construction

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Fri, 19 Sep 2003 03:49:18 +0000

So for the last few weeks, I've been working on a new front page for my web site. It's been barren for far too long. What do you think of it?