Trey’s Blog

What is being done?

The time has come for the first of many camper projects. This time, I’ll be outfitting my popup camper with a receiver hitch to allow the use of a bike rack while in tow. This would be very easy for larger RVs since they typically have a 4″x4″ bumper with many choices of bike racks aftermarket. However, the standard popup camper bumper is only 1″x3″, which hardly offers an easy solution.

What is the plan?

the bumper is slightly offset from it rail mounts as they are only 1″x2″ leaving approximately 1″ gap between the bottom of the bumper and the side rails. It was decided to purchase an 1/8″ thick 2″x2″ square pipe to be fitted across from side rail to side rail. To account for the gap mentioned previously, grooves will be cut lengthwise in the square pipe and the pipe will be fitted tightly to each side rail. After the pipe is positioned, small spot welding will add to the strength of the new bar. With the new bar in place, there are now two points to which a receiver hitch can be mounted giving it the strength we need to support 200 lbs of bicycles.

What we need to purchase?

2″x2″ steel square pipe 52 inches long, Sawzall blades for cutting through metal pipe like butter, and a receiver hitch combo bar. The combo bar is similar to a hitch extension, but is only the receiver portion straight through. I found this at etrailer.com in 6″, 8″, 12″, and 18″ versions in their Fabrication section. The 18″ was my choice since it would leave plenty of room for cutting away excess if necessary.

Steps

1. cut support pipe to fit between side rails
2. measure distance between bottom of side rails and bottom of bumper, then cut a 1″ groove (1/8″ thick) that distance from the bottom of the pipe
3. cut through one side rail near the rear bumper to allow access to slide the new support into place
4. once in position, make spot welds to assure to movement and good bond with side rails
5. weld the cut made in the one side rail to put bumper back into original position
6. put spare tire back into place, then clamp hitch receiver into position
7. put empty bike rack into receiver hitch to check for clearance
8. adjust receiver distance from end of bumper as necessary allowing for full access to bike rack pins
9. remove bike rack and spare tire
10. weld receiver hitch into place
11. for added support, run a bolt up through the receiver hitch and the support bar
12. sand bumper
13. paint with high gloss black paint

Pictures

before project

new support bar resting across side rails.

Support bar is now welded in place.

Receiver hitch ready for installation

Receiver hitch installed and painted

Bike rack fits nicely in the new receiver — I know I painted this sloppily

Let’s go camping!!

Project Summary

The project was a success. I now have a place for my bikes when I’m hauling my camper. Most of the time was spent waiting for the hitch receiver to arrive, but as projects go this one went pretty quickly. There are a couple things I would have done differently. I should have ordered the hitch receiver before starting the project, but at that the time, I had no idea the fabrication receivers existed. The other thing would be to tape off the camper rear before spraying the bumper and hitch receiver. It shouldn’t be that hard to remove the paint as it is not that much, but it could have easily been avoided had I taped off that area.

As you may or may not know, I’ve been actively camping with my daughter this past year, and it has been very exciting.  We are part of the YMCA program, Safari Princesses.  This being my first year I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it has been nothing short of great.  The people in our tribe are fantastic people and we all enjoy getting out to spend time with our daughters and giving them an opportunity to play freely.  Now that this program is over for this year, I started planning for the next season.  I found a good deal on a popup camper on Craigslist, and made the purchase.  My girls couldn’t be more eager to go on the next campout.  They’d be plenty happy camping in the driveway if I’d let them.  Anyway, what most new buyers don’t realize and old buyers already know is that you aren’t just buying the camper.  The are a lot of other expenses associated the purchase.  Besides the obvious license registration, there may be some sales taxes, storage costs, maintenance costs.  You’ll also find yourself needing to purchase items for camping you didn’t need before.  It adds a new level of complexity, but it sure makes ‘roughing it’ pretty comfortable.

First of all, let me state that I do not condone evading the police. I read this story today and it reminded me of a question I’ve had in the past, but never asked. Here is the story/scenario:

An innocent bystander was killed Tuesday morning during a high-speed chase in southeast Houston.

My question is this… would this innocent bystander still be alive had the police not been chasing this person? I know it seems obvious the person committed a crime and must be cited for that crime, but is that citation worth the life of those around the chase? I’m curious what you think. Let me know in the comments section.

It has been a while since my last post.  I’ve been busy camping with my girls and readying a business plan.  I should have more posts up shortly.

Let me premise by stating my daughter is deathly afraid of just about any pet, except fish, which could be a full post in itself.

My mother came over last night and we were discussing the death of a family pet, my grandmother’s 16 year-old cat. When it came time to explain to my daughter what happens to pets, we simply told her that pets go to heaven when they die. Ten seconds after we told her this, we realized that this may have just caused our daughter to be afraid of heaven due to her fear of pets. We had a good laugh about it, but I wonder if this is something to be concerned with later?

I posted about a year ago, maybe longer, about my HDTV experience with purchasing equipment, and what provided quality results. What I found was that online sources had more affordable HD antennas than any consumer electronics store. The brand I fell into online was Terrestrial Digital, which is now available through Target.com. Apparently, someone at Target realized how important these antennas were, or perhaps they got tired of people returning the typical indoor antennas that provide mostly lousy results.

Check out their antennas here

Just recently I decided to try enabling Internet Sharing through my Mac Mini to have my Tivo, across the house, access through it’s Internet connection. The reason I wanted to do this was beause my wireless network is currently 802.11b, and transferring files from my Tivo to my computer over wireless takes several hours. Since the Mac Mini is hardwired to the network, I thought I’d take advantage of its unused Wifi card which features 802.11g. I bought a new USB Adapter for my Tivo and began the configuration. Everything seemed to be going okay until I tried to configure the Tivo to see the Mac on the network. It saw 6 of my neighbors, but no Mac. My conclusion is that the Mac’s built-in wireless card is not strong enough to penetrate walls and floors of a moderate size house. If it had an external antenna, it would have likely performed better.

My next step is to buy a new 802.11g router and a new PCMCIA card for my laptop. Once my entire network is on 802.11g, I assume I will have no problems getting files from my Tivo in a timely manner.

This will seem a little odd, but I was talking to my daughter the other day about the people living in our neighborhood and she asked who our neighbors were. She wanted to know if the people down the street were our neighbors. Honestly, I couldn’t come up with a logical answer to that question. Basically I couldn’t figure out what constitutes a neighbor. Most dictionaries state that a neighbor is someone living near or bordering you. Many people just use the word neighbor to describe people living next to them, then others call those same people ‘next door neighbors.’ So are the people down the street our neighbors? We are in a neighborhood after all. What I finally told my daughter was that the people bordering our house were our neighbors, and each house in our neighborhood has neighbors, so the collection of each of these neighbors makes up our neighborhood. So those ‘people down the street’ I mentioned earlier would be our neighbor’s neighbor’s … neighbor. Is that right? I don’t know, but that is what I’m sticking to until I’m convinced otherwise. Let me know what you think.

I’d also like to hear other stories where your children generated abstract thought in you.

In the past 2 weeks, I dove head first into the world of XML with XSL, and now I’ve found myself floating to the top. The fundamental reason for using these two together is to allow the retrieval of data from a data source, output it as XML, then apply the look and feel to it using XSLT and CSS. By keeping the data separate from the design, we are able to adjust the look and feel without bothering with the backend programming or data. When your company requires a Change Management process to publish code, this will be your best friend.

One issue I came across that others had also come across was the confusion of what XSL calls variables. Many programmers such as myself find ourselves upset when we cannot reassign values to these variables, but XSL intended for these variables to behave in the same way that variables do in a math equation. They don’t reassign. They get substituted as the problem is executed. While this seems easy enough to grasp, I still wasn’t happy with the fact that no website I visited offered the solution to what I needed accomplish. All they did was argue why XSL variables made sense or not.

In a loop, I was wanting to trigger a flag (variable) that would tell the program to do something different after that flag was raised. This is easy enough to do in most programming languages, but XSL is special in that way. Though not published anywhere easily found, the way around this is using recursion and passing your values through parameters rather than variables. In other words, you need call the template with a initial value for your flag, then call the template again from within the template with a new set of parameters, which reflect the change you wanted to make (to your flag). I have a sample XSLT here. You see near the end of the days template, I call the template again with new parameter values. I also removed the for-each because with the recursion it is not required for my project. Just make sure you program your recursion to end at a certain point, otherwise all of you programmer friends will laugh at you as your XSL gets caught in an infinite loop. I’ve done that enough that this time, I avoided it. I hope this helps others looking for the answer to how to reassign values when XSL variables won’t take them.

It seems Tivo has outsourced their TivoToGo initiative to the good folks over at Roxio. This is good and bad news for Mac users. The good news is that Tivo has finally addressed the issue of having TivoToGo for Windows, but not for Mac. The bad news is that in order to get TivoToGo for Mac, you have to purchase Toast from Roxio. Though being packaged with Toast,

Tivo Transfer, as they call it, seems loosely integrated with Toast and the only obvious tie it has with it is the burning of your recordings. I think this is a good idea to keep things from getting bloated. Sometimes I want to burn a Tivo recording to DVD, but most times I don’t. The overall interface is very easy to use.

One thing against this offering from Roxio is the fact that TivoDecode Manager just came out last month for no cost to the end user. The would seem more inline with the previous offerings from Tivo since we do pay for a subscription after all. Which should you go with? That depends on what you are looking for. If you need a cheap way to watch you recordings or back them up onto your Mac, stick with TivoDecode Manager, but if you want the ability to make DVDs from your recordings, and have the interface integration with Toast, go with Toast. I’ve personally been using Toast for burning on my Mac, so I’m kind of torn between the two options and might just go for both.

After years of searching Houston for good quality Chicago-style Deep Dish Pizza, I’ve finally found it. Right under my nose along my daily commute, a restaurant popped up 2 weeks ago called Baby Leita’s. I found it in one of the local coupon circulars that come weekly in the mail and noticed it claimed that not every deep dish is Chicago-style. In complete agreement with this statement, I decided to give them a try and see what they were all about. It is family owned and operated by a couple who just moved back here from a long stint in the Windy City. They decided to give to Houston’s west side what can only be found in a select few restaurants here, but is widely available in Chicago.

Most of my experience with this style pizza has been from my trips to Chicago with my wife and family, but I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable pizza consumer. Baby Leita’s only offers the sauce on top version, which is unlike the pizzas I usually grab while up north, but it turned to be very well made. After some research on Wikipedia (behind the scenes), I discovered that there are two schools of thought with Chicago-style Deep Dish. Those with sauce on top and those with sauce inside the pizza. My wife, having been born and raised in Chicago’s north side, is very firm in her belief that deep dish pizza has the sauce inside and not on top, and that sauce on top indicates a stuffed pizza. A stuffed pizza would have the same beginnings as its deep dish brethren, but instead of having the sauce with the toppings, that add another thin layer of crust and put the sauce on top. Despite this, some larger known restaurants in Chicago feature the sauce on top of both and this little joint in Cypress has done it and exceeded expectations. If anyone in the Upper Katy Area, Cypress, or West Houston, TX is looking for good quality Chicago-style Deep Dish, I recommend Baby Leita’s. It is on Barker-Cypress near Highway 290, just in front of the Stonegate neighborhood. Map It!

After Steve Jobs pushed aside the Apple TV, Apple’s version of the Media Center [Extender],  to carry on for 90 minutes about the iPhone, I began to wonder if the Apple TV would do what I need it to do. It boasts streaming from any PC running the latest version of iTunes, but one catch is that iTunes only supports videos encoded with H.264 and some MPEGs. This makes sense for iTunes because its primary job is getting Videos from the iTMS (iTunes Music Store) to the customer’s iPod. However, I don’t purchase my movies through iTunes. I prefer to encode my movies using the XVid or DivX codec. All of my DVD Players support this codec so it makes sense for me. In fact, with a simple codec install for QuickTime, I’m able to watch my videos perfectly using FrontRow on my Mac Mini. This brings me to my question. If my videos work in FrontRow, would they also work on the Apple TV? I’m guessing that the interface on the Apple TV is the next version of FrontRow, which might suggest I could watch my movies assuming they were stored locally on the 40GB internal HDD or an external HDD. Streaming may be a different beast altogether since it seems to ride on the shoulders of iTunes sharing features. I use iTunes to listen to music or look through photos on my Tivo, which tells me it is very capable of sharing across Wifi, but by why will they not add DivX/XVid support for iTunes?

A couple of other issues I have about this device is the lack of an optical drive, to replace DVD Players, and the name itself. I’m aware that it outputs through a TV, but why call it “Apple TV” when no TV Tuner is included. The only TV Shows you can watch on this device are those available for purchase through iTunes.

What does this all mean? I guess if I can get some answers to the above questions, I would likely buy this unit because the $299 sure seems a lot better than the $799 Mac Mini alternative, which provides everything I need including a DVD Player replacement for only $500 more [ouch].