Sandbox with Seating

I had promised that once we have completed the house that I would build a sandbox in the backyard.  A sandbox is pretty easy to build since it's essentially a box.  A few things to consider when building a sandbox is whether there are cats and other animals around since you don't want your child's sandbox to become an oversized litter box.

Because there are cats in our neighborhood, I knew we needed to have a lid of some sort for the sandbox.  The dimensions of the box is 8' x 4' so a single lid that span the whole sandbox might be too heavy for the little ones to lift.  I decided to divide the sandbox into two 4' x 4' sections.

I built the lids to fold on top of each other so they become a seating bench when opened.  It still offers plenty of play area for the kids, easy for them to open while keeping neighborhood animals out.

Is it time for me to stop reading Yahoo finance?

I've been a big fan of Yahoo Finance and while my use of various Yahoo services have diminished, Finance (and Sports) are still two of my favorites.  However, I started to noticed that I'm less and less interested in Yahoo Finance since they no longer focus as much on news as they do on commentary, rumors and speculation.

When I look up the finance page on Yahoo, most of the articles seems to be about Google and instead of news it's often blog posts on rumors or some sensationalism.  As Yahoo change or focus their direction, I understand why they might cut some more tech-focused products but it would be sad if they let Finance deteriorate.

LazyHacker Is Now More Mobile Friendly

Those viewing this blog on a mobile device will notice a change. I've enabled mobile templates to make it more mobile friendly. To see the web version simply click the "View web version" link at the bottom of the page.

What a Crazy Year

Arguably, three of the measures of adulthood are career, family and home. Over the past year, I started a new job, had a new baby and built a new house. How do I feel? Tired. . . :-)

It was a lot of balls to juggle at once, but thankfully I had a great support system at home and at work. That's not to say that it didn't drive me crazy sometime, but we got through it in one piece!

A lot of people has helped me along the way especially following a dark period of my life. I don't know if they realized how much they kept me going and not lose track that life goes on.

I'm super excited to move to the new house with the family and start enjoying the fruits of our labors.

Week 35: Construction Is Now Complete!

The house is done!!! After a successful final inspection the city has signed off on the construction and approved it for us to move in. 35 weeks ago this was what we had:

And now this is what our soon-to-be home is:

There are still cosmetic details that need to be done such as the landscaping and touch ups on the inside, but there is nothing holding us back from starting to bring our stuff over to the new house. Our GC did an amazing job keeping the project moving forward and staying on schedule. That's quite an accomplishment for a 9 months project.

The last two weeks were pretty hectic with the rain and the backsplash people flaking out, but in the end everything got done. The backsplash went in which allowed us to get the appliances and kitchen faucets in. Finally, our front door also got installed .

Welcome, please come in.

Step through the front door.

Kitchen with actual appliances and backsplash!

22,000 BTUs, baby! Also, it allows for wok cooking on its burners.

The far right is a instant hot water filter great for that hot chocolate or tea with no waiting. :-)

We went for a solid glass backsplash for a clean look as well as easy cleaning.

From the kitchen, we can look to the great room area.

The soaking tub. I'm ready to use it now!

Week 34: Beginning Landscaping and a Test

The landscaping started this week.  The driveway was completed along with the front landing and the front yard landscaping has started.  The frontyard was cleared and mulched so we can pass inspection since the city required basic landscaping, but this isn't the final product.  We'll fully start on both the front and back yard landscaping after the inspection is completed.

Here you can see the driveway pavers:

Oh, the "Test" part in the title of this post refers to me trying Picasa and Blogger's integrated feature for the first time.

How To Migrate from WordPress to Blogger

The actual migration from WordPress to Blogger was very easy.  The hard part was actually finding the information on how to do it.  With a medium to large WordPress blog, a little bit of technical knowledge on running command line scripts is needed, but here are the basic steps:

First, from your WordPress admin dashboard go to Tools > Export to generate a copy of your existing blog in XML format.  By default, WordPress exports everything including all the spam comments so I suggest you delete all the spam comments first (goto Comments > SPAM and delete them) and then do the export.  Some of the spam comments had bad data in them that could cause problems when you try to do the conversion to Blogger's format.  This was what caused me the biggest headache.

Once you have your export file, head over to http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/.  This is an open source project that will convert your WordPress export file to Blogger's import file.  Note that if your export file is greater then 1MB (most likely), you will need to download the script used by the site and manually do the conversion yourself (see below).

In your Blogger dashboard, simply import the the converted file and you're all set!

Manually Converting to Blogger Format

To manually do the conversion, you need to have Python which is commonly available on Linux and OSX, but doesn't come default on Windows.  Once you have Python, you need to get  the Google gdata client.  Go to the directory where you have the client and run:

sudo python setup.py install

You now have everything ready to do the conversion!  Download the conversion script from http://code.google.com/p/google-blog-converters-appengine and from where you uncompress the file do:

bin/blogger2wordpress.sh <you file here> > blogger_import_file.xml

Go to your Blogger dashboard and import "blogger_import_file.xml". 

Why I Migrated From Wordpress to Blogger

For the past 5 years, I self-hosted my own instance of a WordPress blog running on my hosting service, but I got tired of having to do my own upgrades and applying patches.  Admittedly, WordPress is pretty easy to upgrade.  I'm not a professional blogger who needs a lot of publishing features and I don't spend too much time customizing the look of my blog.  Initially, running my own blog allowed me to get what I wanted/needed, but over the past 2-3 years I've only upgraded because of security updates.   Services such as Blogger now provide everything I need so that I can just write and not have to worry about running a blog.

Choosing to use Blogger might surprise people since it's more common these days to go from Blogger to WordPress.  While being a employee of Google adds a little motivation to dogfood my company's own product, I was looking at Blogger even before joining Google.  Blogger is a simpler blogging platform then WordPress, but still have some advance features such as built in integration with AdSense and Amazon for monetization and blog statistics.

Blogger also have recently been geting some updates on its template system that allowed me to pretty closely match the look and features of my WordPress site.

What ultimately tipped the decision, however, was that I wanted to use my own domain name (lazyhacker.com) which Blogger provides for free while WordPress charge a fee.

New URL for Lazyhacker Blog

The new URL for this blog is:  http://blog.lazyhacker.com!

I've moved all the content over the new location, but links to the any posts will be automatically redirected so no bookmarks should break.  All future posts will now only appear at http://blog.lazyhacker.com so it's better to update any links to the new location.

I decided to do this because I got tired of maintaining my own instance of Wordpress.  Even though upgrading WP is easy, it still takes time.  There is really no real advantages running your own instance versus using a service like Blogger these days.  It used to be that the services had a lot of restrictions and weren't very flexible, but these days that's no longer true.

If you're somehow reading this at

http://www.lazyhacker.com/blog/index.php/2011/04/02/new-url-for-lazyhacker-blog

make a comment because you should've been redirected to the new location at http://blog.lazyhacker.com/2011/04/new-url-for-lazyhacker-blog.html.

Week 33: Waiting on the Rain

The recent rain delayed work on the driveway and landscaping which also meant that we have to move the inspection back. It's not a big deal since we're still on schedule but it's not looking like we're going to finish ahead. The protective fencing around the house have been taken down and the driveway was completed. Our glass backsplash is taking longer then expected although it isn't needed for final inspection but the hope is to have it install before we put in the stove. There are still a bunch of little detail work that needs to be done but the GC feels confident that they will be ready for inspection this week. While he takes care of getting the house ready for inspection, we've been starting to plan the front and backyard landscaping. I really like to get that done before we move in because right now the backyard is just a patch of mud and clay...

First time I can take a picture from this angle without a fence in the way!



The crew have started to clean up the inside in preparation for the inspection and because they're close to finishing: