I just recently received the official Samsung Galaxy s3 JellyBean (Android 4.3) update from Sprint. It sounds like this update has been riddled with problems and was even temporarily pulled until the issues could be resolved. I seem to have gotten the latest iteration and things have gone fairly smoothly, except for one extremely annoying issue: I have two "file download" notifications that won't go away no matter what I tried.

Luckily I found this solution on an Android blog from user disgustinglyrad.joe:

1. Open the "Downloads" app (Apps -> Downloads)
2. Under both the "Internet" and "Other" downloads, click "clear all"
3. Reboot the phone if needed.

Finally, no more stuck download notifications!

I don't usually think much of celebrity deaths. The last I can remember being upset about was Dan Wheldon in 2011, but most people probably don't even know who he was. I was watching the Indycar race he passed away in live on ABC that day. When he wrecked I didn't think too much of it. You see a lot of pretty nasty wrecks when you watch motorsports long enough. Soon after the wreck though, you could tell something was...different. When they brought out the big yellow tarp and put it over his car, everyone knew what had happened. It was the first time since I started following racing that I had seen a fatal accident and it served as a morbid reminder that racing cars is still dangerous.

I found this awesome thread in /r/AskReddit today. /u/dingobiscuits asks the programmers of Reddit to sum up a popular film, song, or TV series in a few lines of fake code. The answers do not disappoint. Here are some of my favorites.

From /u/takagi: (Call me maybe)

if (justMetYou)
{
    crazy = true;
    cout<<number<<endl;
    int x = rand()%100;
    if (x>=50)
    {
        callMe();
    }
}

What a difference a year makes. Exactly one year ago today, July 19th 2012, my wife and I risked everything and moved to Florida. Why? Well, why not? I still can't believe we've already made a full trip around the sun since we packed everything up and sold our (awesome) home in Massachusetts. In this first part of a potentially two part series, I'd like to reflect on some of the benefits and challenges of not only working from home, but doing so from across the country. In the coming days I'd like to write another about life in general having moved to a completely new state away from everyone you've ever known.

I hate food.

There, I said it. Queue the jokes about my weight in 3..2..1..

Joking aside, this is a serious and somewhat interesting problem I have that I've never really heard anyone else talk about. It's something I've felt since I was little, but have only recently been able to identify and come to terms with. Normal people love food. Normal people love to eat. Why then, does the thought of having to eat give me the same feeling I get when I think about having to wash dishes or clean the house? Why does it feel like a chore? Well, I don't know the answer to that, but hopefully writing about it will shine some light on the problem.

Gun Control

The recent events in Newtown, CT, where 20 innocent elementary school children and six of their teachers were gunned down in cold blood by an obviously mentally ill assailant has once again sparked an understandable outrage over guns by the general populace. Many have had enough of this kind of thing and feel we need to introduce legislation to prevent it from happening again.

The issue of gun control is one that I have always had an internal struggle with. Even now, at age 27, I don't really have a good grasp on what I truly believe about the issue.

Here's how I just saved ~$300 by fixing my HP Photosmart C4680 printer/scanner.

The Problem

After I risked everything and moved to Florida, I found that my HP printer was having a little...issue. It seems liked it had a mind of its own. The touchscreen panel in front that's used to control the printer would select menus and options without even going near it. It would cancel itself in the middle of printing and scanning and generally became unusable. I figured it was busted in the moving process and we would have to buy a new printer.

I recently decided to try and migrate one of my rails apps to Heroku. It was my first Heroku app, and I'm learning a lot in the process. One of the first gotchas I ran into was that I needed to convert my app to use postgres since that's what Heroku seems to work best with and has the most documentation around.

I figured I would try and get this working locally before messing around with getting it to work on the Heroku server. First I had to modify my local config/database.yml file to connect to the postgres server. (Hint: Heroku will overwrite this file so your local copy doesn't matter over on the Heroku server)

development:
  adapter: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
  database: pg_tcj
  username: postgres
  pool: 5
  host: localhost

It all comes down to regret

It's the single question I've been asked the most over the last couple months. It's been asked by friends, asked by family, I've even asked myself a number of times. It's been phrased many ways, but the implied question is always the same.

"Why on earth would you want to risk everything you have, everything you've worked so hard for, to just pick it all up and move 1300 miles across the country?".

Look, I have it pretty good. I'm not blind to that. I have an incredible job (Which I complain about far more often than I should). I work with an insanely awesome team of people much smarter than me who have evolved into close friends outside the walls of EMC. I have an awesome boss that could give the "Most interesting man in the world" a run for this money. Outside of work, I have been lucky enough to marry my high school sweetheart Valerie, adopt a beautiful, well tempered Siberian husky named Jayna, and was fortunate enough to purchase my first home at the age of 23. I live the American dream every day.

So why risk it all? Why put everything you have in jeopardy? It comes down to one word. Regret.