Setting up expense reimbursement in your Church account

For members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, when you spend money for your Church calling, you can submit receipts to your leaders and have those expenses reimbursed. The old way of getting your money back involved having the ward financial clerk print a check for you, which adds time and effort… Continue reading Setting up expense reimbursement in your Church account

Rip-off report

I started shopping for a network-attached storage device several days ago, after a hard-drive failure on my main home computer wiped out most of the stuff I’ve done in the last year. All of the major online retailers had basically the exact same price of $399, so I decided to buy it from Amazon. I’d… Continue reading Rip-off report

A free lunch

I don’t get as many birthday freebies as Bart Simpson does, but I think that I’ve signed up for more than most people. It takes a special kind of shamelessness to show up to a restaurant and only order what you’re getting for free.

What’s so awesome about Sublime Text?

Everything! Sublime Text lives up to its name — working in this editor truly is sublime. Far better for me than Notepad++. Jeffrey Way of Nettuts+ has put together a great series of video tutorials that show you how to use all the power of this amazing application. But here’s the highlights from my perspective.… Continue reading What’s so awesome about Sublime Text?

Like using a shotgun to kill a fly

For years, I’ve been using programs to replace small snippets of text in my programming. I type `z and the program outputs cd /var/replicate/Replicate/trunk/app and hits enter for me. This is much faster than typing out the whole path (even with Bash tab completion), or password, or chunk of code (whatever I happen to have… Continue reading Like using a shotgun to kill a fly

The Force flows through all things

Since my kids recently watched the Star Wars movies for the first time (in preparation for our family Halloween costumes this year), I’ve become acutely aware of its influence on our popular culture. I’ll see some reference to the Force or to Darth Vader, and think, “Audrey would get that now, but she wouldn’t have understood it a month ago.”

HTML5 form inputs in CakePHP 1.2

At work, we’re building out a mobile version of our replicated sites.  As anyone who’s used an iPhone or Android browser to fill out a web form knows… using an iPhone or Android browser to fill out a web form is really annoying, and it’s best to make things as user-friendly as possible.  That’s why… Continue reading HTML5 form inputs in CakePHP 1.2

Tweaking Firefox tab colors, part 2 (The Firefox 4 edition)

Just when I got used to my new tab colors described in my previous post, Firefox 4 was released and broke what I’d done.  I could still see a teeny difference between my green, yellow, and red tabs — a 2-pixel strip at the top of each of them.  But most of the tab was… Continue reading Tweaking Firefox tab colors, part 2 (The Firefox 4 edition)