I’ve watched and listened to Leo Laport podcasts “This Week in Tech”, “MacBreak Weekly”, and “This Week in Google”  for several years now and find they now suffer from a serious case of the Trump Derangement Syndrom, TDS. This Week in Google has gotten so bad that I canceled my subscription. I don’t care about how much they hate Donald Trump or their political beliefs, I tune in for the technical content which in the case of “This Week in Google” is non-existent. Leo injects his politics into both “This Week in Tech” and “MacBreak Weekly”, and encourages his guests to chide along with him. I do note that on “MacBreak Weekly” he does get some push back from the regulars of the show.

We’re back… We arrived on October 31st at our winter home at Good Life RV Resort near Bartow, FL. It’s good to see friends again and participate in the park events, cards, bingo, donut/coffee Mondays, etc.. It’s the friends and activities that bring us back. This is our eighth year, Five years at Humendall RV Park in Winter Haven, FL, and now three years at Good Life. We switched parks for better amenities. Humendall sites are small, mostly sand, weeds, and seashells. Wiring is all overhead and in many spots to low for an RV to pass without then being lifted. The people were great and we have many friends there. But our 42′ 5th wheel just did not fit their congested park. Good Life on the other hand provides very large open sites where we park on the grass next to a large concrete patio for parking and outdoor lounging. Additionally, the site rent and electric costs are significantly less. The only negative at Good Life is they do not provide cable TV or WiFi. One big plus at Good Life is as sessional occupants we keep the same site every year.

WiFi internet service is a high priority for Sandy and I. Our first year at Good Life we purchased a Verizon MiFi on eBay with unlimited service for $135/month. Our second year we had switched out phones to T-Mobile with unlimited data so just used our hot spots. While the Verizon LTE unlimited was good, the T-Mobile unlimited 3G service was just OK. This year we went with ViaSat satellite internet. So far the service is good. We are able to watch NetFlix, Hulu movies, along with games, etc.

This year we intended on taking a side trip to visit family in Oklahoma. Now we pull a 42′ Cardinal 5th Wheel RV from our home in Chandler, AZ to Good Life in Florida along I-10. Having done this for 8 years we have found specials parks to visit along the way. Usually, we only travel 250 – 300 miles a day. The plan was to deviate from our normal course at Junction City, TX, and head north to Oklahoma. While comfortably parked at Junction City we were rudely interrupted and told to evacuate to higher ground as the nearby river was flooding. We spent that night at a nearby I-10 rest stop at a much higher elevation. Flooding in TX north of our location was really bad. Many roads and bridges were submerged and the rain was continuous. I ended up spending a week at Buckhorn Lake Ranch RV Resort until the rain stopped. While there we did enjoy a visit to Fredericksburg a nearby old German town. I had some great beer and BBQ. Once the rain passed, our trip was uneventful until we blew a tire on the RV just outside of Pensacola, FL. We sat alongside busy I-10 for 3 hours before a service truck arrived to replace our tire. Fortunately, we had a good spare, or so we thought. We got within 50 miles of Good Life when the spare tire blew. It took two hours for a service truck to arrive with a new tire. So lots of excitement this trip. When a tire blows on our RV we experience no issues with control. In both cases, we were able to pull off the road in full control. Before we leave for home next April, all 4 RV tires will need to be replaced. The existing tires are 4 years old, which is the limit for RV tires.

Have not blogged in well over a year, however maintained a TypePad account for years which contained many irreplaceable entries. One is my dear mother’s recipe for beet soup. So much to my surprise, when I attempted to access this blog at Typepad, it was inaccessible. Seem like Typepad switched to all HTTPS. As you would expect I initiated a trouble ticket asking for their help. In response they provided instructions that I am sure they understood but were complete gobbledygook to me. A follow up trouble report yielded no response, It was at this point that I suspected all was lost. I did manage to stumble on to a page that downloaded all blog entries. The result was a web page listing that I saved. WordPress is an advertiser on TWIT, and it was there that I learned about its ease of use and benefits. So took a chance and signed up for an account and sent what I thought was a jumbled mess of a Typepad archive file. To my surprise, WordPress produced this site with all my historical blogs. Mom’s beet soup recipe is safe. Thanks WordPress…

Once again its been too long since my last blog. As a quick update, we are currently wintering at Good Life RV Resort in sunny Florida, and have switched my main platform from a MacBook Air to a Dell XPS 13. This switch saved a ton of money. I have really retired, well actually I did not take a job in 2016, but will may this spring after we return home. In the interim, I have spent programming time working on a couple of personal web applications using JavaScript. Have developed them in plain JavaScript, then again in Angular. Next will be Angular2. In this effort, I have used NodeJS, Grunt, GIT, MySQL, REST, along with many other JavaScript libraries. It’s really amazing how far JavaScript has come in the last few years. It has become a major web development language. My intent is to find a JavaScript coding job this spring.

Ran across this error while developing an Angular application. The fix turned out to be quite simple. Assuming NodeJS is installed and https-server is installed globally, then just run https-server <file location> which will run a server localhost:8080. If needed go to nodejs.org to install node, then in a terminal/command window run npm install https-server -g to install https-server globally.

Wintering in Hammondell RV Resort in Winter Haven FL. Its good to be back with our friends. Playing cards three nights a week and bingo on Tuesday. I left a position with Blackhawk on December 24th, spent Christmas at home, and started our trip to FL the following day. Our trip across the country pulling a 40′ 5th wheel was uneventful, with no mechanical problems. The weather was an issue. Actually stayed one day longer in Benson, AZ to get another day behind a major winter storm. As it was we did run into a little snow, sleet, and rain but nothing stuck to the road. There was a ton of snow everywhere and freezing temperatures till mid-way through Texas.  Spent New Years’ Eve in Beaumont TX. Arrived at Hammondell on January 5th. Overall it was a nice leisurely trip from AZ. For me, the winters in FL are much nicer than AZ. It’s warmer with much higher humidity. We are here till April.

While in FL my goal is to rewrite iscorecards as anAngular SPA.

Issue solved. Actually it was my lack of understanding that was the real issue. So to add a new row to an existing template table I used the following code:

Template.tables.events({
‘click .addRow’: function(event, template){
//alert(‘addRow click’);
var inst = Session.get(‘tablesTemplateInstance’);
var column = 4;
var html = “<tr>”;
for(var c=0; c<column; c++){
html = html + “<td><input value=’0′ /></td>”
};
html = html + “</tr>”;
//alert(Spacebars.SafeString(html));
template.$(‘#card tr:last’).after(html);
}
});

The key learning for me was to. append the jquery to the event returned template object and to return an HTML string. Returning a Spacebars.SafeString does not work.

Spending all my free time building “iscorecards” with Meteor. Built the original app with plain JavaScript, MySQL, and a little Angular. Started a rebuild using Angular, and in the process discovered Meteor. Now its totally Meteor for me. I have only run into one issue which I have not been able to solve, which is dynamically adding a new table row. It can be done, but I just don’t know how at this time. I will definitely blog the solution to this issue.

Here is a really easy way to install the latest version of Python on Linux Mint. This is not my creation, I got the info from the following site:

https://linuxg.net/how-to-install-python-3-4-1-on-ubuntu-14-04-linux-mint-17-pinguy-os-14-04-and-other-ubuntu-14-04-derivative-systems/

$ sudo apt-get install libssl-dev openssl
$ cd /opt
$ wget python.org/ftp/python/3.4.1/Python-3.4.1.tgz
$ tar -xzvf Python-3.4.1.tgz
$ cd Python-3.4.1/
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

The easiest way to make Python 3.4.1 as default is to symlink it:

$ sudo ln -fs /opt/Python-3.4.1/python /usr/bin/python

It doesn't seem possible that I have not blogged for 7 full months. That has got to change…