Welcome to LukeMcReynolds.com!
This is my place to put stuff online so I won't forget it, show the world that I can make a decent website, and share my thoughts with family and friends. It's also a place for me to share Linux/web development tips and tricks with the world at large, and a place for me to post pictures of my cat. If you don't know me and would like to, please get in touch with me - I'll try to respond right away.
CampaignMonitor Sidebox for Zen Cart
CampaignMonitor is an extremely easy to use (and to develop for) suite of third-party e-mail marketing software. I, my clients, and companies I’ve done work for have been using CampaignMonitor for e-mail newsletters for some time now. It’s totally top-notch, and is inexpensive to use, to boot.
I’ve made a CampaignMonitor sidebox for Zen Cart. Customers who fill out the contents of the box will automatically have their e-mail address added to your CampaignMonitor list. Although it works great, and does everything I want it to do at the moment, I’m not quite ready to release it to the public - I haven’t written documentation for it yet, for instance, or cleaned up the comments. When I do submit it, I’ll edit this post to show where you can download it. In the meantime, e-mail me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) if you have any questions, or want to test it out.
Posted on Dec 22, 2008 - 10:22 AM Categories: Geekread more | 0 comments
Snow
Grand Rapids (and most of the rest of the country) has been slammed with snow this past week. Here’s some photos I’ve taken recently showing the snow and how crappy it is.
This is from the front of our house, looking on to the street. (Click on the photo for a full-res version.)
The back of our house. (Click on the photo for a full-res version.)
There’s probably 16-18 inches of snow on top of the table in the last photo. All of it came down in the past 24 hours. I know that 18 inches of snow isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things - Minnesota and upstate New York, not to mention Canada or the UP (Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) get a lot more snow than Grand Rapids. Still, I helped get three cars get out of the snow on Friday, and have felt confined to the house since Thursday night. Then you go to all the trouble to shovel everything, and the next day brings another 4-6 inches, and you’ve gotta shovel again. Temperatures have been in the high single digits to the mid-teens, and it’s been very windy - gusts of up to 40 miles an hour, according to the weather people.
Anyway, I’m sick of the snow. It’s no longer a novelty. I’m glad to be moving to California this summer.
Posted on Dec 22, 2008 - 01:06 AM Categories: Grand Rapids, Local, Photoblogread more | 1 comments
Phillip Seymour Hoffman Looks Like My Grandfather
I was watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart this morning, and realized something: Philip Seymour Hoffman looks like a slightly younger version of my grandfather. It’s uncanny.
Here’s a screengrab of PSH from The Daily Show:
And here’s my grandpa:
Grandpa’s got a couple years on him, but it is similar. When he has his glasses on, there’s even more of a resemblance.
Posted on Dec 17, 2008 - 07:52 PM Categories: Family, Personalread more | 0 comments
This Is What They Say on TV Right Before the End of the World
Isn't that creepy? It was a 25 degree temperature drop in just a couple hours, which is weird, but when my weatherman starts saying things like "ominous", I'm expecting tornadoes or fifteen feet of snow or something. Not just a temperature change. This was on Fox 17 Morning News at 7: I recorded it using MythTV (and discovered that we're all about to die) this morning.
Posted on Dec 15, 2008 - 04:38 PM Categories: Grand Rapids, Local, Videosread more | 0 comments
My Sister Got Engaged Today!
My sister got engaged today! Congratulations Rachel and Brendan!
I got the call from my sister like three or four times, but I had my phone on silent because Lauren and I had gone to our church’s evening Christmas service. :-(
Anyway, good job the both of you. Can’t wait to see you over Christmas!
EDIT 12/15/08: She just called me today - she just got in to UPenn’s grad program!
EDIT 1/6/09: Here’s a YouTube video of Brendan skateboarding. He’s good.
Posted on Dec 15, 2008 - 01:10 AM Categories: Family, Friends, Personalread more | 1 comments
WOOD TV Channel 8 Segment on Look Who’s Been Busted
The local news has picked up my earlier article on the "Look Who's Been Busted" newspaper. The writeup and the "official" video is at http://www.woodtv.com/dpp/news/Look_Whos_Busted_resource_or_wrong; the larger-resolution version that I recorded is below.read more | 0 comments
Busted Weekly To Be Featured in Local News
Busted Weekly (see my previous article on the newspaper) is evidently getting some local attention. I just received an e-mail from a woman who did an interview with Channel 8 news about the newspaper. I hope I get a chance to see it/record it.
EDIT 6:44 PM, 12/12/08:
I’ve recorded the news segment, and will put it online soon.
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lukemcreynolds.com - Now in Valid XHTML!
I’ve updated the site to use valid XHTML now.
You can test the site for validity yourself by clicking on this link: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Flukemcreynolds.com%2F
Posted on Dec 08, 2008 - 07:54 PM Categories: Geekread more | 0 comments
Featured on BaconBuzz.com - My Bacon!
Check it out:
I guess my entry for water chestnuts wrapped in bacon was on the very top of BaconBuzz.com, http://reddit.com/r/bacon/, when they made this ad. You can see my reddit handle, lukemcr, on the right, on the fourth image-frame. It’s the one with 17 upvotes. Here’s the link to the comments: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bacon/comments/7g8vz/thanksgiving_appetizer_water_chestnuts_wrapped_in/.
This is the second time I’ve been minorly internet-famous - my cat, Lion, was on icanhascheezburger.com in ‘07.
Posted on Dec 05, 2008 - 03:13 PM Categories: Geek, Personalread more | 0 comments
Using rsync with Dreamhost’s private backup
Dreamhost has been offering their users 50GB of private backup space for a couple months now. That’s awesome. Unfortunately, they restrict your backup user’s shell using rssh to only be able to access it in four ways: rsync, scp, sftp and ftp. This means a couple things:
- You can’t setup RSA or DSA keys to enable passwordless login.
- You can’t log in via SSH
- The regular rsync -e option won’t work, because SSH is disabled.
rsync is a much better option than scp, sftp or ftp because it can do incremental changes. So, use this command to rsync to your Dreamhost private backup account.
rsync -avz --protocol=29 localdir backupsusername@backup.dreamhost.com:/backupdir
I’m going to write a script to automate this, perhaps using expect or something similar. When I do, I’ll post it on here. In the meantime, check this out: Scripting with lftp in active mode.
Posted on Dec 04, 2008 - 07:46 PM Categories: Geek
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