Author: Rachel

The Do’s and Don’ts of Spaceship Repair

So there is this Very Exciting Book that just came out (August 16, 2022) by Richard Roberts called “A Spaceship Repair Girl Supposedly Named Rachel“. You’d better believe I already read it, and you can find my review on Amazon, mine is the really excited review under the name “Rachel”.

Since I am also supposedly named “Rachel” this book interested me. Ok also, I am actually pretty much “Rachel”. Loosely. It’s a long but true story that I can attest to. No really, I swear on the six eternal beating hearts of the ice worm that inhabits the mist between the far moons of Jupiter. Or I would, but I don’t swear.

ANYWAY: this is a boring Earth blog, so I’m going to tell you all the best repair tools I know of and here is a big list of links, like you used to see on blog pages in the late 90s. Eat that, Algorithm.
These may be Amazon links etc., but I don’t have an affiliate link program – buy them in your little local hardware store if you can, and just use these links to read more about the products and make sure I didn’t make them up.

Sugru: Sugru is amazing stuff; it’s like plastic? it’s like glue? But you mold it with your hands, and it sticks to anything and makes it permanent yet flexible. But it doesn’t last forever, so if you buy some you pretty much need to use it within six months. I think it will last longer than six months if you keep it in the fridge but don’t quote me on that. Actually if you quote me I will be delighted, but it might not be a true fact. Here is a link.

Apoxie Two-Part Resins/Clays: This stuff is SO STURDY that you can mold/repair outdoor all-weather yard ornaments or make actual ship repairs with it. I mean car repairs. SERIOUSLY it will repair a real car. Then of course buff and paint it if you want it to look pretty. Here is a link.

Evil Ted’s molds: These don’t repair anything. These make whatever you are making look Extra. They come in “Hero” and “Villain” and “Steampunk” and “Cyberpunk” what more do you want? You can use them with several brands of air dry clays, and so they are light for costumes/affixing to things that don’t bear much weight. Here is a link.

Garden Velcro: This is just a big spool of green Velcro that was created to tie up your tomatoes, so you have to hunt for it in a garden supply store/garden section of the hardware store, and maybe can’t find it all year around. But it’s awesome for attaching anything to anything else/cables/organizing stuff. I use it all the time for holding up Christmas decorations (or basically anything you want to Velcro to something else). Especially Christmas decorations because it’s green, so you don’t notice it if you hide it in pine. Here is a link.

Nano Tape: You may have seen all the clickbait ads where someone is putting a mason jar on a wall with tape, and, great googlie mooglies this stuff actually works. I bought a roll for everyone I know for Christmas and ended up with a lot left over, but currently I am using it to secure a very big socket extender to my wall outlet. I do shove it back in place sometimes, but it’s been there years and hasn’t fallen off the wall. Here is one example.

Insta Crates: You know how you need to lug parts and whatever around in a crate, and then you take them out and use them up and have a bunch of crates stacked in the corner under a sheet and then the cyborg hides snacks in there and forgets them and it smells after awhile? Well anyway: You can get COLLAPSING CRATES. These are especially awesome to put in your car trunk because they take so little space, until you need them to take up space. Here is one example.

Goo Gone: If you are like me, and a little crazy when it comes to sticky residue, you need Goo Gone. It will remove, well, the sticky residue from old tape, or price labels, or basically it removes any gross film from any surface. It’s great stuff. I don’t know why I keep having the spray bottle part break when I buy it, though, and end up transferring it to another bottle with no label that I have to keep remembering what it is. I live an exciting life. Here is a link.

Actually I could go on, but this is already a long blog. Apparently I have just enough patience to write about one blog post a year. Sorry about that. Maybe I will come up with more. Thanks for reading! Let me know if you buy any of this stuff and it works for you.

Happy 2020

Just a post to say: in 2020 I will try to update this with more content. Remember that tiny Anchor podcast I tried in November? I’m not done with it. But it’s going to evolve into a different form. Now that I’ve made this “resolution” on New Year’s Day, I can hold myself accountable!

I also said all of last year that I would draw more, and that sure didn’t happen. I did code a lot more, but that’s my day job – and I don’t really want to do more of it when I come home at night. I’ve decided that for now, this is ok. But I do want to have more projects in the evening: when you come home from work and “spend time” without purchasing any progress on anything, that’s a bad investment.

I spent today trying to delete portions of this domain that I don’t use. Hopefully they’ll be replaced with “Good Content” this year.

How to Study Hard

Today I’m writing from the Cleveland Game Dev Meetup. This month we’re meeting in the Mayfield Public Library.  Strangely, both times I have come to a Meetup, my GPS has tried to tell me the destination doesn’t exist.

I’m listening to someone explain how Construct 2 is a great platform, and comparing it to Pulse. I wanted to ask someone his opinion of Ableton as a music DAW. But I’m not really getting any code written! I have to admit, I haven’t really touched the Unity tutorial I started last Meetup, and it has been a month. Now that I’m done with my code bootcamp, WCCI, it feels weird to not be working hard on anything in the evening after my day job. I really need to pick up some side project.

You’re right, I did not finish Identiflora yet. I was originally going to work through it as a .NET project, but now I’m not sure if that is the best idea. (Did I say this already? I feel like a broken record.) So in lieu of really “working on the big passion project”, I am working on some smaller things.

I still feel like I should be learning on CodeEval, but it is admittedly pretty dry. So I am excited that I just found Codingame – it is like CodeEval, full of problems to solve using your coding skills, but these are couched like games. It’s really a fun concept, even if it’s still hard work. Speaking of “hard work disguised as a game” I am also enjoying Human Resource Machine by Tomorrow Corporation, the same game company that made World of Goo. In Human Resource Machine you program (using a pseudo coding language) people to take certain integers and drop them into certain boxes – yeah you are really doing the same loops and if/thens that you would be learning in CodeEval, but giving it game trappings makes it fun!

I guess not everything can be made easier and into a game. I really enjoy listening to J. Vernon McGee. He is gone now, but his radio program is now a podcast, and it takes you through the whole Bible, verse by verse, over the course of five years. I once heard him say (and I think he was quoting but I don’t recall whom, sorry),  that if you are having a hard time with a Bible passage, because it is dry and hard to understand, you have to moisten it with the sweat of your brow. Hard work is hard work! But it leads to deeper insights.

That goes for coding too.

 

A Few MVC SQL Tips and Tricks

I have been working with Visual Studio 2015, MVC .NET and MS SQL lately, and ran into several things that I had to keep looking up over and over, so I thought there may be someone else out there in the same boat.

Note: These are all tips for working code-first in Visual Studio.

  1. In your Model, say you want to have a table’s Primary Key auto-increment. Sure you add [Key], but you also need to add this: [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)]
    auto_increment
  2. Here is a handy snippet you need to add to Global.asax in order to add more than one controller to your project:
    Database.SetInitializer<YourProjectContext>(new DropCreateDatabaseIfModelChanges<YourProjectContext>());
    In my screenshot, the name of my project is IceCream. If you don’t know the name of your project context, it should just be the name of your project with “context” on the end. I know that’s pretty basic, but as a new coder, it sometimes throws me. Global.asax is located at the very bottom of your Solution Explorer.
    if_model_changes

Launch House Game Dev Meetup

I have made and sold art for years and still have a hard time (sometimes) calling myself an Artist. So I feel almost funny being at a game development meetup when I have never even tried to make a game. It isn’t “impostor syndrome” it’s just, I’m not sure if I am passionate about it. Not sure what I bring to the proverbial table. But I am here today, at the Shaker Launch House, with about 10 other people working on their own games. I don’t have a specific game idea to work on, but I brought art supplies and am working through some Unity 3D demos. In fact, I watched a lot of tutorials yesterday on beginning game development, and they said the important thing is to “start making a game out of what you can do” as opposed to “start with a great idea”. If you start with a great story to tell, and it is leagues out of your capacity to tell it, you will get stuck and quit. If you make a game that is just “two dots moving” (or..something), then you can actually finish a thing and then move on to the next one with one complete project under your belt (and experience).

My favorite games are ones with interesting characters and stories, and honestly, most of them are 2D not 3D. (In fact, I still like interactive fiction/text adventures.) But Unity does 2D as well. I should learn 3D since I sculpt and I’d like to see if I can print something in 3D. So many skills overlap!

I’ve always wanted to write and illustrate stories and books – art books? nature books? field guides? story books? I just love books. I did not really think about making games (I feel like all of my friends have always wanted to make games). I’m still not sure it is my platform, but I really want the experience of learning new things. And good games tell stories.

IMG_1158
Launch House Angel?

 

The End of the Beginning

We Can Code IT is officially over, except for the part that isn’t: The career fair, and the actual receiving of the certificate.

So the job search has begun. In addition to preparing for the career fair, where you can do a large amount of job searching at the same time.

I had my first interview today. It was hard, and I learned a lot through it:

  • You will be asked questions that you can’t answer off the top of your head.  This is OK. They want to see you work through the problem.
  • If a recruiter tells you the kind of typical questions, be prepared to answer them. My recruiter was spot on with the questions that were asked. Additional searches online for typical interview questions was also helpful.
  • The interviewer is on your side. They are not trying to make you fail. Even if you are fumbling around and not knowing something, they want to watch you figure it out, instead of freeze up and die.

For what it’s worth, no amount of reading stuff online is really the same as sitting in front of an interviewer.  Neither is any amount of reading stuff online the same as actually coding and solving problems. So make sure to keep your skills sharp, and do a power pose before the interview!

 

Plants and Database Design

I’m still working on my web app, Identiflora. As I work I’m referencing both the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Wildflowers and Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. Both books mean a lot to me. I remember when my parents gave me the Audubon book as a teen, and it has been trekked around and loved, and dropped in water so I am probably due for a new copy. The Newcomb’s was my friend throughout Plant Taxonomy class in college (my favorite class!), and is still my favorite plant guide.

I am loosely basing my plant site on the questions proposed at the beginning of Newcomb’s key system: Flower shape (simple symmetrical petals? irregular shape? composite like a dandelion?), plant shape (leaves opposite? alternate? whorled?), leaf shape (simple or compound, toothed or divided or entire?).

In order to make an MVC MS SQL relational database of plants that a user can easily navigate, I need to consider these questions (and the answers). It will help me determine where to split up my database for data normalization. If the only options for plant shape are opposite, alternate or whorled, a table with a column of  records reading “opposite/opposite/opposite/whorled/alternate/alternate” is very redundant. This breaks the DRY principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself). Splitting that into a separate table of only those three options (opposite, alternate, whorled), makes the data integrity of the overall database much better.

I’m just a novice at database design; I’m excited to learn as I go!

On the.. What Week Is This? Week of Bootcamp

It has been too many weeks since I updated. Summary: We Can Code IT is both difficult and rewarding.

This code school is experiencing some growing pains, and I’ve benefited by being introduced to a lot of great instructors, as the list of instructors keeps growing: Mel McGee (the CEO of WCCI), Lauren Holloway, Jarryd Huntley, and James M. Allen. We even had a guest presentation by Susie Sharp, and resume coaching by Patti Substelny.

Create! Make things. You will learn so much. And you won’t get it all right the first time, so fail fast and keep going, and getting better. And Make connections.

Now, nearing the end of the course, I am working on both a portfolio page, and a passion project. I’ve talked about the passion project (Identiflora) before. I don’t think the current version is going to look anything like it did in my head – but I will keep improving it in the future, I just need to get a MVP (Minimally Viable Product), as ‘they’ say. Creating something is better than creating nothing!

In fact, that is the first part of my takeaway from this: Create! Make things. You will learn so much. And you won’t get it all right the first time, so fail fast and keep going, and getting better.

The second part is: Make connections. I have made a lot of connections with the coders in my cohort, and the instructors. And there are hackathons and game dev meetups and other coding opportunities around here that I need to get involved in. Anyone who is farther along in the coding journey can help you when you start down that path. They might be able to shave hours off of your coding snarl, or introduce you to someone who needs your help, or someone with a job offer. Coding sounds like an isolated-in-a-basement-drinking-coffee-all-night career, but in reality you can only thrive and progress when you reach out and make connections.