christopher_samuelson

Our container garden.  We’ve got cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, basil, strawberries, peas, beans, sage and lettuce.  Everything, but the strawberries, we started from seed.  We plan to get broccoli going in the fall, and more lettuce.

This year we started most of our seeds in coffee filters.  It was a great way to get started without messing with dirt, or purchasing starter pods.  Once they’d germinated we moved them into starter pots.  We made some of our starter pots out of newspaper this time.  Saved money and peat by not purchasing as many peat pots.

We’re also going to vermicompost.  We’ve started building our worm bin, but I’ll save those details for another post. (more…)

We got a ton of snow, and Andrew is loving it!

I just joined a small group at our church, Chattanooga Vineyard, focusing on what we can do in Chattanooga, TN to stop human trafficking and slavery.  We are planning a race in November to raise money for Free For Life Ministries.  I’m helping them setup their social media campaign.  We now have a website http://www.setfreechattanooga.org.  We also have a Twitter account @setfreechat.

If you want to help, or just want to know more about human trafficking please visit our site or shoot me a message.

We are transitioning from Mongrels & Apache to JRuby & Glassfish v3.  We use Cookie Session Stores in our RoR app Knetwit, they’re the default session store and work well for our load-balancing requirements.  When we switched to Jruby/Glassfish, instead of our RoR cookies clients were recieving JSESSIONID cookies.  Since the RoR session cookies actually store the session data and JSESSIONIDs do not our session load-balancing failed.

There are numerous solutions to load-balancing with Glassfish clusters and special Sticky Glassfish Clusters.  This seems to be the most common answer to our trouble, but it introduces more variables into the transition.

In the end we set our

config.action_controller.session_store = cookie_store

and we were back in business.

Hopefully this helps someone else transitioning to JRuby/Glassfish.

We just started our Wilderness Lodge vacation in Sevierville, TN (ourside of Knoxville).  Left work early, drove the 2 hours from Chattanooga and went straight to the indoor waterpark after supper.  Andrew loved the kiddie pool slide, but wasn’t too sure about the wave pool, being an hour past his bedtime already probably didn’t help.  Haven’t taken any pictures off the camera yet, but we are having fun testing our new Olympus Stylus 770SW – waterproof, shockproof, freezeproof camera.  Tomorrow I’ll see if we can get any pictures online.

As we were getting ready to leave the pool side (there is a trolley that shuttles you from the hotel to the waterpark) a man collapsed.  The lifeguard were quick to respond with CPR and the AED.  The the paramedics arrived in an ambulance and took the man away as we were boarding the trolley.  Much to our suprise the ambulance was in the front parking lot of the hotel when we arrived.  We didn’t have to wonder why for long, as a Medevac helicopter landed and he was transfered into it from the ambulance.

All in all, an enjoyable trip.  Will keep you posted.

I had the realization recently that a major source of sin and trouble in my life was fear.  Fear at work drives me to a negative attitude, looking to blame others, or to give up because I am afraid that the outcome of my labour will be fruitless.  Fear of not being in control stops me from being kind and compassionate to others, fearing that I need instead to judge and correct them. Fear of not having enough, or being cheated stopping me from forgiving others.  Fear of how others might think of me or act towards me stops me from following Christ.  I want to examine each of these fears from a Biblical perspective, to shine some light.

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Went hiking Signal Point to Edwards Point a couple of weeks ago with the guys from work, randomly found a geocache.  So when Mick and I decided to go hiking Signal Point today we officially logged the geocache “Almost Edwards Point“.  As much as we enjoy being outdoors, and having a GPS device, I think geocaching is going to be an ongoing thing for us.

We also found out more about the trails near Rainbow Falls.  We tried (accidentally) part of the blue trail, and got to cross the other swinging bridge.  If you’re in the Chattanooga area and haven’t hiked Signal Point or any of the Cumberland Trails, you need to check them out.

Brian called us just as we were nearing Edwards Point, wanting to know if we wanted to go hike the trail with him today.  Haven’t heard how his adventure went, but I’m excited to find out.

P.S. Anyone wanting to know more about the trails on Signal Mountain should check out Hiking Trail on Signal Mountain.

We’re pushing out some exciting changes to Knetwit, Cooper has some details over on his blog.  Nutshell: new store, and the ability to search for books.

His birthday party was awesome, Katie has a couple of pictures up.  Thanks everyone that showed up, he had a great tme.