The site upgrade is completed. I just can't wait. So I worked on Sunday and get the new site up and running. This update would be the first one since the new site is up. This is my new goal now. I will maintain this site and fix any issues. But I will not rewrite this site again. Another rewrite will take another six to nine months, and I don't have many six to nine months to spent. I should move on to something new and more interesting.

I get it, every time a good project is completed, I would get this empty feeling, a sense of lost. I have to be focused now. I will make up some lost time on the code project tutorials. And I should find a more interesting project to work on. At this point, I am accomplished. I devoted myself to this one single project for the past five years. It came out as complete success. There are millions and millions of programmers. Most of them work from some companies, they don't keep the product they worked on. I have the privilege of creating this, and relentlessly made it as good as I can with all the little time I have. And it came out all right, maybe more than all right. I am happy. This rewrite has made it even better.

Looking back... This rewrite is epic, I fixed a lot of issues. And the back end code work is very nice, I didn't have to fix a lot and all the work is front end. This made the rewrite really easy. And by rewrite I have discover quite a few new things and new ideas. The best part of this is that it is not all work and no play. I completed Final Fantasy XV, twice. I got to start over on the Mass Effect Andromeda, and play a few other games. I guess some R&R would be in order for me for the next couple days. When fun is over, I will continue with the side work.

Note: This is the last update before the revamp-ed site is going to be live. And I will also add a new tutorial as a gift before the new site comes live.

Today is pay day, so I decided to purchase something I wanted, a SSL certificate before the revamp-ed site comes live. It always bothered me that Google failed to list my site on the first page because the blog site is http instead of https. And the https is using a self signed pkcs12 certificate. The thing is DuckDuckGo, Bing and Yahoo! all list my site as the top of the 1st page of search results. Google not! Google is crazy.

But I still wants top of the first page results on all. At least try getting to the top of Google. Anyways, I need SSL certificate on my site, my new site. So I purchase a standard SSL certificate. And it took me a long time to figure out how to configure the SSL certificate into the site. I don't know what I did wrong, some how the SSL cert I have downloaded does not match the private key I got from the issuer. And I was unable to create the Java key store from the certificate and the private key I got. I spent at least 8 hours trying to figure it out.

I was pretty mad. The issuer's web site wasn't very clear how to reset it. Then I figured out. It is possible to create my own private key using OpenSSL, then create the new CSR, and upload the CSR to get the new certificates. Then some OpenSSL magic and Java keytool would turn that certificate, and the root certificate into a pkcs12 jks store. Then it is easy to use a couple properties in the application.properties for the spring boot application. And it is working. Since it works, I installed into the existing web site. Now the secure site is working with an official certificate. Thumbs up!

I will document the experience and publish as blog post. This will be my last blog post for the existing site. Then I will convert everything to fit into the revamp-ed site. The new site will support UTF-8 instead of ASCII. And it will be 100% https. The old contents would be 100% compatible with the revamp-ed design. Awesome!

What I got for Father's Day is the Nest Security Camera. I got the 2-pack version. One is just not enough to cover the whole house. The two cams, one is used to watch for the front door and the other one is for the garage. They were very easy to connect to the home WIFI, and super easy to install to the exterior roof. The sync and install took less than an hour. It was also great that I have all the necessary tools, parts and instructions to get this done correctly.

I also upgraded the four lights in the attic room. They were the EcoSmart LED lights that can be embedded into the alcove for the lights. They were not easy to install, the clip one part is so hard to fit into the alcove. I was able to do it. And the end result is completely worth the effort, the room is so much brighter now. I was super proud of the upgrade.

The web site upgrade project is code completed, as of 6/13/2022. I will be doing a lot of testing for the next couple of weeks and get ready to migrate the ole one into this new one. There is going to be interesting to fit all that old site data into the new one. I am also planning to get SSL certificate for the site. This is also going to be interesting, setting up the certificate and use it. It will be a great summer.

I went to Ocean City NJ for two days vacation. It was fun and not as stressed. Not many photos was taken. Two days before the vacation, my big SUV had Check Engine warning on. At first, I thought it was the coolant/antifreeze liquid level too low. So I bought some and poured in idn't help. It is some what stressing not knowing what was broken. Luckily, I was able to find a device that can read the error code from the car. It is called OBD2/EOBD car diagnostic tool. So I bought one for $22 and had it overnight shipped home. It arrived the day before we left for vacation. And it took 5 minutes to read the error code. It turned out to be an issue with EVAP system, a minor one. Knowing it is not a big issue, I was able to enjoy the vacation.

After coming back from vacation, I took the car to repair shop, and fixed within 3 hours and cost only $130. That diagnostic tool is definitely worth it. Even the repair shop guy commented, "Worth every penny." With that, I should be able to check the error code, find out what could be the potential issue, and estimate how much the cost to fix it. I recommend everyone to get one.

On Monday, I solved the 2x2 Rubiks Cube. It was definitely not easy. Took me 3 hours (on and off). This is great mile stone I have reached. I learned from someone on how to solve the 3x3 one. This one I tried with online tutorial. It took a while and did work out.

I also figured out how to encrypt a folder and mount a drive to it using EncFS. The tool itself has multiple issues. But it should be safe for what I needed. I will probably create a tutorial post on how to use this.

Everything else is good.

Just a quick updates of what's up with me. The biggest thing is the broken air conditioner. The same one I fixed last summer with the leaky cooling coils. Somehow it is not blowing cold air. I was furious, cursing the bad luck I had with this new house. I found out about this issue at the hottest day in May. 98 degrees. The upper floor got heated up to 89 degrees and the air conditioner was not cooling it. The next day, it was 92 degrees, and still it wasn't cooling. I called the repair company and left a message. Then I searched online to see if I can figure this out.

One thing did came up from search is that the external fan supposed to work and would first cool the air and blow out the hot air. And on the second day, I noticed the fan was not running while the internal unit was running. Could it be the issue? And what would be the cause of this problem? The first thing I thought about was the power supply is not working. I checked around the external unit. and found a disconnected wire. It is pretty obvious because there are two wires connecting to this unit. One of them are connected with a connection cap. The other wire are disconnected and some where on the ground, the connection cap is lying there.

I picked up the two wire ends and put them together and the external unit immediately started running. It was so simple. One of my boys must unscrewed the cap and didn't know what it was for. I turned off the AC unit power and reconnected the wire and it worked. The next day, the repair company didn't even call back. I didn't call them again because it was fixed. I saved $95 of inspection fee.

I was doing OK with Mass Effect Andromeda. It was a crappy game. I plan to finish it, then I will uninstall it. I will not play it again. It is long and uninteresting. I am doing fine with the re-write of this site. And no progress with CodeProjects tutorials. I can get the rewrite done in 2-3 months, and redo the whole thing. The site will be down in a few days. The germinated mint is growing fine. The two pots of spearmint were huge now.

I can tell you, the foam sealant is a really dangerous product. I bought some recently and used one can to try seal the rotten plywood in the attic, that stuff is very sticky, and foamy. And drips due to gravity. And because I have to work with small spaces, I got that stuff all over my sweat shirt. Some got on my pants. And I had a lot on both of my hands. This stuff is almost impossible to wash off. I tried rubbing alcohol, hot water, with soap. Then I tried acetone. None of these worked. Finally, I was able to get a lot of these off during the hot shower. I would think twice using this stuff next time. Hopefully, I have fixed the issue with the attic leaking.

I had some writer's block recently. I couldn't think of a project that I can write about for codeproject. I could write something simple. But I can do much better than that. I should not settle for something less. I will start working on the next tutorial soon. I guess I will experiment with Angular a little and find something interesting to write about. I guess a good start point would be the parent/child controller data exchange.

Personal project is going great, I have completed the back end administration pieces. The last part would be the home page statistics for the administration page. I should finish this then start working on the public facing pages. That would be the plan.

I think I am starting to write these little update. Again, there is not much updates. I took a small trip to a place called Long Branch in New Jersey on 4/28. It was a day trip. And I went to the beach for an hour. That was pretty nice. There was some high wind and I think I got a sun burn. My face was itchy for 3 days. On the beach I picked some sea shells, and some white pebbles. For some reason, there is only a few people on that beach. High wind.

While we were gone, the handy men came and removed that trouble-some electric pole and moved the power cable close to the side of the house. And patched the hole with some new roof tiles. They also fixed the leaking of the flat roof and the the chimney. Yesterday 5/1, it rained pretty hard and the leaking wasn't there. I hope it is finally fixed. a lot of money spent on these little repairs. My checking account is again bleeding money. I hope this is it. I personally stopped going to Home Depot. There has to be an end to the home improvement.

The lawn is fine. I might need some more fertilizer for the back yard. I will do that later. The Mint plants were grown. There ware so many branches, the leaves were green and numerous. I have figured out how to care for them. All I had to do is sitting them down at the window for a few hours of sun light, and one cup of water each. They would show they are in distress when I forgot to water them. Then some water would bring them back to the top. I think I am going to cut some of the leaves so that it can grown some more. The ones I germinated from seed are also doing find. Their leaves are like bigger than sesame seeds now. I just keep watering them and bring them to the sun. Hopefully, they can grow faster.

Added - 5/3/2022 The dish washer issue is also fixed. It turned out to be an issue with the power supply. The neutral line was loose and the handyman fixed it. It should now work as expected.

There is again not much update. As usual, I will have plenty to say about not much of updates. For the past two weeks, I was playing Mass Effect Andromeda, I was on the third planet, and just started the raid on the facility. This game has been difficult. There has been a lot of minor bugs, and some major ones I have seen. To fix the major ones I have to shut it off then restart, then the missing piece would become available. I decided to play this game because I started Cyberpunk 2077. Then I thought about this one, which is another equally bad game. But both are not bad to the point of unplayable. I had fun playing Mass Effect Andromeda and will probably finish it. This is a good exercise to get used to 3rd person shooting before more complex games.

For my own project, I am just busy along. I have made great progress, and slowed down a bit for the past week. Last week, I spent all nights playing games. The project work was deferred to during the day. I did all right but the progress is slowed. I managed to finish the post comment management piece. There is still one bug to fix. The comment search function is wrong. Instead of find all comments of a specific post, it is returning all matching comments from all posts. This needs to be fixed. I wrote skeleton code for private messages management, but I need a mock page to enter the private messages. Then I can continue with the private messages management work. This would be easy enough to do. After this, I will be doing the guest management work. That would be easy.

Again, there is not much going on. The new tires for the BMW is working fine. And tax return is received. It filled a big hole in my accounts, which is nice. Anyways, The latest Home improvement I have done is that I installed a light socket in the basement next to the washer. I had to do twice to get it work. That is why I have picked my subject title "How Many Engineers It Take to Screw a Light Bulb".

The first try, the installation went OK, but when I turn the power on from the electric panel, the light just wouldn't turn on. I know I was rushed to get that installation going, and mostly likely it didn't work. Today, I uninstalled the socket and reversed the wiring. When I turned the power on, and as expected the light bulb is on. Surprise! I guess polarity do matter. Now that I know how to install light bulb socket, I can install some more for the ones that wouldn't work. Still I get the jitters when I do it. I don't like to be zapped.

Another thing I was doing pretty well is raising the mint plants. I have bought two pots of Spear mint and they are doing great. When I first got them, I thought they were bad because they seemed weak and dying. As soon as I got home, I pour some water and they went up like they are OK, and it are thriving ever since. I realized that I had to pour water every day for the plants and have at least 2 hours of sun light. Now the pots seem small for the two pants. I will move them to the garden when the temperature gets little higher.

I also bought the mint seeds, three bags. I put the first bag to use, in two batches. The first batch failed because I buried the seeds in the soil. That turned out to be the wrong way. They should be spread evenly on the top of the soil. Then watering the soil to make it moist, and have the germinating pot exposed to plenty of light and keep the temperature (in door) around 65 to 68F. In three weeks, they will germinating. At first, the plant is extremely small (smaller than a grain of sand). And it took a while to get to the size of sand grain. That is how big they are right now. I will keep you all posted as progress goes. So far, the germinating process is going well.

As for the personal project, I am working on getting the post comments management working. I have made a lot of progress. View post on the public site is working. And adding comments and display comment publicly is working as well. Gaming, I was still playing Call of Duty Infinite Warfare, and doing videos on it. And I also started playing Mass Effect: Andromeda. This game although crappy, is playable, and I decided to enjoy it. I was using both games as a way to improve my FPS skills so that I can do better on Cyberpunk 2077.

Overall, the past 10 days, my life is turning out to be quite exciting!

I didn't put any update out because there is not much to put out there. I was super focused on my project, this site, the upgrade. I have made a lot of progress recently. Like I said, I was super focused. After FFXV is completed again, focus was easy. I play games once a week, mostly on Satuday night for 2 hours at most. Then I spend most my time on my project. Progress can be made when there is time to work on it. I estimate later this year I can get a brand new version out.

Aside from this, I installed the water filtration system in the house, a softener and a reverse-osmosis system. The cost is about $4000. The BMW had a new set of tires, this, was an adventure itself. I ordered the tires at Costco. Then more than a month, they didn't came. I tried to cancel and it was almost un-cancellable. I had to call. Then it informed me the tires were shipped, and when I scheduled for the install service, just before I go, another email says my order was refunded. I ended up cancel the service appointment, went to another service provider and replaced the tires on the same day for $300 less.

At least, the tax return is filed. The return sum looks awesome. I am certainly looking forward to that. Anyways, I should get back to work with the project. This would be the last rewrite. When finished, I will pick another project to work on.

I started learning how to write single page application using latest Angular framework. It was much more complicated than it was four years ago. Not only I had to install the latest Angular, I had to install latest Bootstrap just to get some idea how to integrate everything together. And I was immediately in trouble. It took me a while to figure out how to add the bootstrap CSS file to the application, and how to add JQuery and bootstrap JS files into the application.

In the end, I finally figure it out, it has to add to the angular.json file. The next problem is that I had no idea how bootstrap 5 works. Yep. that is the version I added. And I had no idea how to use it. It looks so alien from bootstrap 3.4.x. This really proves my point. When you mix all the new stuff together, the learning curve would be many times more difficult than learning one thing at a time. This presents a challenge: how do I learn several things at the same time, absorb the knowledge, and retain them for future use.

The solution I will be trying is I learn one thing at a time, and well document what I learned, then I should be able to retain these knowledge for future use. I think. The problem is that technology evolve so fast that the notes I have take now might not be relevant a few years down the road. So there has to be some way to update the knowledge so that it can stay relevant. I have not figure that out yet.

I got great news. I have successfully backed up the database from the server, and restored on my dev machine. I got great plans for this operation. I will finish the development of the new blog engine. Then I will use these data to restore the database so that new application can use the existing data.

The problem I have face is that even I was able to restore the data, I was unable to save the new data with UTF8 encoding. That was in the morning. Later, when I checked, every table was using default encoding of latin1. I had to change all of them and solved the encoding issue.

There is really not much other updates. I finished FFXV on XBox One. I felt a load off my shoulder. I have leveled to 97, which made the finishing of the game really easy. That game was just ridiculous. After over leveling, the ending is so easy to beat. When I first got this game. It was so intimidating, I had to spent so much time, and I thought it was not worthy. It was actually a fun game to beat. Now it is completed, I will put game aside for a while and work on my project. I got my focus back.

Anyways, these are the update for the past few days, I did a lot of project work, this is the best news I had so far. I think the rewriting is going to paid off.

I have done it. Installed a new medicine cabinet. Here is the back story. The original medicine cabinet face mirror was damaged when I attempted to clean it. The surface that I thought was glass was in fact something very fragile. So it suffered extensive damage when I used a sponge for washing the dishes. There is no way of fixing that face mirror without some kind of replacement.

At first, I thought I can replace the door of the medicine cabinet with a new one from the same cabinet, I just purchase one, remove the door, and use it to replace the damage one. The problem is that I didn't save the receipts of the original one. I scouted the Home Depot and Lowes for similar one. Just couldn't find it. I had to play guess game. Finding one with the same size and hope it is it. If the new one does not fit. I will remove the old one and install the new.

I bought a new one on Thursday 3/3. And installed on 3/4. As expected, the new one has a door that did not fit the old one. The positions of the door hinges are different for the two. So much so for the idea of swapping the doors. I had to remove the whole thing and install the new cabinet. I had a lot of luck. For one, I had a old tarp cover that I can use to cover the wood floor. It was big enough to cover the floor for the dirty work. Next, it is the problem of removing the old cabinet. And it was super easy, unscrewed the top fixture and the cabinet can be removed.

Once removed, I was able to position the new one on the old bottom fixture, unfortunately, the problem came with one of the top fixture. I think I hit the stub with the screw and was not able to screw the nail all the way in. That was on the right side. The left side was screwed in OK. I had the two pieces of top fixtures from the old one. I used them to stabilize the new cabinet. I thought I was done. Then two hours later, I decided to fix it proper. I had to unscrew the old nail and use a shorter one. That solved the problem. The cabinet was sticking to the wall as it should.

Now I know how to install a medicine cabinet. Later that day, I finished the game Final Fantasy XV on XBox One. With the main character on level 97 and rest three on level 96, the ending is very easy to complete. That was a pretty good week.

I am almost finished Final Fantasy XV replay on XBox One. It was fun but also disruptive to normal life. I spent 3 nights a week playing it. Almost 9 hours a week. That is too much. I like to cut down to the old schedule, 2 days a week and max 6 hours. Yet I like the new schedule, give me a lot of time to relax. I am unable decide at this point. On the down side, I relax more, on the up side, I do a lot more work during the day, so that I can free up time at night and have fun.

I installed Cyberpunk 2077 on the new PS4. It took a couple hours. 45 minutes to install the base data. Then 4 hours to download and install the 1.51 patch. All that is straight forward and simple. And when I test drove the game for 10 minutes and it was good. The graphics is rough (I got a cheap and crappy TV), but it works as expected. And I thought the game was fun. There were dialogues, and driving vehicles. I think I will do some research first on this game and I am going to drive like crazy and see how much fun this is going to be.

There are like 8 different games lined up in my queue, and I have not install them. This is the scenario that there are so much fun and not enough time. Heh Heh...

Finally, I ordered a used PS4 Pro for $350 (a little steeper than before social mess). And it arrived yesterday. When I ordered, I picked one that has no accessories (no power cord, no controller, and no HDMI cables). The shipment came within two days. And all the accessories are available. This is a pleasant surprise.

I have been thinking of buy a PS4 Pro for a while. It started when I saw the terrible graphic rendering of FFXV on PS4 slim. The outcome is not as good as on XBox One S. And I bought a bunch of new games. One of them being Cyberpunk 2077. This particular game is very trouble some. After FFXV on XBox One, I will try install this game and all the updates and see if I can play it. There is a lot of bugs which I hope a beefier system might mitigate some.

I am very thankful to the declutter service. The price is low, the hardware is high quality and delivery is very quick. Very happy with this purchase. Recently, there is a lot of cash outflow and I will not be worrying about that. I am just going to be the happiest kids of this planet!

There is not much going on recently. I finished the CodeProject tutorial and it was posted. While I was doing that I recorded a video showing how the sample application works. It was nice. With this new laptop, recording desktop activity was very easy.

I did have the 2nd minor surgery recently. It was not as bad as the 1st one. I can move the mouth and eat some more solid food. Not like the last time. The 2nd day is still tough, having a headache, and some burning up. But I was fine after 3PM.

Still playing the game FFXV. I am at level 84 and will soon be over level 85. I was thinking of getting to Level 90 and finish the main story line. Still posting videos.

Finally, I was trying to get an Android emulator. I like to install some games on it. The only one I was able to get to work is Android-x86 on my QEMU emulator. Unfortunately it runs rather slow and dies unexpectedly. Not sure what was happening. It is fun trying to figure things out. Since this is not working. I will put it on hold for now.

I am currently working on the memo features for the new website.