Category Archives: Personal

The boring stuff that happens in my life.

Recipe: Moroccan Chicken with Rice

By Dougal | Published: January 22, 2010

Let’s take a break from the tech talk, and I’ll share a recipe with you. No, not a programming recipe, but the food kind. Yes, sometimes I cook. I generally like cooking, though I’m not so fond of cleaning up the mess afterward. Recently, we had some split chicken breasts that we needed to cook up. I thought about just doing a standard baked chicken, but I wanted something a little. different. After perusing a selection of chicken recipes on SimplyRecipes.com, and reviewing the ingredients we had on hand, I decided to try combining ideas from two different recipes: Moroccan Chicken with Lemon and Olives and Chicken and Rice Casserole.

In our case, I was cooking for seven people (myself, my wife, her parents, and our three kids). [...]

Posted in Personal | Tagged chicken, cooking, delicious, Food, hrecipe, mediterranean, medium-difficulty, Microformats, middle-eastern, moroccan, recipes | 10 Comments

Merry Christmas!

By Dougal | Published: December 24, 2009

I had hoped to post about some things before things got too hectic, but that didn’t happen. But I wanted to at least wish everybody a Merry Christmas (or which ever holiday variant you prefer), and a Happy New Year!

Posted in Personal | Tagged Christmas, Holidays, new years | 3 Comments

Where’s Waldo?

By Dougal | Published: April 25, 2009

Or, more to the point, where’s Dougal?

Sorry about the long silence here. After our son got out of the hospital from his pneumonia, he had four weeks of therapy before he returned to regular school. I had to drive across town to drop him off and pick him up, which ate up around 3 hours of each day when all was said and done. I’ve also tried to devote some time to taking care of some tasks around the house before I start my new job.

MailChimp Head New job, you say? Yup. [...]

Also posted in WordPress | Tagged drupal, Family, Jobs, mailchimp, WordPress | 22 Comments

There’s no place like…

By Dougal | Published: March 2, 2009

For anyone who wasn’t already aware, my wife and I spent the last two weeks in the hospital with our son, Jamie, who had pneumonia. Scary stuff, that pneumonia. I hope nobody else we know ever gets it. Anyhow, Susan and I pretty much lived at the hospital the whole time Jamie was there, though we did manage to get some work done remotely, and Suze put in some face-time at her office here and there.

Jamie was released on Friday afternoon, and we were certainly glad to get home. It’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever get caught up on sleep (those fold-out chair/bed things are not the least bit comfortable, and nurses came in and out of the room every few hours during the night). [...]

Posted in Personal | Tagged bleah, hospital, jamie, Kids, pneumonia | 5 Comments

My day as a tag cloud

By Dougal | Published: February 13, 2009

If I could record all the phrases I said in a typical day, and turn it into a tag cloud, it would probably look something like this:

Jamie stop DVD clean up come back hold your horses work not right now lunch toys Suze beautiful boo-boo dog cat snack dammit turkey kicking Mickey Mouse Clubhouse cute pick up Mary hitting smart Claire movie clothes stay out in a minute don’t nap sweetheart

What would yours look like?

Posted in Personal | Tagged Family, Kids, tag cloud, Tags | 7 Comments

It’s Time for Some Changes

By Dougal | Published: October 13, 2008

I’ve been saying for years that I want to redesign this site, but I still haven’t made many substantive changes. One of my favorite sayings is, “The cobbler’s children oft go without shoes.” It certainly applies to this site, as I spend a lot of time doing web development, studying programming, CSS techniques, SEO, user interfaces, and many other related disciplines that make up this craft. [...]

Also posted in Announcements, WordPress | Tagged app, CSS, Design, Lifestream, plugin, Plugins, Programming, SEO, Themes, WordPress | 13 Comments

Knee Update – Week 7

By Dougal | Published: August 27, 2008

It’s been seven weeks since my knee surgery. I can now officially put my full weight on my right leg. Unofficially, I’ve already been walking around without crutches for most of the past week. When I had my six-week checkup with the surgeon, I asked when I could drive a car on my own instead of having to get my family members to drive me to appointments. He said “whenever you feel like you can,” so I did.

The important thing about the six-week checkup last week was that it marked the point that my meniscus repairs are healed enough for me to start bending my knee past 90 degrees. [...]

Posted in Personal | Tagged acl, diet, Exercise, Family, healing, knee, surgery, therapy, Weight, weight loss | 1 Comment

Macbook + Coffee = Bad

By Dougal | Published: August 12, 2008

Everybody knows that you shouldn’t keep beverages too close to the computer, right? The reason is because eventually, your toddler is going to run up to give you a big hug before she leaves for daycare, and is going to bump your leg. Your leg, in turn, is going to bump the TV tray where you set your coffee cup. The cup is going to tip over and spill several ounces of coffee directly onto the keyboard of your Macbook. And as a consequence, the Macbook is going to cease to function.

Yes, that’s what happened here at Castle Campbell last Friday morning. I tried to disconnect power and battery as quickly as possible, tried using a blowdryer on it, sat it out in direct sunlight for about an hour, and continued to let it air out for quite a while after that. [...]

Also posted in Hardware, Linux, Operating Systems, Software, Tech | Tagged Apple, Coffee, Hardware, Linux, mac, macbook, metacity, repair, Ubuntu, window managers, xfce, xfce4 | 15 Comments

Knee Update – Day 5

By Dougal | Published: July 16, 2008

I think I’m in the “it gets worse before it gets better” phase of recovery from my knee surgery. Maybe I just overdid things yesterday (visited our chiropractor and went out to a restaurant for dinner). Today I had a headache all day and my stomach has felt just a little off — not naseous, but not hungry. Of course, part of my trouble might be lack of sleep. I can’t move around like normal, and anytime I need to move my leg in the slightest, I wake up. It’s taken its toll on me, and I wound up conking out for a good portion of the day.

But, I still try to do the exercises that the physical therapist showed me. [...]

Posted in Personal | Tagged acl, Family, healing, knee, surgery, therapy | 7 Comments

Knee Surgery

By Dougal | Published: July 12, 2008

About 16 or 17 years ago, I injured my knee in a job-related incident. Being young and stupid, and not really understanding insurance and workers compensation very well, I never got around to doing anything about it, beyond using crutches for a while until I could walk without them again. My doctor at the time recommended that I get it scoped for a better look at what the damage was, but like I said, I was young and stupid, and so I put it off.

As a result, over the years my knee has mostly been okay, but occassionally it would “lock up”, requiring me to do odd manipulations of my knee joint to “unlock” it. [...]