http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/site/index/ en tallmann@gmail.com Copyright 2008 2008-07-16T00:30:00-06:00 http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/usps_united_states_parcel_stealers/ http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/usps_united_states_parcel_stealers/#When:00:30:00Z In the continuing saga of our tax return, I’ve been checking the status of our refund online, each time coming to the same result: “We don’t know what’s going on. Please call 1-800-829-0582 ext. 462 and give the operator reference number 1101.” A few weeks ago, I called the magic number only to get “Due to the volume of calls for this issue, please try back another day”. Seriously?!? I was more than willing to sit on hold for an hour or more (that’s what cell phone speaker phone is for) to get an intelligent answer. Tonight, I finally got the nerve up to call back. After sitting on hold for 30 minutes, I got through to a human being (and a pleasant one to boot!). I gave her my info, listened to the click-click-click of some old keyboard from 1984, and got my answer: “We have absolutely no record of your return”. Again, seriously?!?!? I stuck our return (albeit, unsigned) in the big bin at the post office along with many other people on April 15th. How can there be no record? That was when I googled “lost mail” and found other people who shared my sentiment for our beloved USPS (hereafter United States Parcel Stealers). The good news is that the lady on the other end said, I could just re-sign a copy of my return (or just sign), and drop it in the mail (you better believe I’m getting delivery confirmation stamped on that sucker). Still, how frustrating. Tomorrow’s Challenge: See how much interest I can get from the IRS. Personal 2008-07-16T00:30:00-06:00 http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/custom_404_search_page_with_php_and_apache/ http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/custom_404_search_page_with_php_and_apache/#When:19:59:01Z Apache Config: ErrorDocument 404 /path/to/some/script.php In your php search script: Read $_SERVER[’REDIRECT_URL’] or $_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’] to get the original request that triggered the 404 and perform your search on that. This will return a 404 to the user-agent, but for FF, IE, and Safari, they will display the custom 404 page as long as the content-length is greater that 512 bytes. Some people will tell you to do some crazy mod_rewriting and 302 redirect to a script that does your search. The with that method is that you aren’t returning a 404 to the user-agent. The benefit is trounced by the added overhead of the server returning a result forcing the browser to make a second request. The end result is essentially the same. While a user-agent is not forced to display the custom content from a 404, most do. Of course, if you’re using a decent framework, there’s no such thing as 404’s and you handle exceptions anyways, right? Comment if you must Nate PHP, Software 2008-06-05T19:59:01-06:00 http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/cognizant_reckoning/ http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/cognizant_reckoning/#When:18:26:00Z Mercy is not a gift I have been known for. On the contrary, I can be quite harsh and brash. This black-and-white, dogmatic, “I’m right; You’re wrong” mentality has proven me guilty of hunting for specks of sawdust despite my own grave shortcomings on several occasions. I’ve crucified people I called my friends and irreparably damaged relationships. The stench of arrogance and disdain wafted heavily towards any thoughtful observer. My hypocrisy was unchallenged for years. The first twenty years of my life were, spiritually speaking, unremarkable. Nothing to be seen here. Even though I had grown up in “church” (or some feeble mockery of it) and “walked the aisle” at the tender age of 8 years old, there was absolutely no evidence of true life. I was great at fooling people (or maybe no one just spoke up). My peers looked to me as a great role model and my mentors and teachers looked to me as a shining example of a great church-ed product. How sad the condition of my heart though! In the busy-ness of my work (a product of my pride), I never let slip just how peccant and decrepit I was. But 2004 was the year when all of that changed. Beginning with some painful yet refreshing events, God began His work of consuming and transforming my heart. There was most definitely a dramatic (and yes, overnight!) change in my life. My life as a person saved by grace (after all, no earthly power could turn me from depravity to light) had begun. For the next three and a half years, I grew in rectitude and maturity (though some might doubt ). So here we are in May of 2008. I’m married (an incredible and incredibly enlightening experience to say the least), no longer in school or of school age, and at the beginning of what you might call “real life”. I say all of that to say this, although my life was transformed almost four years ago, I’m still (and will always be) developing. My mercy (or lack thereof) is undergoing somewhat of a construction phase, and I find that my heart increasingly pangs when I encounter suffering, lostness, or a searching soul. Now more than ever, a great urgency is working deep inside. Firstly, and most importantly, my love for Jesus and the desire to obey Him, and secondly, the thought of a world full of 6.6+ billion people, most of whom don’t know know true peace and love that only comes through Jesus are the fuel feeding this burning in my soul. For the last several months, and even more in the past month or so, my heart has been heavy. I don’t know what it means or where it leads, but I do know that I’ve felt this kind of burden before (preceding my move from Cookeville back to Murfreesboro, both times I was led to Asia, the start of my relationship with Lacy (now my wonderful wife), etc). Lacy and I are young, (relatively) free, and energetic to be slaves to Jesus Christ. As I said before, I don’t know where this leads, but if anyone is still reading this, I would ask a favor of you. If you have a relationship with Jesus, I ask that you just pray. Pray for us; pray for yourself; pray for harvest. If you don’t have a relationship with Jesus, then I ask you to call or email me (615-397-0339 or tallmann@gmail.com). Colossians 4:2,3 Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with an attitude of thanksgiving; praying at the same time for us as well, that God will open up to us a door for the word, so that we may speak forth the mystery of Christ, for which I have also been imprisoned; John 4:35 “Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are white for harvest.” Personal 2008-05-13T18:26:00-06:00 http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/what_if_i_forget_to_sign_my_tax_return/ http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/what_if_i_forget_to_sign_my_tax_return/#When:01:01:00Z But first… This woman is crazy! Lacy and I like to watch American Idol, and we both agree that Paula Abdul is nutters. She never has anything of any substance to say: “Oh, I just gotta say how pretty you look tonight!” In other news… I had my paper return in my adequate manilla folder, the address for the Internal Revenue Service, an envelope, and my $2.50 pen (what can I say? I like nice-writing pens!). While I was addressing the envelope, I was thinking, “I really need to go ahead and sign this thing while I’m thinking about it.” Lacy was in the bathroom brushing her teeth though, so I figured I’d wait for her to get done then we could just sign it at the same time. Now the envelope was a standard size envelope while the W-2’s are kind of funky shaped. After I addressed the envelope, I got a little distracted while thinking about how I was going to fold the W-2’s in the least awkward way to make them fit in the envelope. I was so happy when everything fit perfectly inside! I licked the envelope with care so as not to wet it too much, then sealed the envelope completely. To make a long story short, as soon as I dropped my envelope into the box, I knew I forgot to sign the stupid thing. There’s no way I’m getting it back now so we just came home. I googled around for it a little bit but didn’t see anything right away that would answer my question, “What if I forget to sign my tax return?” I’m on hold with the IRS right now (1-800-829-1040 just in case you want to know what number to stay away from). At first I thought I would just get a quick answer about what to do, but after an hour of listening to Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube”, it has become an excersise in perseverance. Update: The guy that finally answered (1:07 on hold) told me that there’s nothing I can do. I have to wait for the IRS to send me a letter back saying they rejected my return, then I can sign the bloody paper and give it back to them. I guess our money will just have to wait for a while longer. 2008-04-16T01:01:00-06:00 http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/happy_css_naked_day/ http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/happy_css_naked_day/#When:15:57:00Z Happy CSS Naked Day! If you are reading this on my site and not through a feed reader, you will notice that the pretty design elements are totally gone. April 9th, 2008 is CSS Naked Day. The creator of CSS Naked Day describes the event, “The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure...” I’m always looking for a reason to strip, so that’ll do! In other new, I’ve downgraded back to Firefox 3 Beta 4. I couldn’t take the crashing over and over and over again. Watching the Mozillazine forums, it looks like other people are not to happy with this latest release either. More later, Nate Update: I just realized my site looks pretty good with no CSS. 2008-04-09T15:57:00-06:00 http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/firefox_beta_woes/ http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/firefox_beta_woes/#When:15:37:00Z Soooo… I love Firefox. Let me just get that out of the way. On that note, FF3b5 has got to change. A few months ago, I switched to FF3b3. It was ok. Still several glitches making it unusable in production. Then FF3b4 came out. *Cue angels singing* It was great! I actually started using it in production (made possible by switching to betas of my extensions (thinking of you, Firebug)). Memory usage was down significantly. Speed was up substantially. There were a few bugs, but nothing to write home about (namely, Gmail Subject lines going to new line after email label). I’ve used FF3b4 for several weeks and sang its praises to many-a-developer.. Then came the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog… I mean, Firefox 3 Beta 5. 2008-04-04T15:37:00-06:00 http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/obligatory_april_fools_recap/ http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/obligatory_april_fools_recap/#When:03:29:01Z Ok, so I’ve watched today’s April Fools junk along with everyone else and was mostly dissapointed. Here’s a recap of the few I enjoyed: XKCD redirected to Questionable Content which pointed to Dinosaur Comics which pointed back to XKCD. I enjoy XKCD and Dinosaur Comics so I thought it moderately enjoyable. Matt Cutts (one of my favorite reads), posted that his iphone, connected to some external interface for SATA drives, has a SATA interface and reads just like an external storage device. Of all the April Fools jokes, this was the most believable, which is the point of April Fools… right? ThinkGeek has always been a good stop on April Fools day. (Ok, that last one is kind of gross). YouTube RickRolled about 6 million people. +1 for playing on a much overplayed internet fad. -6 million just because On a side note, I think it would have been great for The Onion to post real news for the day. Anyways, off to bed. Got a funeral to go to tomorrow. --Nate News, Personal 2008-04-02T03:29:01-06:00 http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/time_to_update/ http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/time_to_update/#When:05:33:00Z Well, now that I have a first comment, I know that someone must read this thing, so I’m inclined to update a little more Several projects at work converged at once with due dates in the same week (Perfect Storm anyone?). This means a few more late nights and early mornings. Today wasn’t too bad though. My wife (wow I love saying that!), was babysitting in Franklin tonight until 12:30am, so I wasn’t missed at home. My inlaws (Lacy’s mother, sister, and brother), came to stay with us on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. It was very much fun to have them here playing games, watching movies, catching up on conversation, etc. We all enjoyed some much needed family time. They left on Monday after shopping with Lacy for a few hours (Lacy’s on spring break this week). Speaking of Lacy… she’s home Gotta go. 2008-03-26T05:33:00-06:00 http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/new_old_site/ http://www.natetallman.com/index.php/blog/new_old_site/#When:02:11:00Z Here we go again… I’m starting blogging again. Several times a day, I catch myself thinking, “Man, I wish I would write about _________”, or “I really need to log _________ so I don’t forget”. Here it is. It’ll probably be boring to most of you (whoever “you” are). Yes, I know that most of the links on the site don’t work (I’m working on it). You’ll be able to leave comments if you want to (soon). Topics covered (in no particular order): My walk (Spirituality) Family (Life with my INCREDIBLE wife ) Work (PHP, CI, and general Linux admin) Hobbies (Pretty much the same as work) Whatever else I’m feeling (Politics, Finances, and other blech) --Nate Blogging, Personal 2008-03-19T02:11:00-06:00