Not much to report on here. Things are pretty quiet for a change.

I cleaned up the fallen branches (from our blizzards) and have been trimming back our trees. I have much more trimming to do before I am satisfied. Lori jokes that when I’m finished, there will be three toothpicks out front. I would, but my ladder isn’t that tall.

The only real drama we had happened this past Sunday afternoon. I was outside trimming the trees. Matthew and Emily were out with me. During our playing or while we were cleaning up, someone must have knocked over the smaller gas can (which is a gas/oil mixture). We didn’t notice it for a little while. About 90 minutes later, I noticed that I smelled gasoline in the house. I went into the garage and noticed that the smaller gas can was on it’s side and had leaked most of the contents onto the ground. The gas took a path right into a crack in the driveway next to the house. I cleaned up what I could (with sawdust from the chainsaw).

Our house really started to smell like gas. We had to open windows and burn candles. Only about 3/4 of a gallon of gas leaked out, but it really stunk up the house. The worst was in the basement. It smelled really bad down there. That crack in the driveway must lead directly into our basement.

Most of the smell was gone yesterday. The basement still has a distinct gasoline smell. But I think that will fade over the next few days. The rest of the house smells almost normal again (as of yesterday).

I’ll have to find a better place in the garage for the gas cans. When we get some time outside, we’ll have to clear out the garage and reorganize some things.

This is Alesist’s photo (from flickr).

Last week I saw someone post an image online like the one above. It’s the results of a mouse path tracking program (IOGraphica). The program tracks your mouse movement (or non-movement) and makes a pretty picture.

I decided to give it a shot and see what happens. The results are captured in the image above. This image shows my mouse path over about 7 hours of work.

The black dots (large and small) are where I left the mouse sit. The larger the dot, the longer I let it sit. The lines are the tracks that my mouse took.

I’ll probably never run the program again, but it was a neat experiment.

Our dog loves to catch snowballs in the snow. This video shows some of that.

Ah, Summertime. We miss you.

We’re supposed to get 8+ more inches of snow this Thursday. I’m looking forward to the summertime.  I wonder if they will add to the snow totals before Thursday gets here.

I am really tired of the snow, aren’t you?

This is the life of roof heating tape. Isn’t this awesome? No more ice dam!

Here is some grainy video from my iPhone 3G (using Qik). You’re looking at the snow in our front yard. Enjoy.

This is our mailbox while the latest blizzard was still going on. The snow is deeper now, but our mailbox has been dug out. Our number on the back is broken though. I need to fix that.

We were either like Titanic, taking on water (and sinking). Or I found the Hoover Dam on the roof. Which works better for you?

Around 3:00 PM yesterday Lori told me that our front window was leaking into the living room. When I got home, I worked on getting the ice off of our overhang out front. I got a lot off of the front, but not all of it. Later, we noticed that the water was still pouring in. It was crazy how much we had caught in buckets. We just thought that the water was still coming in through the front.

Around midnight, we heard a dripping sound in out bedroom. It was the water dripping into our window and freezing on the bottom. It was about to overflow (or maybe it did). We cleaned it out and went to bed.

I won’t bore you with all of the details, but we managed to get water (and water spots) in our bedroom, Ryan’s bedroom, our bathroom, the living room, the playroom and even some water in the basement. The water was coming in all over the front of our house.

At 7:00 AM, I was up on a ladder (to the top roof) trying to break the ice dams. I broke about four or five open. There was about a gallon of water sitting in each one. Around noon, I ran out to a hardware store and picked up some roof heating tape/cable (EasyHeat). It took a few hours to finish up, but I got the rest of the ice off of the roof and installed the roof heating tape.

I guess we’ll find out in a few days how well I did with the de-icing and roof heat tape installation. All I know is that my feet hurt (from standing on the ladder) and I want Summer to start.

Image by andrewcparnell.

We had a heck of a snow storm over the weekend. We were originally supposed to get 10 - 14 inches of snow. When the storm was over, we were left with about 22 - 24 inches of snow.

I spent most of Saturday shoveling. I shoveled a place for the dog to do her business. I shoveled out both cars. I also shoveled out a place for the trashcans and roughly three parking spots on the street. I also shoveled the back deck off.

I even got the ladder out and cleared some of the snow from our roof. I have been worried about getting an ice dam. We haven’t got one yet, but I’d rather be safe than sorry. I think the insulation in our attic is a little old and may not be as effective as it used to be.

I guess the bad news is that we are getting more snow tomorrow afternoon. There seem to be two different reports. One report says that this next storm will dump an additional 6 - 12 inches of snow on us. The other report says that we should expect 1 - 2 feet of additional snow. Ugh. I’d rather have less snow than more.

The kids will like it though.

LearnIt 1.2 was approved by Apple in the Apple iTunes App Store yesterday. This update is a big one because of one significant item. It includes an In App Purchase item.

The In App Purchase available is called Barnyard Animals and costs $0.99. It includes 12 barnyard animal flashcards. LearnIt 1.2 also includes another free module called Shapes. Shapes includes 9 shape flashcards.

In App Purchase (or Downloadable Content) has been something that I promised to add to LearnIt when the application was first released. It took about 6 months of time for me to get the feature in there, but it’s there now.

Apple initially rejected this update. But they rejected it because I hadn’t submitted the In App Purchase for review. I thought that I could submit the In App Purchase after LearnIt was approved by Apple. It turns out that you have to submit the In App Purchase first (or at the same time). Apple was nice enough to send me an email to let me know this. They were also nice enough to allow me to reply to the email to get the approval moving again. So, thanks Apple!

If you own LearnIt, please help support me and check out the In App Purchase. If you don’t own LearnIt, please purchase both. :)

Original Source: http://devblog.ryangrier.com/