a personal blog, writing just for fun

Posts, ordered by date descending

  • Fuel purchases for an IS 300

    2020 october 25, 4:40p

    If your car has a 17.5 gal tank, how much fuel do you actually buy?

  • So long, MR2

    2020 october 24, 6:55p

    Well, I said goodbye to my lil’ MR2 recently.

  • Prototype loops in Io

    2020 october 24, 6:44p

    The default nature of Io is that, if you follow the prototypes up from the Lobby, you come back to the Lobby.

  • Economics of eating pasta

    2020 october 23, 6:51p

    I certainly have been eating a lot of pasta, so I wonder: is anything cheaper? Or is it expensive, or what?

  • De Cecco pasta

    2020 october 20, 7:38p

    De Cecco pasta is surprisingly good, really good. I can’t remember a better pasta.

  • Pasta shapes to try

    2020 october 18, 8:25p

    I like my penne and my linguine, but I wonder what other pastas I should try.

  • Quartz wristwatch accuracy

    2020 october 18, 1:54p

    I have a quartz watch that I set in 2018 and just reset today, after 2 years of drift.

  • Io in 10 minutes

    2020 october 18, 10:50a

    I try (not very well) to explain Io, a small language, a la X in Y minutes, as much as I know anyway

  • Compact identification via timestamping

    2020 october 15, 7:52p

    If I really wanted to compact my standard yyyy-mm-dd file.avi notation / nomenclature, how might could I do it?

  • Clock time calendar

    2020 october 14, 8:18p

    Why doesn’t anyone / has anyone used base-60 “clock time” beyond the 12/24-hour modulus we usually think about? 59:59:59:59 and so on.

  • Software versioning I like

    2020 october 13, 8:42p

    I like semi-annual release cycles. 2020a, 2020b. 2021a, 2021b. Nice, simple. Dates, too.

  • Five new holidays

    2020 october 12, 4:17p

    We should get five more holidays.

  • Pizza combinations

    2020 october 10, 6:42p

    Long live the 2-topping L / XL.

  • More interactive compilers

    2020 october 10, 1:17p

    I sometimes wish software compilers wrote back significant info, directly into the file.

  • Making sub-8:00

    2020 october 03, 4:33p

    I made it to sub-8:00! I have never been more proud of a 2 Km pull.

  • Sustainable outcomes in identity theft

    2020 october 02, 4:59p

    So news comes out today saying hackers dump personal info on freaking high schoolers in Las Vegas who did nothing but live in a district whose online ops got hacked.

  • Infix LISP

    2020 september 05, 9:12p

    Is it possible to have a LISP that doesn’t use strictly prefix (+ x y z) but sometimes (x choose y) infix-style expressions?

  • Economics of a new credit card

    2020 september 05, 8:37p

    I got a new credit card offer in the mail today: should I sign up?

  • Erg steady, progress upon progress

    2020 september 05, 6:30p

    Wow, I just rowed a 6 Km personal best today, and was shocked to find out my split beat my recent and hard-fought 5 Km personal best.

  • Human 0-60

    2020 september 03, 7:40p

    What would it take for a human, like me, to accelerate oneself to 60 mph? AKA 88 feet per second?

  • Io, a curious language

    2020 august 30, 10:57p

    I re-learned some Io this past weekend.

  • 18 weeks, 1 Mm

    2020 august 30, 10:08p

    Well, I did it. I erg’d 1 Mm in 18 weeks.

  • More metric unit sizes

    2020 august 16, 9:34p

    I still root for metric prefixes over language-based numbers (kilogram over one thousand grams, even megameter over one thousand kilometers).

  • Jekyll bash script helper functions

    2020 august 14, 4:28p

    Same functions as before, but modified slightly.

  • Bloodborne bosses, ranked

    2020 july 28, 11:11a

    I’ve now, years after starting, beaten most all of the bosses in Bloodborne.

  • Replacing the receiver

    2020 july 26, 2:05p

    My receiver went out the other day. RIP my Pioneer. Seven years, almost.

  • Fixing the laptop, cost estimates

    2020 july 25, 9:35a

    My laptop is in dire straits.

  • 2 Mm

    2020 july 12, 3:47p

    I hit 2 Mm on the erg yesterday. 2,000 Km.

  • Electric Mini

    2020 july 12, 11:32a

    Mini is releasing an all-electric car. Interesting.

  • Upgrading the iPhone 7

    2020 july 11, 9:56p

    I think it may be time to upgrade my iPhone. The camera is starting to not work sometimes.

  • Average waffle mix

    2020 june 28, 8:57p

    I have just one box of Aunt Jemima pancake mix left. It’s time to say goodbye.

  • Zig, cool stuff

    2020 june 24, 3:55p

    I watched a couple youtube videos on Zig and I am impressed.

  • Goldman Sans

    2020 june 24, 3:42p

    I really like this font.

  • Safari & font-family

    2020 june 22, 7:18p

    I don’t quite know what’s changed in Safari since I last used it (Firefox works, well, great), but it doesn’t seem to render many fonts.

  • Erg workouts, replanned

    2020 june 21, 10:28p

    I can definitely say I’m more comfortable erging longer pieces (“steady state”).

  • Erging my first half-marathon

    2020 june 21, 6:19p

    I did it, yesterday. I erged 21.097 Km in 1:49:51. Woo hoo!

  • Customizing Jekyll CSS Styling

    2020 june 18, 6:33p

    I’m not sure if I never knew this, or if I had just forgotten, but I re-learned how Jekyll sets up theme customization.

  • More progress through volume

    2020 june 17, 8:34p

    I put down another personal best on the erg today.

  • Progress through volume

    2020 june 13, 5:40p

    So I didn’t really mean to, but I set a new 5 Km personal best today.

  • What even is PHP

    2020 june 10, 7:40p

    That’s what I’m wondering, these days.

  • Setting up MediaWiki

    2020 june 07, 2:51p

    I set up MediaWiki yesterday: it was super easy and it seems super useful!

  • Would it were so simple: web applications

    2020 may 30, 4:03p

    I miss the simplicity of web programming, back when performance was not king.

  • Erg season 2020 ends

    2020 april 30, 3:37p

    Well, I did it.

  • Bash tips for Jekyll blogging

    2020 april 26, 1:46p

    These bash functions are useful so you can just drop into a terminal and hit new-post and basically be off..

  • Rebooting the blog again

    2020 april 24, 7:38p

    I kind of miss the default Jekyll theme, and want to uncomplicate my blog setup. Maybe that’s a bad idea.

  • $100 of groceries

    2020 april 24, 7:33p

    I went to Kroger today, and I spent almost exactly $100.

  • Last week of erg season 2020

    2020 april 22, 7:25p

    Last full week of erg.

  • End of erg season 2020

    2020 april 14, 6:41p

    Well, it’s mid-April. All this coronavirus shit is weirding up the whole universe in a horrible way, it would seem, but the erging continues.

  • Hello World in x64 Assembler

    2020 january 03, 6:29p

    I should really brush up on this stuff.. this is some old junk I found laying around. I wish I could write assembler as well as I could in 2016. Maybe a resolution for 2020?

  • Oil Change From Memory

    2020 january 03, 12:37p

    I did an oil change a couple days ago. I usually get a few steps out of order. I thought I’d try writing down the steps, in order, to see if I could.

  • Understanding Double Clutching

    2020 january 01, 9:25a

    I’m coming up to One Year of driving a stickshift.

  • The Double Progress Bar

    2019 december 31, 6:57p

    You know what I miss?

  • Mono CD ripping/burning in OS X

    2019 december 31, 2:27p

    I know this is The End Of CDs, but here’s a quick rundown on how to rip a CD in OS X, mix the stereo down to mono, then burn it back to a blank CD.

  • Some Fragrance Ingredients

    2019 december 27, 8:27a

    Here are some ingredients lists (!?) found on the bottom of cologne boxes:

  • The Absurdity of English Units

    2019 december 27, 7:04a

    I think it speaks for itself; some of these are now historical.

  • Some Fragrances

    2019 december 26, 1:08p

    Outliers first, favorites last. It might sound bad if I say something smells like soap but none of these are bad, except the first one.

  • I Hate Content Security Policy

    2019 december 26, 8:38a

    I’m trying to add MathJax to my site, either via CDN or dumping it in static/ or whatever.

  • Unicode Fractions

    2019 december 25, 6:07p

    This is for my reference, helpful when writing down recipes in plain text.

  • The Average Bundt Cake

    2019 december 25, 5:51p

    I’ve written down a few recipes for Bundt cakes recently, it’s something I want to try.

  • Regarding Shoe Sizes

    2019 december 24, 11:33a

    I don’t really know what to believe when it comes to shoe sizes.

  • MathJax is So Easy to Install

    2019 december 23, 10:12a

    (How Easy? So Easy)

  • Meal Prep Frozen Sandwiches

    2019 december 22, 11:16p

    I’m a bit slow on the uptake when it comes to meal prep, making food ahead of time.

  • Web Fonts in 2019

    2019 december 22, 7:52p

    Web fonts are still the best fonts.

  • Array Languages Are Hard to Read

    2019 december 22, 8:37a

    This is not exactly a shocker.

  • Password Entropy, Part II

    2019 november 21, 3:56p

    Passwords are, generally speaking, expensive to crack.

  • Programming the Erg

    2019 november 20, 5:17p

    This is a post about hitting the buttons on the erg according to certain “cheat codes” to start specific workouts. There’s not much to it.

  • A Slightly Different Metric

    2019 november 18, 12:50p

    If we don’t use a metric system based on feet, kilofeet, millifeet, &c, then maybe we could use one based on miles, millimiles, .. ?

  • Hello Syncthing

    2019 november 13, 9:28p

    I’m not sure what happened to BT Sync / Resilio Sync / &c, but it’s time for me to try something else. I just can’t get it working on Linux.

  • Arms-Only Erg

    2019 november 06, 4:34p

    I ran an experiment, to prove something I’ve heard but never confirmed to what degree:

  • Writing a GIF by Hand

    2019 october 30, 5:50p

    Suppose you’ve got a blog.

  • Enter the Kemper

    2019 october 29, 6:32p

    I turned on my Kemper Head for the first time today.

  • Actual Amps Used

    2019 october 26, 8:20p

    To the best of my knowledge, the following guitarists (all favorites..) used the following amps:

  • A SQL Statement

    2019 october 16, 3:44p

    In essence, (and in order)

  • Halfway to Metric

    2019 october 10, 10:18p

    I have an idea that will help transition America to the metric system.

  • Counting in Postgresql

    2019 september 26, 4:01p

    I have a table numbers (n, ..) that I want to get the count of.

  • Simple Password Entropy

    2019 september 22, 9:44p

    Passwords are easy to generate, easy to record.. but still nobody likes 45-character passwords!

  • Redoing My Content Security Policy

    2019 september 22, 12:52p

    In my effort to benchmark inlining vs linking the CSS on this blog, I noticed I had errors in my JS console pulling up my blog in production.

  • CSS Inlining vs Linking

    2019 september 19, 10:51p

    I like to serve this site in a fast way, not doing anything hugely dumb.

  • Optimizing CSS readability versus size

    2019 september 18, 5:22p

    Editing minified source code sucks.

  • Some Favorite Math Theorems

    2019 september 16, 8:58p

    These are just nice things to think about. I don’t know why, but some of them are just nice.

  • Erg Splits Chart

    2019 august 26, 10:11a
    split power 1 Km 2 Km 5 Km 6 Km 10 Km
    01:50/- 263.0 W 03:40 07:20 18:20 22:00 36:40
    01:52/- 249.1 W 03:44 07:28 18:40 22:24 37:20
    01:54/- 236.2 W 03:48 07:36 19:00 22:48 38:00
    01:56/- 224.2 W 03:52 07:44 19:20 23:12 38:40
    01:58/- 213.0 W 03:56 07:52 19:40 23:36 39:20
    02:00/- 202.5 W 04:00 08:00 20:00 24:00 40:00
    02:02/- 192.7 W 04:04 08:08 20:20 24:24 40:40
    02:04/- 183.6 W 04:08 08:16 20:40 24:48 41:20
    02:06/- 175.0 W 04:12 08:24 21:00 25:12 42:00
    02:08/- 166.9 W 04:16 08:32 21:20 25:36 42:40
    02:10/- 159.3 W 04:20 08:40 21:40 26:00 43:20
    02:12/- 152.2 W 04:24 08:48 22:00 26:24 44:00
    02:14/- 145.5 W 04:28 08:56 22:20 26:48 44:40
    02:16/- 139.1 W 04:32 09:04 22:40 27:12 45:20
    02:18/- 133.2 W 04:36 09:12 23:00 27:36 46:00
    02:20/- 127.6 W 04:40 09:20 23:20 28:00 46:40
    02:22/- 122.2 W 04:44 09:28 23:40 28:24 47:20
    02:24/- 117.2 W 04:48 09:36 24:00 28:48 48:00
    02:26/- 112.5 W 04:52 09:44 24:20 29:12 48:40
    02:28/- 108.0 W 04:56 09:52 24:40 29:36 49:20
    02:30/- 103.7 W 05:00 10:00 25:00 30:00 50:00
    02:32/- 99.7 W 05:04 10:08 25:20 30:24 50:40
    02:34/- 95.8 W 05:08 10:16 25:40 30:48 51:20
    02:36/- 92.2 W 05:12 10:24 26:00 31:12 52:00
    02:38/- 88.7 W 05:16 10:32 26:20 31:36 52:40
    02:40/- 85.4 W 05:20 10:40 26:40 32:00 53:20

  • Ranking Erg Workouts in SQL

    2019 august 26, 8:20a

    I erg. Not competitively. I’m still kind of a noob.

  • Books to Finish in 2019

    2019 august 22, 7:07p

    I’m a pretty bad book finisher!

  • Thoughts on seximal vs dozenal

    2018 june 24, 11:51a

    I watched a video yesterday on base-6 aka seximal. It came up on HN.

  • Excerpt from An Open Letter to Hobbyists

    2018 june 04, 4:00p

    Oh, how the times change.

  • Good Things – Async, Await

    2018 january 31, 3:00p

    Whew! I am just about done writing .then(..) every 12 spaces. Like I think Rolling Stone said, Guitars are out, weird clicking sounds are in.

  • See Ecks Jay Ess (CxJS)

    2018 january 24, 3:00p

    I’ll be short. I recently stumbled upon a framework called CxJS.

    CxJS is a client-side application framework driven by a server-side endpoint of your choice.

  • Difference engines

    2017 december 23, 3:00p

    We are not so different, you and I.

  • Daylight savings time v2.0

    2017 december 22, 3:00p

    It is ridiculous that time literally repeats itself every year here in America.

  • Sports-ification of the news

    2017 december 21, 3:00p

    Is anyone listening to the news these days? If you close your eyes, you can almost see the scoreboard.

  • Bamboo

    2017 december 08, 3:00p

    So I just found out that Atlassian makes this software thing called Bamboo.

  • What ever happened to F1 .. F12 keys?

    2017 december 06, 3:00p

    RIP F keys. I never see applications use them any more.

  • Go slices are three finger data structures

    2016 november 21, 3:00p

    What Go devs call slices are what I think of as a “three-finger data structure”.

  • Extended globs in bash

    2016 february 02, 8:10p

    I learned about extended globbing today, in bash.

  • Drinking more Elixir

    2016 january 17, 9:05p

    I’ve been reading & writing more Elixir; a few things caught my attention.

  • Drinking some Elixir

    2016 january 02, 8:15p

    I got an Elixir book for Christmas, the one by Dave Thomas.

  • Filenames suck

    2015 december 01, 6:25p

    I really like bash scripts. Who doesn’t, right? But as the saying goes, a man’s got to know his limitations. One thing I’ve never liked is how you have to handle filenames on the shell.

  • Fun with localStorage

    2015 november 22, 12:26a

    I’ve been reading through the source of SC4, a self-contained crypto web application. It’s like PGP in a .html file.

  • A body-recursive chunks

    2015 november 14, 8:02p

    As it turns out, Erlang supports at least one kind of efficient recursion other than tail recursion.

  • Body & tail recursion in Erlang

    2015 november 12, 8:12p

    Old habits die hard. Some things can suprise you.

  • Simple profiling in Erlang

    2015 november 09, 6:00p

    Over the weekend, I was looking around the lists module for a function that could group a list into pairs or triplets. Either a pairs, triplets, group_by, or chunks function, basically.

  • Bit twiddling in Erlang

    2015 november 07, 7:38p

    It’s been a long few months. Lots of traveling, interviewing, moving, & working. Stressful. I’ve been busy, to say the least.

  • A bit more of React & CoffeeScript

    2015 june 30, 11:32p

    I want to move past the hello, world example I posted yesterday and show something just a bit larger, the React tutorial.

  • A bit of React & CoffeeScript

    2015 june 29, 7:31p

    It’s been a long two weeks; one large project and several interviews have just eaten up tons of my time. I don’t really like traveling; it really wears me out.

  • Four good talks

    2015 june 14, 8:00p

    I’ve been sick this past week, spending more time than I expected chewing aspirin and watching talks. I just wanted to recap the ones that stood out.

  • Fooling around in dozenal

    2015 june 11, 7:49p

    I wrote a couple small modules for fun recently and wanted to mention them here briefly. I wrote one to calculate ranges of numbers and the other to convert numbers to dozenal, or duodecimal (base-12).

  • SForest, another random access list

    2015 may 25, 3:57p

    In a recent post, I discussed the mechanics underlying skew-binary random access lists. In this post, I’ll walk through some code I’ve written to bring the ideas to life with JavaScript.

  • To edit effortlessly is Sublime

    2015 may 23, 1:22p

    I use Sublime Text 2 quite a bit. In this post, I’ll talk about the few things I’ve learned about it. Before I jump right in, let me bore you with some backstory.

  • Skew-binary random access lists

    2015 may 19, 7:26p

    This is another post on another data structure, the skew-binary random access list. This is perhaps my favorite data structure; I just think it’s ingenious.

  • Understanding Metalsmith

    2015 may 16, 11:40p

    Today, I learned a lot more about alternatives to Jekyll. A local developer (thanks, Chris!) pointed me towards assemble.io, an all-Javascript solution. On the other hand, I found Metalsmith.

  • BForest, a binary random access list

    2015 may 14, 9:23p

    This is a post on a data structure, the binary random access list. Not the best data structure in the world, but close to one of my favorites.

  • Ad block, minus minus

    2015 may 12, 6:49p

    Recently, I updated my /etc/hosts file. I don’t currently use any ad blocking software aside from that.

  • Long live the shell

    2015 may 11, 6:30p

    There are few things in this world you can count on like bash.

  • Creating a skeleton Node.js module with Grunt & Mocha

    2015 may 10, 10:30a

    It’s easy to make Node modules from scratch.

  • Grunt, from a newcomer's perspective

    2015 may 09, 8:03a

    I’ve used Makefiles in the past, but you can’t write Makefiles in JavaScript. I’d rather just write JavaScript if I could; one language is simpler than two.

  • First Post

    2015 may 07, 7:47a

    It took me a few days, but I’ve got a barebones blog up.

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