Lagging Indicators

Our cat recently got cut on his leg; being in an area without access to a vet, we were a bit unsure on the severity of the injury or what a naturally healing cut would look like over time (and how to identify the start of any infection).

Croissant Club has been live for about 3 weeks now.

The Nespresso Vertuo Next we had would when initially turned on, immediately blink orange and not stop if you pressed it, sometimes it would switch to blinking orange twice, then pausing, over and over the application would various show and error that the…

Signing up for an online, at-home test from Pearson VUE also means accepting their Facial Comparison Policy.1 Pearson VUE may use facial images collected during the testing process to develop, upgrade, and improve our online proctoring application in the…

I needed to identify and tag duplicate news articles from a Google Alerts RSS feed which filters the news through keywords while working on topic modeling of news coverage on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program since summer 2024.

A slow pace, to be sure, but I have been adding to a dashboard of SNAP Performance Indicators over the past year, based on the SNAP data I’ve been cleaning and compiling over the past 2 years, and built with the Observable Framework library.

Recently on YouTube I searched “population apportionment” to find that many of the recommended videos across different channels looked the same and appeared to be AI-generated, heavily automated, and extremely low effort.

With the Flashforge Adventurer 5m, my first 3D print is the Enclosure kit project.

If you visited a .gov website during the 2025 government shutdown, you may have noticed alert banners on the top of the page that indicate a suspension or interruption of normal operations for the agency.

In September 2025, the Trump administration said it will no longer release the Household Food Security Reports.

At our wedding, each table was named after a country we had either visited or had some relation to, as a personal touch instead of classic table numbers.

I’d like to take a popular class for 3d printing at the library, but I can’t get a spot.

If you sort a list of Texas counties by county name, the counties will not be in order by county number.

The Trump Administration has a famously loose approach to data visualizations.

This is the obligatory moved blog from one framework to a different framework article.

Close to 2 years ago, I had an idea for a mobile application that allowed users to store, submit, and manage tax reimbursements in foreign countries.

The National Review in July published a short opinion piece in July ‘24 entitled How Congress Can Fix Food Stamps.

I re-deployed 8 Red Squares, a site that allows you to play through the 8 Queens Puzzle on different sized boards.

I recently bought the Kensington Slimblade Trackball to replace the Logitech MX Master mouse that I have been using for the last year.

What follows are a few takeaways from a recent app launch, where I had some successes and some things I had to fix.

Site is accessible here, and the accompanying GitHub repository can be accessed through that site as well.

Note a slightly different format to topic, rather than state-based.

pd.crosstab is one of those built-in functions in the Pandas API that I forget about routinely.

Here is Microsoft’s documentation page on the topic.

a) improve communication skills by forcing myself to formalize an opinion.

These are some thoughts about using a Wacom Intuos Wireless Pen and Tablet to complement a mouse and keyboard over the past few weeks.

These were my answers to the application essay questions for UChicago’s MSCAPP program back from the 2018 round.

Context Student and supporting organizations wrote a letter to the USDA recommending that the SNAP application interview requirement be removed, with the accompanying press release here.

Written by Larry Gonick & Woollcott Smith Note: This is based on the “Revised and Updated Edition”.

Summary: many warnings about EBT payment scams and theft, alongside a proposal to improve security state bills (and national) continue to propose work requirements and refuse additional SNAP funding for the summer upcoming Farm Bill renewal is stalled by…

Written by Darrell Huff and illustrated by Irving Geis.

Microsoft Teams provides an integration with Microsoft Viva, which schedules daily check-ins to record your perception of your mental state.

The following is a curated list of news articles by U.S. state and nationally that discussed SNAP benefits in February 2024.

I recently went on a weekend trip, where I counted each time that I interacted with a person who was a citizen of the country I was visiting.

I started to post SNAP performance indicators from the USDA in machine-readable format, aggregating and cleaning the data from the many PDF tables.

I took about 70 classes over a one-year unlimited class subscription with Babbel Live for Spanish from mid-2022 to 2023.

If you’ve got the framework installed, and just want to deploy the static pages, skip to below.

The choices to make origami sunflowers are few.

Some people are very into keyboards.

- Whenever I do analyses I am nervous about being wrong, but using Excel’s autofill function to impute data would have definitely been on my “this is not correct to do,” at the very least. - Nice example of a personal project.

For the first time, in my many years of eating lentils, I found a small stone in my lentils while I was eating the curry.

227 vehicles have passed by us in the last hour.

- A series of YouTube videos on how “practical effects” in movies are highlighted by directors, actors, and viewers, but actually are building blocks to extremely realistic computer generated visual effects.

In the past six months I’ve started to have finger, wrist, and forearm pain.