Tom Clancy

❧ "What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good?"

❧ "What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good?"

❧ "What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good?"

❧ "Sometimes, a synecdoche is all you need" ❦ Trying to be all cool and tough this weekend, I was being a bit sloppy with a chainsaw.

What I Think: A 21-Year Archaeological Dig Danger This is the first (and probably only) guest post in the history of this here blog.

❧ "What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good?"

New Pelican Plugin: Obsidian-Style Callouts Vibe-Coded Slop It should be noted, per the anti-clanker movement, there was little to no thought involved in this process.

Finding My Voice For … reasons, I fed Claude a bunch of my Internet posting history.

Harold and George Destroy the World!

❧ "What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good?"

❧ "What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good?"

The Effect of Gas on a Marriage I was well into my 30s before I realized my mother’s aphorism on relationships, “Fits find each other” had a positive meaning.

Converting MP4 to GIF Do you, like me, often find yourself in internet arguments for no good reason and want to reply with a dead-perfect response GIF so everyone will clap and love you even more but the response you want is actually stored in your bookma…

Printing from Python on a Mac I recently automated the download of one of my favorite cryptic crosswords, both because I am nerdy and because it went behind an extravagantly high paywall.

Music This Week Didn’t expect to be back so soon, but I got busy doing something* this weekend and what I was listening to finished and Spotify’s Recommended let me know The Beths have a new album out and it’s just as good as the last one (for the record,…

Music This Week Trying something new, here are a couple of things I’ve been playing on repeat.

Autocomplete in Python Shell on Windows Because I drive myself insane replicating this when I find I want autocomplete on Windows, here are the steps (as of January 2017 anyway): pip install pyreadline pip install ipython[shell] Except right now step 2 fa…

Dear Josie: On Weasel Words Dear Josie, On the very off-chance I don’t get a chance to barrage you about this a thousand times, here’s a lesson on weasel words.

Heat Oracle: Heat Oracle 2016-10-21 Internet of Things project for homeowners with heating oil Internet of Things project providing homeowners with better efficiency for oil heating Implemented a mobile-friendly responsive website design Integrated Stripe…

Upgrading Django For the second time in a few years I’ve found myself doing a number of Django upgrades.

Debugging a Vue.js Error I know it’s been a while and I really should write more often, but this is just a quick one for Google to index in case it happens to someone else: I recently wrote my first vue.js component and was really pleased with how easy it…

Harvard Business School: HBX: Harvard Business School 2016-03-01 Building a MOOC for the Best and Brightest I spent two-and-a-half years working as both a front- and back-end developer on various parts of the upcoming MOOC offering from Harvard Business S…

Worst Pickup Line: A Play in One Act INT - BEER STORE - DAY CREEPY GUY, a man in his late 50s in hiking shorts and an ankle brace is paying for a popsicle at a beer store at 10:30 in the morning with the change from what is either a prescription pill cont…

Exception Handling I’ve been thinking about exception handling a lot recently.

Ground Energy: Ground Energy 2014-10-21 Internet of Things project optimizing ground source heat pumps for homeowners and businesses Built and currently maintain (and extend) the Django codebase that powers Ground Energy.

Java Version Hell on OSX In one of those “Why did I even look at the terminal” moments, I noticed Solr stopped working properly in a local Django setup.

The Garrison City Should Lock From the Outside At the beer store just before 3pm.

Thoughts While Lowering a Crib I get why people with kids feel like they need a bigger house: I’m trying to adjust a crib in situ and it feels like parallel parking a parade float in Rome “No hon, I’ll do it during the week when the house is quiet.”

wxPython on OSX Mavericks with or without Homebrew Just a short note for anyone else who runs into this nonsense: I could not get the current version of wxPython to install in a useful way using homebrew. brew install wxmac --python --devel to install into

Django Profiling Bug I’m doing some work profiling a large Django application and I was running into this weird error when I tried to aggregate the stats with gather_profile_stats.py which comes with Django.

It’s My Party (now) I’m trying really hard to take parenting magazines seriously, but they seem to be written for a demographic that straddles dense and insecure.

Résumé Rewrite Services Helping people with a job application is not something I do.

Fundraising: A Play in One Act INT - NIGHT - a fundraiser from University of Rochester calls TOM who has the phone on speaker while holding JOSIE.

Those Clever Kids: Since You’ve Been Gone 2014-03-04 What I’ve been up to since last I posted an entry I’m coming to the end of another contract and realizing just how out-of-date this portfolio is.

Checking on memcache’s health From time to time a client on WebFaction will experience a hiccup in their memcache process.

Lacey “I’ve put relatives in the ground with fewer tears.” — my mom Last Sunday night we had to say goodbye to the gentlest soul I will probably ever meet.

Installing New Relic Plugin Agent on Shared Hosting New Relic’s basic agent (and the free 30 days of Pro we got up front) have been a huge help on one of my largest ongoing projects.

Setting Up Server SSH Access Because I always forget and because I am getting into the good habit of connecting via SSH for everything, here’s a note to myself on how to get SSH deployment keys running in my typical process: Use or generate a key Add the…

The Next 25 Years As befits what was an all-male school, the highlight of my 20th high school reunion occurred in the men’s room near the end of the night (with a conversation at the urinals).

“Rich Get Richer”: A Play in One Act EXT - DAY: An outdoor concert/ festival between acts.

Popular with Jerks 25-40 Washing my high-horsepower, low-milage car as a break from my computer-based job while wearing Local Sports Team’s baseball hat and streaming music made by white males (see below) from my Apple phone to a Bluetooth speaker, I thou…

Django Command to Back Up to Amazon S3 with Python If it’s of use to anyone, I wrote this fairly thick-headed script to look for the most recent versions of files matching one or more patterns in a directory, zip them up and back them up to Amazon’s S3 Se…

MySQL and Python on OSX Because I rarely use MySQL nowadays and because how often do you set up a new machine, this is a reminder to myself on how to get mysql-python installed in a virtualenv Add /usr/local/mysql/bin to your path (permanently in your .pr…

Top Tips for Patients Having recently had shoulder surgery, some advice: Memorizing your patient number will amuse the nurses Conversely, making your first statement after coming out of general anesthesia, “It was supposed to be the other arm” will not am…

Greener Development A local experience designer, James Christie has been writing about what he calls “Clean UX”: designers and developers starting to make conscious choices about code and design that reduce the carbon footprint of web sites.

Parochialism Don’t do this: https://twitter.com/AndrewBerkshire/status/344972991404310528 At best, it says, “I’ve been drinking”.

CSS: min-width vs. zoom Ran into an interesting quirk today that I don’t see a lot of search results for: if you have a min-width set on an element but then set a zoom on an element other than 100%, the min-width (and, one presumes, the max-width) is scal…

ConvenientMD: ConvenientMD 2013-05-21 Built the website and tools that helped a startup grow to a major New Hampshire health provider Worked directly with the founders to create the front- and back-end of their original web site and then extend it to add…

Ruining Fletch If you’ve never seen Fletch, stop here and go watch it.

Songs Craig Finn Has Heard Bar Bands Play Beast of Burden Working in a Coal Mine Green-Eyed Lady Lay Lady Lay Legs Ain’t Too Proud to Beg Fairytale of New York something by The Dixie Dregs