Blogging and personal websites and email are considered old school and I just want to cry.
Archives for 2018 (Lifestream)
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Dec 20, 2018, 7:12 PM -05:00 -
Nov 22, 2018, 1:11 PM -05:00 Hrm. I'm beginning to get a bit worried that Jane from "Jane Says" may not ever actually make it to Spain.
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Nov 18, 2018, 12:23 PM -05:00 How I Organize my Photos
I have a large collection of digital photos dating back over 15 years. An impressively small fraction of them are actually any good, but that's a different conversation, probably revolving around my digital hoarding habits.
Such a large collection deserves a particular method of organization. Or maybe it doesn't. Did I mention they're mostly mediocre? Anyway, I have one! I thought I'd share in case anyone finds it useful (including a future version of myself, my mind being a sieve and all).
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Nov 10, 2018, 9:14 PM -05:00 Fedoras and Infinite Streets
As you walk down a typical street in Manhattan the first thing you notice is just how straight it is. Roads in Manhattan have actual vanishing points, like railroad tracks. You walk slowly towards this point that you will never reach, and the cross streets come up one at a time, at perfectly spaced intervals and at perfectly right angles. First you look left, and then you look right, and you're taken aback at how perfectly straight those roads are as well, and how they also seem to go on forever in the distance.
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Oct 17, 2018, 12:10 PM -04:00 Now that pot is legal, I think I'm high from all the collective haze of smoke that spontaneously appeared over Montreal this morning. Just kidding. I'm pretty sure that was smog.
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Oct 16, 2018, 9:10 AM -04:00 I ether saw John Goodman on my way to work today, or someone who looked a hell of a lot like him.
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Oct 14, 2018, 9:10 PM -04:00 Maniac on Netflix feels like it's taking place in the same universe as Blade Runner
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Oct 14, 2018, 12:10 PM -04:00 On a list of "movies I watched and liked as a kid but in retrospect of kind of horrific" I think "The Parent Trap" is near the top of list.
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Oct 12, 2018, 2:10 PM -04:00 Home for a Rest could easily be about death and despair if it were sung differently.
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Oct 12, 2018, 12:10 PM -04:00 I feel like a lot of Italian cuisine is basically a competition over which dish has the highest (tastiness / # of ingredients) ratio.
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Oct 12, 2018, 11:10 AM -04:00 Rice pudding ice cream is a thing? I....want some. Like, right now.
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Sep 28, 2018, 5:09 PM -04:00 "A lot of problems would have been solved in the old west if they simply built towns big enough for two people"
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Sep 10, 2018, 11:09 PM -04:00 I think fresh cheese curds might be the main reason to live in Quebec.
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Sep 2, 2018, 4:03 PM -04:00 Angst and the Angular Module System
Google's AngularJS is one of the most popular web frameworks out there, but it comes with its share of criticism (performance around two way binding being one of the more prominent complaints). Google responded by releasing Angular 2 (and, as of now, 4, 5 and 6), which addressed some of the issues but at the cost of being drastically incompatible with its predecessor, with no realistic way to upgrade except through pure elbow grease. Angular 2+ might as well be a completely different framework.
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Jul 13, 2018, 9:07 AM -04:00 I'm sorry everyone, but two spaces is not enough indentation.
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Jul 4, 2018, 8:07 AM -04:00 Does anyone else refer to the free coffee in their office as Soma?
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Jun 13, 2018, 9:06 PM -04:00 Legion. You break my heart. #Legion
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Jun 10, 2018, 2:10 PM -04:00 Why Is There No E Sharp?
In an attempt to at least try and get to know my theremin a bit better, I caved and bought Carolina Eyck's The Art of Playing the Theremin. I mean, her instructional videos on YouTube are great, but they don't really give you a proper sense of how to move your fingers when playing a tune. Her book, on the other hand, does.
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May 20, 2018, 3:45 PM -04:00 On Finding an Excuse to Buy an Arduino or: How I Finally Got Myself a Theremin
In my last blog entry, I talked about theremins. I've known about them for a while, and I've always found them fascinating, but I've never actually taken the plunge and bought one, despite being being tempted on many occasions (they're not that expensive).
At the same time, I've known about Arduinos for a long time, and I've always wanted an excuse to buy one, but I've never actually taken the plunge and bought one. As I'm fond of saying, an Arduino is a solution in search of a problem, and I just never found the right problem for one.
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May 1, 2018, 10:45 PM -04:00 On Pulling Musical Notes Out of Thin Air
I am an unapologetic Downton Abbey fan. The series is full of memorable scenes, but one in particular has stuck with me. Daisy, one of the scullery maids, is asked if she turned on the electric lights in one of the rooms and she replies "No. I daren't".
It seems like such a minor, throwaway line, but I feel like it succinctly captures how the uninitiated must have felt about electricity back then. Daisy is downright afraid of it. Steam and fire are very direct and literal sources of energy, but electricity is much more abstract. You never see the electricity moving or burning, even as the motor spins or the lamp shines.
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Apr 20, 2018, 8:04 AM -04:00 Hearing the Community theme song makes me happy.
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Mar 30, 2018, 1:25 PM -04:00 Blogging with Emacs and Pelican
Pelican is my blogging engine of choice these days. Given that Emacs is usually (though not always) my text editor of choice, it made sense to try and streamline the process of writing blog entries for Pelican with Emacs. What follows is my attempt to document such an endeavour, partly because I think it might be useful to the (undoubtedly tiny) cross section of people who use both Emacs and Pelican, but mostly so that I have something to refer back to when the need arises.
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Mar 1, 2018, 5:03 PM -05:00 I find it weird how the word "dump" does not sound appetizing, and yet the word "dumpling" does sound very appetizing despite sounding like it should mean "small dump"
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Jan 18, 2018, 8:46 PM -05:00 Static Typing, IDEs, Automated Testing: An Eternal Golden Braid
I've been a programmer by trade ever since I graduated from University. This is a fairly long time, as these things are measured. I still consider myself on a learning curve, but that's a separate conversation.
My career, such as it is, mostly sidestepped the whole static versus dynamic typing debate that roiled in the early 2000's. School, when it veered into software territory, mostly consisted of C and Java, two statically typed languages. My professional life, until fairly recently, has been mostly in Java (with a bit of C++ thrown in for good measure) and hence has almost exclusively revolved around statically typed languages.
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Jan 11, 2018, 9:01 AM -05:00 Though I find the story of Scheherazade both gruesome and disturbing, I still love the narrative conceit that you can stop your looming execution if you can only just come up with a good enough cliffhanger.