Specialized web designer and software developer
Almost everyone I knew growing up played the famous Super Smash Brothers Melee on the GameCube. Super Smash Brothers: Melee Characters The host of characters and game play to unlock every character and battle locations was a love of the game where we’d spend hours fighting with our favorite characters with our friends. I remember my parents would play, not knowing the controls, and saying “you’re…
Things I did Finally watched The Super Mario Galaxy movie. It was a good watch that brought more of the Mario universe to life. Began doing some work with data lakes in AWS. Started converting some VHS tapes to digital with some new adapters. Things I read Re: Linkdump No 117, or “Thoughts on Computer Snobbery” Over/Under #76 with Richard Griffiths Codeberg members vote to ban AI-generated code Is…
I got the dust off my GameCube and it has a new life. This was only made possible because I got a new RCA to HDMI adapter. The adapter was originally for my VHS player to convert those old tapes to a digital format. I also got a new USB-C to HDMI capture card for this process, but when I went to run the process the VCR had stopped working. Just because the VCR didn’t work at this time doesn’t mean…
The final whistle blew and Spain is the new FIFA 2026 World Cup winners for the next four years. It was great getting to watch the World Cup this year as the family was more into the games than previous years, so we watched a lot of soccer. We followed USA, France, and Argentina through the tournament. First, you always root for your home country and enjoy watching the other teams play as well.…
A while back I wrote about Implementing TinaCMS + 11ty and used that for quite a while as well. I also enjoy using PlopJS for my automation , and this works well for a quick easy way to create the file and open my editor to begin writing. The other portion of writing I like is some dashboard like view data of my website. I’ve been writing on my blog for 11 years now and that is a lot of writing.…
Things I did Made a score keeping web app for playing pickleball . Please use this on your phone for best viewing results, the page allows you to name your teams, keep score, along with history for fat fingering a point or out. Also, once a team wins, you can rematch or a new game. It is great that the family has been into soccer especially the World Cup - we’ve watched a lot of soccer. With the…
I began testing out how I could use a new static site hosting service and in doing so, I need a way to send files to the remote host over SSH. Once your account and SSH keys have been loaded to the remote server, you can begin connecting and need a way to upload your static site content to be displayed on the web host. The sample script uses an rsync process the keeps the remote host up to date…
Why I Replaced .Count with Measure-Object in My PowerShell Code. I tried the .Count and it kept returning 0 when I knew there was more than one in the count. This caused problems when I needed to count if there was great then 0 or 1 items, and .Count was unreliable. Moving to Measure-Object was, and this is why. Recently, I made a small change throughout some PowerShell code that looked like this:…
Things I did Who isn’t watching FIFA? There have been a lot of great games this World Cup season. Made two new dashboards for my team that we’ve really needed. A Windows SQL Cluster monitor and dashboard Another internal dashboard for a 3rd party tool that will now show us all our stats in one place Found a new park to take the family to Enjoyed some time with some good friends I got my very own,…
It’s been a few years since 2023, when I last wrote about the use of AI . Today we have ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude Code, and many other tools, with new models and capabilities appearing constantly. At this point, it’s becoming less about which AI tool you choose and more about the agents, integrations, and skills those tools can leverage. Personally, I don’t mind the use of AI in the…
Things I did Finished another book Solved some issues in functions that should work better for work Watched a few FIFA games Things I read Didn’t have much time to read this week Things still to do Worked with a vendor to resolve some issues. More work to do there as the automation processes continue Enjoy the weekend! Time has flown by this week as it feels like yesterday was Monday, when it’s…
Things I did Kept using the new productivity app: Super Productivity Make a canary check over 800 items in under 10 seconds More fancy lambda work Tons of bug fixes Things I read Simply Track Your Reading Journey Using a Markdown Book Log Shadow AI Is the New Shadow IT, but Blocking It Won’t Work The USB drive in your drawer is slowly losing your data right now Things still to do Weekend…
Things I did We had a great vacation to the beach Pet a stingray Made sand castles and flew a kite Things I read Do counting the number of waves we jumped over count? Do street signs count? Things still to do Lots of reading and getting back into work mode Reply via email
Things I did It is the last week of school, so we’re attending final activities and such for school Getting reading for summer vacations and getting outside more Built a todo app, only to use something else altoghter for now… Wrote a blog post about it Things I read I’ve been reading a new book. The second book in a series from one I read last summer Stats page with Eleventy - I’ve always like…
I’ve tried to keep track of my daily tasks in so many different ways. At work it’s a Microsoft Tasks or the newer Planner integrated into Teams and such. I’ve tried apps like Trello, Planner, Jotty, and even made my own. The problem is too many apps but none of them seem to stick. Eventually, I forget where I wrote down that note and to do item, or switched to a new app and now my tasks are all…
Things I did Spent time at the park with the kids Built a reading log to use in my personal notes. The blog post about it. Finished 2 books and watched the movie of one Read some RSS feeds, I started to have way too many unread and it was bothering me Converted a Python Django website to an Express app backed by AWS DynamoDB and S3 storage Worked with a lot different APIs and managing data Started…
I started reading a few books and wanted a way to keep track of those I’ve read, reading, and want to read. There are plenty of online sites that can track this for you… but when you like to program things and can find a good API, why not make a simple tracker yourself? Let’s begin by using 11ty as our static site generator and begin. I decided to use Open Library as it was simple, clean, part of…
Things I did Organized the garage and now I can find the tools I need without tripping over things that shouldn’t be there. Created a new project! Check out DisplayDrop , a simple digital signage solution. Finished my civic duty for Jury Duty. That was an experience and glad I wasn’t chosen, but it was interesting to be a part of the trial process. Built the Lego DeLorean from Back to the Future -…
Things I did Wrote a post on my time using openSUSE Finished some SQL High Availability install automation. Still have one little thing to fix. Made some good progress on a lot of little projects that have needed some movement. Looked into the AWS S3 Files option for a new way to serve content from S3. This seems like a fancy way to use EFS and use S3 as the backing system instead. Only this…
I have now used openSUSE for a few months, lets see how it has been. It’s been a while since I’ve updated my Linux journey . There was always something about openSUSE all those years ago I never understood until now. Alright, now that the obligatory fastfetch screenshot is out of the way how has openSUSE Tumbleweed been? Well, pretty great in fact; even KDE has been a great choice. I decided to go…
Week 14 was a busy week and did not have time to write a post about the week. Things I did Had Easter with the family and played games, hid Easter Egss, relaxed some and went to church. Battled out some automation for some installs at work. I’ve had a lot of the pieces and finally getting it all put together. AWS released a new feature called S3 Files that can turn your S3 bucket into a shared…
Things I did Made some updates to my week notes process . Used another PlogJs process to make setting up my week notes easier. Updated my Bookmarks script to support the | character for better path management. Ensured my git config was set correctly. I have two accounts; work and personal. Now my GPG commits work correctly. Finished a new monitoring function and leveraged Environmental Variables…
Things I did Typed a lot on my new keyboard - MageGee MK-Star ! Created a new monitoring tool for work comparing two different systems and making sure they match and alert the team if not. It was Spring Break so tried to take it easy. Fixed my car, and it feels good to complete your own maintenance and get things working again. Started to rewrite my resume with 11ty. Just something fun and…
I’ve been using a new mechanical keyboard for about a week now and here are some first impressions. I first heard of this brand by reading the review Adam’s Desk wrote up. Everyone at work had a mechanical keyboard of some kind, some expensive, some cheaper. Even the new hires got some cheaper RGB keyboard instead of the standard Dell keyboard you get with your computer. With mechanical keyboards…
This is a little late… Things I did Rewrite a monthly process from a Powershell function to Python so we can run it daiy in Lambda without needing me to run it manually. Saving time and better inventory. Good 'ol car problems and got those hopefully fixed. Compare the number of instances in a AWS ASG to what we have in Parallels to ensure properly uptimes. Made a lot of improvements to some…
Things I did Had a very busy week at work. Learned a lot about how machines use the NTP time and wrote a prcess that will check the timedrift and resync the server time as needed. Trying out a new git program: GitButler . It helps some of my work flow as it creates a workspace that is updates and then branches to get things back into the main branch. I need to get better at branching my work to…
Things I did Upgraded a Ubuntu server from 20 LT to 24 LTS. To upgrades in a row, all to find out SQL 2022 is not officially supported on Ubuntu 24 LTS and had to apply some hotfixes. Began converting a PowerShell script into Python. Python still seems like it just flows compared to the way other programming languages and writing the same logic. Wrote a blog post: CSS is a programming language…
For a long time, CSS was the “coloring book” and JavaScript was the “engine.” But the line has blurred so much that CSS is now technically Turing-complete (if you count the combination of HTML and CSS selectors). The transition from static styling to “programming” really accelerated when we stopped asking CSS to just look a certain way and started asking it to calculate and behave. Examples of…
Things I did Setup automation to expand Linux partitions in AWS when drives are expanded Researched some new Linux OS just because: CachyOS AerynOS AnduinOS Added some static site generator showcasing over at Static.Quest . I wanted to have an additional way to highlight the tools the members are using, or in some cases, created. We got the house patined! Never a dull moment when you have some…
Things I did Fixed some SQL backup issues and figured out how to do some parallel backups Rooted for some Winter Olympics. The snowboarding was great, but almost every team had people falling. I was a guest on the Lazybear in the [Over/Under #52 with Clayton Errington] https://lazybea.rs/ovr-052/ ) Got backups working on my Laptop that is running openSUSE Tumbleweed, and setup with PicaBackup for…
Things I did Learned some new Powershell things that will help moving forward. Started watching the Winter Olympics open ceremonies. Increased some script processing time and cut run times drastically. Finished my guest blog post, and getting ready to send that out. Thought my laptop was giving me some fits, but was just using the wrong password… Started using the editor Kate more than VS Code or…
About a year ago, I found a better way to identify the exceptions in Powershell and have multiple catch blocks for each of them. You can read more about that here . This week I found an even better way to enhance the catch blocks while working on a process for work. I had a huge opperation that was happening in the try block and found it would error out on a null value, but couldn’t find out why.…
Things I did Enjoyed the snow and the time off work over the weekend. Finally got some good progress done on some projects at work. Started some blog posts, now to finsh them. Worked on finding a new todo app and even creating on. Need a better way to manage tasks and keep track of them all. Completed the first month of the Bible reacp, and now we’re 10% complete which seems like a crazy idea.…
So this is week four of week notes , time flies! This week was no different. I completed a few projects this week and pretty proud of them. I created a few projects: Bible recap tracker Domain Guard Convert Time function The Bible recap allows me to keep track of how far I’ve read and see the percentages of completion in a few different ways. I decided to make this a repo for anyone else that…
This week I went down a rabbit hole. I started looking into 3D printers and all the cool things you can print with them. Although it would be nice to have one, I am still doing some research into brands, things to print, material, etc, all before making a purchase. There are some friends with one and I can always borrow theirs to do some testing out first. All of the 3D printing also brought up…
At the start of the new year, I decided to install openSUSE and it’s been great. I’ve been able to update my firmware and BIOS through regular updates. When I setup my installation I took the benefit of the TPM+Password integration with LUKS. After a few updates I started noticing upon boot, I was entering my password a few times to unlock the disk and then it finally decrypted and continued to…
This was the first full week back to work after some time off for the holidays. It was good to be back but also took a moment to get in the groove of things again. Found my deadlines for old projects and new ones at work. I found a few links that I decided to save this week in my raindrop read later section: AWS FinOps Dashboard Isoweek calendar I really like movies and TV Shows and have my own…
I got a new watch over the holidays and really enjoying it. I have had many watches over the years and trying out a fan favorite - Casio. Casio AE1500WH-2AV A few years ago, I had a Fossil watch and loved it. Then the Apple Watch was released, and at the time I did not see a need to recharge my watch each night and thought that was silly. Fast forward a few years I decided to get an Apple Watch…
Well look at that, week 1 of 2026 is coming to a close. I’m going to try and get some week notes done this year. I want to start writing down more of the accomplishments, difficulties, and random thoughts I found throughout the week. That way when I need to go back and remember what I did throughout the year I have a way to do that. I’ve seen a few formats others have used to write their week…
A quick look back at some accomplishments in 2025. blog wise I decided to take part in the 100DaysToOffload again this year and wrote 62 blog posts to add to the collection. I started the year with the goal to write the 100 blog posts, and 60% seems like a good success for what I’ve been doing this year. I also started the100pics and added 17 photos. I could have added some more, but my time for…
I received the LEGO GameBoy for Christmas and it’s amazing. First, the manual. When you start building the LEGO set you are greeted with a manual like you would th real GameBoy along with a bit of history. The history takes you down memory lane when the device was released and the first games that were released for the new handheld device were great to read. As I began to build this I was amazed…
About two years ago I wrote about how easy updates are. Being able to sync the fork and the CI/CD integration that runs and builds the front end and gets it all updated is a nice easy solution. However in the latest updates for Umami there was an the update from version 2 to version v3.0.0 . Looking back now, there is a linked document to migrate MySQL to PostgresSQL . This didn’t help much in my…
With the ever changing cloud market, local archives might be the way forward. With the push to cloud services there is the advantage to pay for the service and allow someone else front the hardware cost for the convenience of resilience, data storage, and more. What happens when that service is no longer free, costs go up, company dissolves, then what do you do? This kind of goes with another…
A year of a new Webring, Static.Quest ! Wow, time has flown by. A little over a year ago, Benjamin was giving away a domain name. When I saw the name Static.Quest the first thing I had in mind was static websites and the quest you can take to find new ones. He was able to transfer it to me, and I took my idea and made a great project out of it - a Webring. A Webring is a collection of websites…
So this might be a little old now, but I’ve been using Omnivore for my save-it-later application, and it was bought out and discontinued. There was a post I found to migrate my items to Raindrop.io . This migration used the Omnivore API to download the items, then import them to Raindrop.io . Previously I wrote how I was doing this, and now with the move I’ll briefly share how I’m doing that now.…
Common subjects from uncommon angles This was part of a photography class where we had to take photos of common items but from uncommon angles. Extreme close up of chain link fence showing fine texture of the links and vast Bokeh of the fence. Reply via email
A list of TV shows I’ve enjoyed over the years. There are so many TV shows I’ve watched over the years and I’ve been needing a good new show to watch. So here is a list of a few of them I would recommend as well. The list The Americans - Set during the Cold War period in the 1980s, The Americans is the story of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, two Soviet KGB officers posing as an American married…
There is a lot of controversy over AI - good, bad, indifferent. Controversy over personal use versus business use. From some colleagues in different roles we’ve discussed how our companies are looking to leverage the use of AI in certain areas for employee use as well within the products or fields we support. The conclusion, it’s all over the place and hard to define. This week, I had a process…
Here lately I’ve been trying to find some new TV shows to watch. A few times over lunch during the week, I like to take a break and watch a show while I eat. The problem is I’ve seen a lot of shows already and not many new ones seem like something I’d like to watch. The last show I finished watching was Black Rabbit on Netflix . This is labeled as a Mini Series so really is only the one season of…
A few years ago I worked part time as a delivery driver for a pizza company in town. It was a fast paced job where every minute was making money and when the computer systems went down it was a big loss for the company and my tips for the night. There was one main computer all the others communicated with and it was the main that had issues. This particular night was Mother’s Day weekend and a…