My little corner of the web for sharing wherever my interests take me.
At 1am, my phone rang. It was a friend of friend calling. The first words I heard from her were “get a pencil and start writing.” She informed me that my friend was in the process of being arrested outside her home. Naturally the first questions that came to mind are why is she being arrested and what is going on, but instead the first two questions I asked were “which department is arresting…
Pictured above is the Canyon Creek bridge along the Green Mountain forest road. It and the road beyond were damaged in 2011 and has remained closed ever since. Each year its condition degrades further making any eventual repair/replacement even more expensive. Meanwhile, the bridge closure rendered the remaining 8.5 miles of Green Mountain road inaccessible to vehicle traffic. This transformed the…
This is the story of how Google killed a 14 year old Android app overnight. 2008 was a time when the web had mostly become ubiquitous but still before most people carried it all with them in their pocket on a smartphone. For me, a high school student at the time without a smartphone, my programming classes were the only times during the school day where I could access the internet in a school…
Normally when you encounter a bug with Ruby, or any other interpreted language for that matter, using the language’s provided debugging tools are all you need to diagnose the problem and find a solution. Indeed that works 99% of the time. But what about when it doesn’t? What about when your program is so hosed that the typical debugging tooling doesn’t yield any fruitful information? This was the…
Airplane camping in Washington is a far cry from the meccas of Idaho, Utah, or Alaska. Despite all of the forested and mountainous terrain in Washington there are no true backcountry airports in the state. Nevertheless, there are a healthy amount of fly-in camping options on the more beaten path for pilots to enjoy. The tradeoff for this accessibility being, unlike the aforementioned backcountry…
On those rare clear winter days, waiting in the morning lift line for Chair 1 to open at Heather Meadows provides a beautiful view of Mt. Shuksan. Before opening time at 9am it’s common for the lift to start and stop multiple times as the lifties prepare for the day’s operations and ski patrol heads up the mountain to complete avalanche control. Each time the lift starts again the engine revs up…
The Idaho backcountry is an intimidating place, and rightly so. Many of the destinations there are unforgiving airports with little to no margin for error. The reward for developing the needed skills to fly here is operating in one of the most scenic and remote areas in the continental US. The most challenging strips are generally not accessible to those without a STOL plane and a good amount of…
Last year I wrote extensively about the politics of ski areas in Washington and a vision for the future of skiing in the PNW . One of the topics that came up in both of those posts was Mt. Pilchuck. Namely its history as a ski area and the potential it has for the future. This made me want to explore more on the possibility of reestablishing winter access to Mt. Pilchuck. First off, for readers…
Here’s a problem: You have 20,000 records each with latitude and longitude coordinates. You want a search function for these records to show the results closest to the user’s current position on a map. What do you do? Thanks to Postgres’ full text search and Earthdistance extension we can implement this logic entirely in the database and it’s lightning fast to boot. This is exactly the problem I…
I dislike Webpack. I even more strongly dislike Webpack when integrated with Rails. My prior experience with it has always been one of those tools that when it works silently in the background doing what you expect it’s fine, but when it doesn’t do what you expect, well, there goes the rest of your day debugging it and endlessly tinkering with obscure configuration files. Then again, JavaScript in…