I’ve been playing a lot with WLED and addressable LEDs recently and I decided to do one of the ulimate LED projects - permanent house lights for holidays and the like. It’s hard to take a good picture of them but you can see some animation at least. The box isn’t super well locked down right now but I’ll strap everything down at some point. The brains of the operation is a QuinLED-Digi-Quad, an…
https://flosscharm.com My wife invented these cool little embroidery projects you can use as a keychain or any kind of tag, with your own tiny design on them. We’ll have the blank charm for sale soon and you use the website to play with designs.
At XOXO 2018 I saw a fun talk during the Art+Code evening by Monica Dinculescu . One of the things she showed off was her project emoji-garden on Glitch . Seeing this project gave me the idea for a version where you can create your own garden and the other day I finished it. Click here to see sim-emoji-garden
Click here to see the scene I’ve decided to start focusing more on art recently, as well as making sure I put things online. This is part of the first project. I had the idea to generate a calming scene of a field of grass. I’m going to make different versions of this scene using different techniques as an exploration and a learning exercise. This one was really fun to create so I’m looking…
I grew up in Santee and spent a lot of time at Santee Lakes. It was fun visiting and seeing all the new stuff but also the things that are the same.
I moved my blog to a new system. Instead of Squarespace, I’m now hosting it myself on Amazon S3 and using a system called Hexo to manage it. I really liked Squarespace but I couldn’t justify spending money on a blog I don’t really update. I do plan on updating more often but I also wanted a little project. Hexo lets me write code to do cool stuff so I plan on doing that more often.
The XOXO conference of 2014 was literally life changing for me. It was my first visit to Portland and it was what convinced me to want to move here, which we’ve now done. Dan Benjamin of the 5by5 podcasting network interviewed a bunch of attendees (including me, randomly) and I joked to my wife about the interviews just being 50 people saying the conference was inspirational in different ways.…
Just saving this for later…
One of my favorite internet people, Merlin Mann, had an episode on his Back To Work podcast program where he talked about the idea that you only get so many Saturdays in your life. Saturdays being the days that we usually use to do fun stuff, hobbies, cleaning, things that aren’t work. I liked this idea a lot and it got stewing around in my head. Eventually I came up with the idea to visualize…
I’ve been getting into wood turning thanks to my wife’s interest in it. I’ve made a couple of pens and a pencil that turned out pretty well. Some friends asked for a video on the process so I finally made one of my most recent pen. I’m also starting to sell the pens and mechanical pencils I make. If you’d like one, contact me at the Contact link at the top of the page. Right now the price is $10…
[When Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking…
[](http://twitpic.com/dj27dh 'Share photos on twitter with Twitpic')
An overview on 2013, which on twitter I called my favorite year yet. I read about 36 books , but I also read hundreds and hundreds of comics . This included the entirety of Preacher and a full re-read of Sandman, both of which are on my favorite comics of all time list. The list of books I read is on Goodreads . Warning: It includes a lot of Star Trek books. I regret nothing! I helped in an…
This isn’t a very good picture but I made a new strap for my wife’s new camera. Technically I found the idea on Instructables but none of those were exactly right so I made my own version. The real one is by a company called R-Strap and they cost like $60. This one I made from some nylon strap, a buckle, metal dog leash connector, and a screw that fits in the tripod attachment hole on the camera.…
This is my first drawing using the blended layer of pencil as a background. Looks pretty nice for this kind of drawing but getting the erasing of the grey to match the shadows on the real hand was a pain.
I’ve gotten behind on a lot of stuff due to moving to a new house, so I’m going to be a little extra creative in my criteria of what goes on this list. :) My next creative thing for the year is that I danced at my company’s big yearly party. Kim and I have been taking couple’s dancing lessons for awhile now but it hasn’t really prepared me for the kind of dancefloor activities you find at these…
The path to mastery : Strive to understand fully and completely the tool at hand. Explore exactly how it works and what it can do. In addition constantly learn how to build on what you and others have done before. Aim for clarity and comprehension, and mastery shall surely follow.
If you’d asked me what the hardest parts of making DebugMap would be, I would never have thought writing the explanatory text for the homepage would so high up on the list. Crikey, it’s hard to explain things . Being so close to the site and what it is, it’s hard to explain to somebody who hasn’t had the damn thing on their mind for 6 months. I made way too many assumptions about how the site…
Hello again to both of my regular readers. It’s been a long time. It was a pretty long time ago I posted my previous entry where I optimistically (or perhaps stupidly) said I’d be launching my side project “soon”. Well, you’re in luck! 6 months later: “soon” has arrived. I’m super proud to be launching my new website for developers, called DebugMap . It’s a tool to help programmers remember what…
This is a list of things I’ve learned while building my side project (which I’ll talk about soon (really!)) Grails Groovy MongoDb Git Heroku Modern HTML, CSS Design Color schemes Modern Javascript Wildcard SSL certificates Speaking at conferences Fun times. :)
I've been neglecting my little blog here for quite awhile partly because I've been working on a side project that I didn't know how to write about. I'm not quite ready to pull the covers off it and talk directly about it yet (soon!) but I didn't want to let the private nature of the site prevent me from writing any longer. In the spirit of just getting something written, this is probably going to…
My Minecraft Home Base This is the first of hopefully many videos I’m going to make about my adventures in the land of Minecraft. I hope you enjoy, it’s my first time making any videos like this.
“I wish in the past I had tried more things ‘cause now I know that being in trouble is a fake idea.” _ Chris Onstad, _ Achewood creator (via eudaimonist ) _1246940) Nowhere Men - Science is the new rock ‘n’ roll
hehe
[Patio11 says hello ladies - Spontaneous Evolution](http://akshat.posterous.com/patio11-says-hello-ladies). A great (and short) video from a great coder about selling software to women. While the talk is about women, really the larger ideas are about anyone. I’ve been thinking about these sorts of ideas for awhile and I’ll have a post on it soon.
Merlin Mann - Scared Shitless - Webstock 2011 View more [presentations](http://www.slideshare.net/) from [merlinmann](http://www.slideshare.net/merlinmann) Sheesh, pretty much everything Merlin does blows me away in some way or another. Even without hearing the talk that goes along with these slides he succeeds in moving me in a very real way that few other writers do. You should listen to [his…
Now that the title of this post has scared off all non-technical readers of my blog (sorry Mom! :)) I wanted to come back to hopefully regular posting with a bang. I’ve been working a side project that involves a REST web service. I needed to upload a file along with some identifying data and for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out. I could get files to upload with a PUT or send the data with…
As the title of this post suggests, I've landed myself a new job. If I may say: whoohoo! The road to this job has been the hardest I've ever gone on and I wanted to lay it out because it's not just the typical 'Who you know' story like some of my other jobs have been. When I finally decided to look for another job, I aimed high. My brother-in-law put my resume in for Google, even though without a…
There's a big discussion going on in the comic book world about digital comics. For a lot of people the physical comic is of a piece with the art or writing. I used to be that way too, collecting many long boxes full of books over the years. Recently though, what I've discovered is that while I love comics, I don't love paper. Now part of my decision when buying comics is 'Do I want to take care…
Both of the Java Posse Roundups I've been to, I've made some fairly big decisions about my career. Now, I didn't even really consider my career until fairly recently. I'd had some great jobs, a couple of not-so-great jobs, and I was finally working as a professional programmer. A couple of years ago though I started thinking about what I'd like to be doing as a programmer in the future, whether…
This is a roundup of my thoughts about the Roundup, the Java Posse Roundup 2010 that is. If you don't know, the Roundup is the yearly conference put on by the guys who do the [Java Posse](http://javaposse.com/) podcast and tech writer/speaker Bruce Eckel. If you're a Java person, you should be listening to their podcast, no question. The conference is an unconference/open space…
The hacker, the architect and the superhero: three completely different ways to be an excellent programmer « The Reinvigorated Programmer .
I'm going to start posting more code here, finally. I don't consider myself a rockstar programmer or anybody to be telling others how to program but when I do something I found interesting, hopefully it'll also be interesting to others. I'm always looking for better ways of doing things so if you have suggestions, I'm all ears. Recently I was implementing a new project at work where I had to read…
> _Every year, [Tim Burton] spent an enormous amount of time on failed projects._ > > A few: Catwoman, Conversations With Vincent, Dinosaurs Attack!, The Fall of the House of Usher, Geek Love, Go Baby Go, Hawkline Monster, Lost in Oz, Mai the Psychic Girl, Mary Reilly, Superman Lives, X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes. > > One key element of a successful artist: ship. Get it out the door. Make things…
Mathematically Correct Breakfast – Mobius Sliced Linked Bagel . This isn’t exactly programming related but it’s very geeky. Next time we have bagels at work the keyword will be: Awesome.
A New Theory of Awesomeness and Miracles, by James Bridle, concerning Charles Babbage, Heath Robinson, MENACE and MAGE .
> Here are the most frequently forgotten fundamental facts about software engineering. Some are of vital importance—we forget them at considerable risk. via [Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software…
My friend runs an informal football picks contest every week and I thought of a way to participate in a very geeky way, **a program that would make my picks for me**. I decided it would be funny to write a program that would randomly make my picks for me since everybody else spends an inordinate amount of time thinking over their picks. Plus, I don't pay attention to football so my picks would…
> To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one’s bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion. I am very thankful. The Mythical Man Month, p. 291 via CLOSED-LOOP: The passionate developer: I do like my profession, I don’t like my job . This is great stuff. I’ve always felt the way Fred Brooks talks about in that quote and this post captures a…
> Dear Mr. Architect: > > Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost…
Awhile back I was inspired by a post on a local Albuquerque group blog called [Duke City Fix](http://dukecityfix.com) about a guy who walked across town, taking pictures along the way. I've always liked walking and thought it would be cool to do a similar walk. Every place I've worked at I've taken my lunch hours and walked around, sometimes taking pictures but mostly just exploring. You find a…
[ ]( http://thisisindexed.com/2009/09/the-world-used-to-be-flat/ ) Indexed » Blog Archive » The world used to be flat. I’ve been following Jessica Hagy’s work on Indexed for a long time and I’m always glad to see her getting more and more popular.
[Eye Candy IS A Critical Business Requirement](http://www.slideshare.net/stephenpa/eye-candy-is-a-critical-business-requirement 'Eye Candy IS A Critical Business Requirement') View more [documents](http://www.slideshare.net/) from [Stephen Anderson](http://www.slideshare.net/stephenpa). Great presentation. Goes very fast too, don't be scared of the number of slides.
 Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman This is a very interesting data visualization art piece from MIT. You enter your name and it looks for everything online it can find about you. For reference, here’s mine: Although I should…
[Get **Release It!** on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0978739213?ie=UTF8&tag=mattorama&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0978739213) A few weeks ago I heard an interview on Software Engineering Radio with Michael Nygard , author of a book I hadn’t heard of called Release It! My wife had been reading Ship It! and I had heard good things about Manage It! so I was happy…
I had been writing a post about how my new favorite URL shortener, Tr.im, was [shutting down and stranding all my precious links](http://blog.tr.im/post/159369789/tr-im-r-i-p) when just this evening they apparently [decided to keep the service running](http://blog.tr.im/post/160697842/tr-im-resurrected). **I should be happy about this but I still feel weird about the whole thing.** So in place of…
[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Challenge_vs_skill.jpg)[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Challenge_vs_skill.jpg)Challenge Vs. Skill diagram from Wikipedia via [Merlin's footnotes](http://www.43folders.com/2009/08/04/enough). I was going to write a post about Merlin’s post on Just Enough To Start…
> WE’VE gained so much in the digital age. We get more entertainment choices, and finding what we’re looking for is certainly fast. Best of all, much of it is free. > > But we’ve lost something as well: the fortunate discovery of something we never knew we wanted to find. In other words, the digital age is stamping out serendipity. via [Ping - The Digital Age Is Stamping Out Serendipity - by Damon…
[Culture](http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664 'Culture') View more [presentations](http://www.slideshare.net/) from [reed2001](http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001). Great, I’ve known Netflix was an awesome place to work for awhile and I’ve been trying to get in there. Now everybody’s going to be applying and I’ll never get in! :)