Barely making it out alive
Yesterday was my wife's birthday and this happened. Years ago I made a Twitter account called @bretlovesanita just to serve as place to memorialize sentiments that, in earlier times, would be carved into trees or passed as notes while the teacher wasn't looking. Before heading to church I made a post that said Happy Birthday to the most beautiful girl in the world . After writing and posting that…
I'm on my Sunday dinner-time drive to get burritos, top down, listening to Real Jazz on SiriusXM. The Marcus Miller show is on and James Brown's Cold Sweat finishes playing. Miller then says to listen to this and plays the horn line from So What . Check this out at 0:50. Now, I am pretty familiar with Kind of Blue . I have played it a lot. A. Lot. But I still didn't see where Miller was going.…
As I begin typing this, I'm sitting in the dark, with headphones on, listening to Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here . I used to listen to music in the dark a lot in high school and through college. In fact, I first heard Pink Floyd while falling asleep to WDAI (or was it WKQX?) out of Chicago on my new Pioneer SX-750 receiver hooked up to my equally new Epicure 10 speakers (a combo I bought with the…
I decided to switch from Jekyll to Cryogen in producing this static site blog. This is more of a test than an announcement, just to make sure feeds and such work. Maybe I'll get back to writing more frequently. The tech is a bit closer to what I use everyday. It should look basically the same on the outside but is different on the inside. "Sooner or later, different scares people." –…
I've been working ( some of ) the Advent of Code problems since they began just before Christmas in 2015. I've used the problems to exercise some different Clojure muscles than the programming I do for my job. My solutions are on GitHub . When I read the problem for part 1 of day 03 for this year, it struck me that you could solve this pretty quickly without writing any code. Here's the answer…
Events have me thinking about this a lot lately. Is it always possible to reprogram the simulator? We shall see. I hope to elaborate more later. In the meantime, enjoy one of my favorite scenes in all of Star Trek. "I never took the Kobayashi Maru test until now. What do you think of my solution?" ― Spock
This presentation caught my eye the other day. [ UPDATE: The video I had linked to is no longer available so I've removed it. The video is too old to remember specifics but my basic thoughts on Angular at the time was that it was overly complicated at nearly every level of use. In any case, I've never looked back after using the Reagent and re-frame ClojureScript libraries. ] I worked on a fairly…
My apologies to Jean Shepherd. As I've gone through the process of writing this over Thanksgiving weekend, the title has changed three times. I believe I've finally landed on one that best descibes the content. It a rambling story about data and discovery. Hmmm, that gives me an idea for a book, Clojure: One Story at a Time. Or some such nonsense. There's nothing earth shattering here. Unless…
I'll never see my dad grow old. Sorry, I didn't mean to shock you or make you feel uncomfortable. But that is a fact that I've pondered many times recently. My dad died unexpectedly on October 14, 1997. He was only 67 and still active and enjoying life. My memory of him was always as a low-key yet active guy. For me, that last snapshot of him from 1997 will be how I think of him for all time as…
(BTW, this is not the long inaugural post I mentioned before. I guess it didn't have to come next.) “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” ― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man This is a subject that has come to my mind a number of times. Probably more so lately because I've been interviewing. But it also comes up occasionally when talking to younger programmers. What do we (whatever we are) call…
Wait for it I've worked out enough of the kinks getting this blog going to just jump in and start. However, the inaugural post I have planned is likely a long one. It is something that has been in my head for a long while and I need to get it out before I can move on. I took a course in speed waiting. Now I can wait an hour in only ten minutes. - Steven Wright