❧ "What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good?" ❦ Good in the last month Step bits: how did I not know about these? Bought a small set to put holes in a metal planter and they worked perfectly, then the smaller ones came in handy when I needed to make …
❧ "What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good?" ❦ Good in the last month Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die - terrific science fiction, only downside was it left me annoyed with everyone who had their face in their phone for a while after. I watched it on a flight …
❧ "What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good?" ❦ Good in the last however long it has been Perry Mason - trigger warnings, but cool story, good acting and amazing cinematography. This and The Pitt could be about anything and still watchable The entire Burn to Shine video series. A series …
❧ "Sometimes, a synecdoche is all you need" ❦ Trying to be all cool and tough this weekend, I was being a bit sloppy with a chainsaw. I’ve had the chain come off plenty of times before, but never had it tangle so badly I couldn’t immediately get it back …
What I Think: A 21-Year Archaeological Dig Danger This is the first (and probably only) guest post in the history of this here blog. It is written by someone you know and have strong feelings about, claude . I grabbed a copy of all the bookmarks I have ever tagged whatithink …
❧ "What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good?" ❦ Good in the last week Fresh-ground cinammon. Finally nailed my colors to the mast on this and threw out the ancient McCormick-or-whomever spice container we have had for years. Made sure to sniff the contents first to give myself a fuller …
Finding My Voice For … reasons, I fed Claude a bunch of my Internet posting history. In retrospect, much of the worst of it Metafilter comments (not so bad) Reddit archive (not great) Twitter archive (very not great) I wanted to see how well it could match my overworked, purple prose …
New Pelican Plugin: Obsidian-Style Callouts Vibe-Coded Slop It should be noted, per the anti-clanker movement, there was little to no thought involved in this process. I had learned to use Obsidian callouts , found I liked them and wanted to use them here. I write all my notes and drafts in …
Harold and George Destroy the World! I have been thinking a lot lately about these two fellows. If you are not lucky enough to know them already, those are Harold and George from the Captain Underpants series of books (among others). Two supposedly prototypical boys whose wonderful imaginations are in …
❧ "What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good?" ❦ Good in the last week Mutiny After Midnight - I know I mentioned it last time but it’s just so good. Between this and Sound & Fury, he’s cornered the market on Rolling Stones-style ‘70s scuzz rock and I love that …
❧ "What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good?" ❦ Good in the last week Milk Street’s tacos arabes Tom’s Crossing The fact Hardcover exists, a site to replace Goodreads, which has been dead since Amazon bought it only no one will tell it to lie down Dogs telling …
The Effect of Gas on a Marriage I was well into my 30s before I realized my mother’s aphorism on relationships, “Fits find each other” had a positive meaning. Because my mother and her sister both taught in special education and because their side of the family is from …
Converting MP4 to GIF Do you, like me, often find yourself in internet arguments for no good reason and want to reply with a dead-perfect response GIF so everyone will clap and love you even more but the response you want is actually stored in your bookmarks in the superior …
Printing from Python on a Mac I recently automated the download of one of my favorite cryptic crosswords, both because I am nerdy and because it went behind an extravagantly high paywall. In the process I decided I wanted Sunday mornings to be even more leisurely and made the script …
Music This Week Didn’t expect to be back so soon, but I got busy doing something * this weekend and what I was listening to finished and Spotify’s Recommended let me know The Beths have a new album out and it’s just as good as the last one …
Music This Week Trying something new, here are a couple of things I’ve been playing on repeat. Brian Dunne, Clams Casino Safely inside my Dad Rock, Springsteen-inspired category, I think I found this via Xgau’s Substack. The whole album is amazing and the previous one is great too …
Autocomplete in Python Shell on Windows Because I drive myself insane replicating this when I find I want autocomplete on Windows, here are the steps (as of January 2017 anyway): pip install pyreadline pip install ipython[shell] Except right now step 2 fails when installing scandir so I grabbed it …
Dear Josie: On Weasel Words Dear Josie, On the very off-chance I don’t get a chance to barrage you about this a thousand times, here’s a lesson on weasel words. Take a look at Always be suspicious when politicians or advertisers (if there’s still a difference) don …
Heat Oracle: Heat Oracle 2016-10-21 Internet of Things project for homeowners with heating oil Internet of Things project providing homeowners with better efficiency for oil heating Implemented a mobile-friendly responsive website design Integrated Stripe for payment processing Site is based on a REST API talking to vue.js components Twilio …
Upgrading Django For the second time in a few years I’ve found myself doing a number of Django upgrades. It’s a good thing: I’m happy the framework I chose to base most of my work on when I went solo has stayed relevant. But this time I …
Debugging a Vue.js Error I know it’s been a while and I really should write more often, but this is just a quick one for Google to index in case it happens to someone else: I recently wrote my first vue.js component and was really pleased with …
Harvard Business School: HBX : Harvard Business School 2016-03-01 Building a MOOC for the Best and Brightest I spent two-and-a-half years working as both a front- and back-end developer on various parts of the upcoming MOOC offering from Harvard Business School. On the front-end I’m building various teaching resources in …
Worst Pickup Line: A Play in One Act INT - BEER STORE - DAY CREEPY GUY , a man in his late 50s in hiking shorts and an ankle brace is paying for a popsicle at a beer store at 10:30 in the morning with the change from what is either a …
Exception Handling I’ve been thinking about exception handling a lot recently. A., because I’m stultifying and B., because it’s been a source of contention in the codebase I’m responsible for. I wrote some formal documentation last week to try to normalize our approach, but I’m …
Ground Energy: Ground Energy 2014-10-21 Internet of Things project optimizing ground source heat pumps for homeowners and businesses Built and currently maintain (and extend) the Django codebase that powers Ground Energy . The system receives status reports from geothermal installs once per minute, logs them to the database and provides both …
Java Version Hell on OSX In one of those “Why did I even look at the terminal” moments, I noticed Solr stopped working properly in a local Django setup. Initially I ignored a slew of 404 errors when Haystack tried to reindex because … well because who the hell cared? I …
The Garrison City Should Lock From the Outside At the beer store just before 3pm. I always get a little nervous when a car pulls in and someone from the backseat gets out. DUI ? Underage driver? Just plain crazy? Thankfully it was number three. After the young guy got out …
Thoughts While Lowering a Crib I get why people with kids feel like they need a bigger house: I’m trying to adjust a crib in situ and it feels like parallel parking a parade float in Rome “ No hon, I’ll do it during the week when the house …
wxPython on OSX Mavericks with or without Homebrew Just a short note for anyone else who runs into this nonsense: I could not get the current version of wxPython to install in a useful way using homebrew. brew install wxmac --python --devel to install into my Homebrew-controlled Python install worked …
Django Profiling Bug I’m doing some work profiling a large Django application and I was running into this weird error when I tried to aggregate the stats with gather_profile_stats.py which comes with Django. It kept throwing TypeError: zip argument #1 must support iteration if there were two profile …
It’s My Party (now) I’m trying really hard to take parenting magazines seriously, but they seem to be written for a demographic that straddles dense and insecure. The latest unsolicited offering from Parents — is apparently for people who don’t already know ice cream cake and enough room …
Résumé Rewrite Services Helping people with a job application is not something I do. Unless you accidentally send it to me when asking your friends to review your cover letter before applying to be president of a bank. Especially if the email ends, “Constructive not your usual Tom. Thanks.” This …
Fundraising: A Play in One Act INT - NIGHT - a fundraiser from University of Rochester calls TOM who has the phone on speaker while holding JOSIE . We join the call in progress … Caller: “Sir, no amount is too small.” Tom: “Well, I make like ten cents a day punching out plates …
Those Clever Kids: Since You’ve Been Gone 2014-03-04 What I’ve been up to since last I posted an entry I’m coming to the end of another contract and realizing just how out-of-date this portfolio is. Rather than try to catch up with an endless series of posts …
Checking on memcache’s health From time to time a client on WebFaction will experience a hiccup in their memcache process. It’s not obvious at first unless the site is under heavy load (New Relic is a huge help in diagnosing the problem); this post is just a central …
Lacey “ I’ve put relatives in the ground with fewer tears.” — my mom Last Sunday night we had to say goodbye to the gentlest soul I will probably ever meet. I’ve tried to figure out how to write this since then but it all comes out as a jumble …
Installing New Relic Plugin Agent on Shared Hosting New Relic’s basic agent (and the free 30 days of Pro we got up front) have been a huge help on one of my largest ongoing projects. Wanting more insight into our server after a mystery incident yesterday morning, I’ve …
Setting Up Server SSH Access Because I always forget and because I am getting into the good habit of connecting via SSH for everything, here’s a note to myself on how to get SSH deployment keys running in my typical process: Use or generate a key Add the key …
The Next 25 Years As befits what was an all-male school, the highlight of my 20th high school reunion occurred in the men’s room near the end of the night (with a conversation at the urinals). Him: “What brings you here?” Me [ assuming he meant something other than the …
“ Rich Get Richer”: A Play in One Act EXT - DAY : An outdoor concert/ festival between acts. Our hero, TOM , just growing into his impossibly handsome looks in his late 30s strides purposefully toward Port-a-Potty Row. His path is interrupted by THE STRANGER , a younger man. Before TOM knows what is …
Popular with Jerks 25-40 Washing my high-horsepower, low-milage car as a break from my computer-based job while wearing Local Sports Team’s baseball hat and streaming music made by white males (see below) from my Apple phone to a Bluetooth speaker, I thought to myself, “Boy, you need to step …
Django Command to Back Up to Amazon S3 with Python If it’s of use to anyone, I wrote this fairly thick-headed script to look for the most recent versions of files matching one or more patterns in a directory, zip them up and back them up to Amazon’s …
MySQL and Python on OSX Because I rarely use MySQL nowadays and because how often do you set up a new machine, this is a reminder to myself on how to get mysql-python installed in a virtualenv Add /usr/local/mysql/bin to your path (permanently in your .profile) If …
Top Tips for Patients Having recently had shoulder surgery, some advice: Memorizing your patient number will amuse the nurses Conversely, making your first statement after coming out of general anesthesia, “It was supposed to be the other arm” will not amuse them Like the man said, you can’t buy …
Greener Development A local experience designer, James Christie has been writing about what he calls “Clean UX ” : designers and developers starting to make conscious choices about code and design that reduce the carbon footprint of web sites. As developer tools and frameworks get better and easier, the risk of bloat …
Parochialism Don’t do this: https://twitter.com/AndrewBerkshire/status/344972991404310528 At best, it says, “I’ve been drinking”. At worst, it just looks stupid. Rene Rancourt is a thing— if you’re from New England, he’s perfect. If you’re not, I guess he’s annoying. Regardless, there …
CSS : min-width vs. zoom Ran into an interesting quirk today that I don’t see a lot of search results for: if you have a min-width set on an element but then set a zoom on an element other than 100%, the min-width (and, one presumes, the max-width) is scaled …
ConvenientMD: ConvenientMD 2013-05-21 Built the website and tools that helped a startup grow to a major New Hampshire health provider Worked directly with the founders to create the front- and back-end of their original web site and then extend it to add more tools as the business took off. Added …
Ruining Fletch If you’ve never seen Fletch , stop here and go watch it. It’s a great comedy and one of the rare cases of a movie being better than the book. Assuming everyone reading past this point has seen it, you’re familiar with the plot: businessman Alan …
Songs Craig Finn Has Heard Bar Bands Play Beast of Burden Working in a Coal Mine Green-Eyed Lady Lay Lady Lay Legs Ain’t Too Proud to Beg Fairytale of New York something by The Dixie Dregs