Recent content on The Hive
I was working on figuring out the uptime for one of our services at work. The service was down for 96 minutes. Our uptime only counts for the duration that people are actually doing work in the office, which works out to a convenient 40 hours. I do the calculations, and it turns out that 96 minutes of downtime during a 40 hour period works out to be 96 percent uptime?! I’ve tried plugging…
Caring for yourself and actually doing the work of taking care of yourself are not easy feats. It’s something I’ve always struggled with, and still do to this day. That said, I have found two distinct paths that were very helpful to me, and so I wanted to take the time to write about them today. These tips are specifically aimed at people who either don’t value themselves enough…
This is a recipe that my wife found on Facebook and asked me to make. We have since had it multiple times. This spin on the classic spaghetti has a deep, velvet-y sauce with just the right amount of spice. Original recipe by Chef Boyd Brown III ( Warning : Facebook link) Servings Makes 4 - 6 servings Ingredients 1lb thin spaghetti Any kind of spaghetti-esque noodle is fine 1lb ground beef 1lb hot…
I recently read I oppose marijuana legalization — on libertarian grounds by Jim Grey, and it has truly been living rent free in my head ever since. Not only do I disagree with Mr. Grey’s stance, I believe his reasoning is deeply flawed. I take so much exception to his stance that I just had to write this post so that I can hopefully move on. Uh-oh, Stinky! The crux of Mr. Grey’s…
I’d like to open this post by saying that anyone who is pro-second amendment and also pro-cop is delusional. Those two ideas are antithetical. This is what I’m writing about today The Delusion of the Second Amendment The second amendment to the United States Bill of Rights states that A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to…
Today I read “This is why I’m fat” by Gordon McLean , and a lot of the ideas he puts forth I can relate to, so I wanted to write about those, and my own experiences. With the societal stigma put on people with high weight numbers, it’s good to have neutral conversations about it. Am I Fat? Personally, I don’t consider myself fat. Not yet, anyways. Despite this, I actually…
Some years ago I learned about security.txt , a proposed document that could be added to a website to let security researchers know who to contact in the event a security concern is found. It’s a really cool proposal, and you should definitely check it out. This proposal also showed me the /.well-known/ folder, since that’s where security.txt is supposed to be placed. /.well-known/ ,…
There’s been talk going around about a new protocol, humans.json - not to be confused with humans.txt , of course. The purpose of this protocol, as I understand it, is to provide yet another way for us on the open web to differentiate ourselves from AI and to “vouch” for each other. I’ll start by pointing out, I did go ahead and implement this on my site . I like joining in…
Apparently my RSS feed hasn’t been working for an indeterminate amount of time. I only found this out because I was checking out Bubbles.town . I saw that my site should be included, but only one of my posts were on there. Following the link they have listed as my RSS feed is what showed me that it wasn’t working. Anyways, if you get this, welcome back, and go checkout Bubbles.town 🫧…
The other day, my wife and I went to one of our favorite places to get brunch. It was a busy day, so we were seated at a table that was right up against another table. This made it nearly impossible to not listen in on what your neighbor is talking about. At the table to my right were two women, who we’ll call Steph and Mary. They seemed to be catching up on each other’s lives since…
I haven’t had much energy to write lately, but when I saw Shellsharks had completed this questionaire, I just had to join in. 1. Please introduce yourself. My name is Apis Necros, or Bee. 2. How long have you been making websites? I think I made my first website in fourth grade on Freewebs.com. If I recall correctly, I think it was about Sid Meier's Civilization IV, which had recently come…
Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten older, or wiser, or maybe just more jaded, but it dawned on me the other day, that I can’t think of any holiday I celebrate where I actually feel like I’m celebrating anything. For the most part, holidays just feel like an excuse to spend more money than I actually have. There are truly only a few holidays I can think of that feel worth…
This story’s a bit different from my usual People stories. You see, this one is spooky . This would’ve taken place some time in 2020 or 2021. I was driving along a major arterial road in my town late in the night, say, around midnight. In the car with me was my then-fiance and our partner. We were on our way to Taco Bell, listening to music, and having a good time. There was pretty…
Over the past year, this blog has become a library of echoes. You all don’t see it, and that’s kind of the point. I’ve acquired quite a collection of drafts. Many of the posts are about things I felt very strongly about in the moment, but then the moment passed, and I am no longer sure I was making the point I wanted to make. I still feel strongly about the topics, mind you, but…
When I was a wee lad, say 6 years old, my favorite place to be was in the sandbox at the park down the street from where I lived. Given the opportunity, I’d be there all day everyday. While there, I met a lot of the regular kids, though most of them I’ve forgotten about. One I don’t think I’ll ever forget though was this odd little girl. I was playing in the lower of the…
Saucey dogs are a simple dish of just tomato sauce and hot dogs. They’re barely even a dish, and yet, here we are. As my mum explained to me, this recipe comes to us from a Betty Crocker cookbook my maternal grandmother’s mother had. My great-grandma made it, my grandma made, and my mum made it for us. Saucey dogs are only really considered to be a complimentary dish for Kraft…
A fun thing about having been raised as a middle-class, white, AMAB who is also at least a touch self-aware, is that any time I have, what I believe to be, a profound thought, I have to stop and wonder if it actually is profound. Over time I’ve learned that men are in our culture so regularly spout the most mundane takes ever, and act like they’re Socrates. I’m aware of this, and…
Today’s entry is a short one, as it was less than a five minute encounter, but it’s too good not to share. My partner and I were driving home one day, and arrived at the last major intersection before we got home. This is a large intersection with two left turn lanes. We were in the right of the two lanes, and since it was a nice day, we had the windows down.
There’s another blogging questionnaire going around, and thanks to a tagging from ShellSharks , you now get to know some useless information about me. You can find the original post by David on his blog . Do you floss your teeth? Pft, no. Not with any regularity. Much to my dentist’s chagrin, I struggle to have any routines in my life, and my dental hygiene is included in that. I floss…
The company I currently work for has something they call the Core Values. The Core Values are four guiding principals that help us achieve our business goals. They are principals we want to see in all employees, and they drive our hiring, firing, and promotion decisions. This all may sound pretty “corporate synergy”-ish, which would make sense since it does come from a business…
Thanks to Kev Quirk’s post , I found this post by Joel Chrono, Blogging Expectations , which was in turn inspired by a post from Robert Birming , which was inspired by a post from Brandon’s Journal . Isn’t the internet great? I encourage you to go read all their posts to get a clear picture of the conversation at hand. If you only read one, though, for the sake of this post, make…
This page serves as a catalog for all my slash pages . /whoami - All about me /about - An alias for my Who Am I page /why - A brief composition on why I maintain this blog /blogroll - My blogroll with all my favorite blogs /links - A collection of links to various sites I use, enjoy, want to share, etc. /chipotle - My usual Chipotle order
I write this blog because I have a lot to say. I have a lot of thoughts on things, but I only have so many people around me I can talk to. Furthermore, I’m actually really bad at saying what I want to say. While I may come across as well constructed in my writing here, I often take hours or days to put these words together; a luxury I don’t have when speaking.
I do not consider myself a professional database administrator. I know how to administer a database. I know about the three forms of normalization . I know, generally, how to make a robust database, and all I took was a 101 database management course in college. Why then, in the year of our lord 2025, do I still see people tying user profiles to email addresses??? “Sorry, we can’t…
I was talking with my coworkers one day about our work lives before joining our current company. One of them mentioned how the union at the grocery store they worked at was very corrupt. There were rampant cases of sexual assault and harassment amongst employees, but no one would ever get fired, or even talked to about it, because the union would just sweep it under the rug. I was absolutely…
It seems that questionaires have become a trend among bloggers, and I’m so happy about that. As I explained in my last one , I used to love filling out these kinds of things back in the MySpace days. My friend ShellSharks tagged me in his post where he answers these ten questions, and who am I deny the people what they want. I did do a similar kind of questionaire in the past, A Music List ,…
I often find myself scared of existing. The way I see it, as long as I can be aware that I’m existing, then I can prove I’m still alive. Cognito ergo sum, and all that. But I’m not always aware that I’m existing. Some times I’ll be going about my day, and suddenly become aware that I wasn’t aware for the past couple hours. Where did I go during that time? I was…
I’m a child of the mid-2000’s internet, and as such, I spent a lot of my time on MySpace filling out surveys, or memes, or meta posts, or what ever you want to call them. When I saw this post from Kev Quirk in my RSS feed, I opened it so quick. And after reading it, I knew I had to fill it out too! Get to know my blog Why did you start blogging in the first place? I started blogging…
I’ve been really into making ganache recently after having to do it once for some brownies. Something about the ease of it, and it only taking a few minutes, really makes it an enjoyable process. For this ganache, I did something special, and used a shot of the 20-year port wine I got my partner for our fifth anniversary. The port really comes through, and lends a deeper flavor to the…
Back in ‘09 or ‘10, my church’s youth group made a trip to a nearby amusement park. While I knew pretty much everyone in the group, there was one girl roughly my age that I didn’t recognize. She must’ve been someone’s “plus one”, but I don’t recall ever seeing her before or after this night. Throughout our day there, she was stuck to my side…
One of my partners recently posed an interesting question: do I think love is transactional? I immediately responded with a “no”. I said that I think no true, proper love should be transactional. They then followed that with, “Okay, but then what’s ’true love’?” Having considered this many times, I explained that to me, true love is doing things for…
It occurred to me yesterday that I don’t generally advertise the posts in this section of the blog. There’s a link to it on the archive page, but otherwise the only way to know about them is if you follow my RSS feed. Don’t get me wrong, that’s exactly the point of this section. I want a place where I can dump thoughts and not have to worry about sharing them every where.…
During my middle school years, I spent a lot of time at the library. Mostly, I was there to play on the computers. My best friend Alexa and I would sit there for hours playing Runescape. Truly some of my best times were spent there. Over the hundreds of hours I must’ve logged sitting there, I encountered a handful of people who I still think of all these years later. Here’s a few of…
These hamburger buns are a modified version of my peasant bread recipe. The modifications provide for a sweeter, softer bread. Servings Makes 18 buns. Ingredients 2 1/4 cup bread flour 2 1/4 cup all-purpose flour 2 1/4 teaspoon dry active yeast 1 tablespoon salt 2 cups luke-warm water 1/3 cup honey 2 tablespoons room temperature butter 1 tablespoon butter (for topping) 1/4 cup milk (for topping)…
I’ve never considered myself a marmalade guy, but my roommate made this for a special occasion, and it was phenomenal. Modified from Castello’s recipe Servings Makes about 1 cup. Ingredients 5 whole mandarin oranges Tangerines work too 100ml sherry 200ml water 200g sugar 100g almonds 1 Cinnamon stick Special Equipment Blender Steps Slice oranges thinly. In a small pot, add orange…
This recipe is a core component of the Milk Bread recipe. It could also be used in any other bread recipe. Servings Makes approximately 1 cup of starter, which should be enough for two loaves of bread. Ingredients 1/3 cup of bread flour 1/2 cup whole milk 1/2 cup water Special Equipment None Steps In a small sauce pot, whisk together flour, water, and milk Bring to a simmer over medium-low heat,…
This recipe is my partner’s recipe for a Japanese-style milk bread . It has one sub-recipe, which is the starter used for the bread. A loaf of Milk Bread fresh out of the oven Servings Makes 1 loaf of bread Ingredients 1/2 cup Milk Bread Starter (room temperature) 2 1/2 cups bread flour 1/4 cup white sugar 2 1/4 teaspoons dry active yeast 1 teaspoon salt 1 egg (room temperature) 1/2 cup warm…
Why Did I Think I Could Do This? Last night, before I went to bed, I started trying to learn cross-stitching. I bought one of those beginner kits that’s got a pattern and everything you need, and as I sat there reading the instructions, I thought to myself, “Why did I think I could do this?” It’s not that the instructions were particularly complicated, but they were more…
This bee’s Chipotle® order. Bowl with a tortilla in it Barbacoa White rice Black beans Pico de gallo & corn salsa Sour cream Lettuce Cheese I’m very particular about the flavor profile of this combination, and no changes can quite compare to its perfection. This page was inspired by Shellsharks’ concept created as a parody of similar IndieWeb /<page> ’s .
Content Warning: suicide During my time in the bakery, I made one of my best friends ever, Tyler Baumgartner. He was a goofy guy, and had such golden retriever energy. There certainly were times where he could be grating with his silliness, but he never meant to upset anyone. In many ways, I thought of him as a little brother. He was an amazing man, and had so much potential. One summer he packed…
10-key Encoding I recently made a big switch, and downgraded from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone to a dumb flip phone. I’ll spare you my soapbox speech about why, but one of the most jarring changes has been moving from a swipe-style keyboard to the classic 10-key keyboard. I was able to get used to it kinda quickly, having dealt with it many years ago, but I still stumble sometimes.
I had originally tried to make this a pull-apart bread, a la monkey bread , but it turns out savory monkey breads are pretty hard to make, and it ended up just turning into a loaf. Nonetheless, this bread is perfect for things like grilled cheese, or even just as a side for dinner. This recipe is a modified version of the Peasant Bread recipe , but this time it’s seasoned and savory and also…
One night in early spring, I was alone in my state’s capital waiting for my partner to be done at a metal concert, and found myself with little to do. Despite being the state capital, and a fairly large one too, there was nothing to do at 9 p.m. on a Sunday. After lamenting on Facebook that even the book store closed at 7 p.m., a friend of mine sent me to a link for a book store that was…
The curse of knowledge is one of my favorite cognitive biases to ponder on. This is our brain’s bias to think that just because we know something, then everyone else must know about it too. It seems like such a childish idea, but it’s something affects us all the time. One time, while working in the bakery, I had taken an order for a cake that the customer wanted writing on. They…
DLA - A Naive Approach Jump to the demo! Generative landscapes have always been a topic I’ve wanted to learn. Like many of my peers, I originally got into programming because of Minecraft! That said, making a world like Minecraft takes a lot of maths, and can be a lot to take in without proper schooling, so it’s always been out of my grasp. The closest I’ve ever gotten was this…
I saw this fun looking “meme”, as they used to be called back in the day, on Facebook where you ask your friends to give you a number, and then you answer the question respective to the number they picked. I really like sharing my music tastes, so I thought I’d just answer them all here. Not only am I excited to share this part of myself with other people, I also look forward to…
One time my partner and I were at our local grocery store. It was around Halloween time, and so right in the main aisle they had their main, 4-sided display of assorted Halloween candies and treats. Now I tend to feel weird for it, but I love popcorn balls . I don’t know if it’s the Ohio in me or what, but I feel like they’re such an underrated snack. Seeing as it was that time…
Inspired by a post from Jeremy Kieth , I thought I’d share some bookmarklets that I use. This page will be updated from time to time whenever I think of a new one. What are “Bookmarklets”? Bookmarklets are links that you can bookmark that, instead of directing you to another webpage, perform some action on the webpage you’re on. In the case of the ones I have here, they…
The mind is truly a fragile thing, and an unfortunate truth is that in order for it to maintain itself, it must forget things eventually. Even people we once held dear cannot always escape this fate. Today’s post is an ode to forgotten friends. I remember you, even if I cannot remember who you were. This post is actually one of the first that I wanted to write for my blog. I’ve been…
Just a classic peanut butter cookie recipe. Not much else to say. Servings Makes about 16 cookies Ingredients 1 cup smooth peanut butter 1 large egg (room temperature) 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup white sugar 1/4 cup white sugar (for rolling) Special Equipment None, but an electric mixer of some kind would be helpful Steps Preheat oven to 350°F Mix peanut butter, egg, vanilla, and 1 cup of…