UPDATE: The beta test is now over. Thanks to everyone who helped! I’ll be putting this into production shortly.
OK, I think I finally have enough bugs beaten out of my email subscription management system to make it ready for a public beta tes...
I don’t play a ton of poker. Some charity tournaments here and there. I’m usually good enough to be one of the last players eliminated before the payouts start. Better than the random fish off the street, but not quite as good as the sh...
As I’ve mentioned, I am winding down my Facebook experience. There are a couple of things I need to do before I deactivate my account there for good, including completing the email subscription version of this blog, and writing what is likely t...
Very early this year, my company told me that I was doing to be done with the weekly commute back-and-forth to our headquarters in the Boston area, and I’d be assigned to my first long-term customer engagement, in New Jersey. I was told that ...
It’s infrastructure weekend at the old blogaroo. Many exciting things are happening!
Migrating the site to a bigger EC2 instance running Centos 8.2, and all the packages that come with that. ✅ Upgrading to a new version of the blog rendering...
If you saw something that said, and I’m quoting directly here, “Please join us when your favorite band performs together as a band for the first time since March, live online from a rooftop in their hometown!” what would you expec...
In the year and a half prior to the Shit Going Down, I had retooled my guitar rig for playing mostly with TBGB. A rack-mounted Kemper Profiler into a Mesa 2x12 cabinet, and a truly giant pedalboard to control it all comprise that rig. In keeping wi...
On the morning of Thursday, March 5, Hell Year, I was getting ready to check out of the Westin in Waltham, Massachusetts, my home away from home for most of the previous year. Without thinking too much about it, I threw the little vial of lavender ...
let the night air cool you off
tilt your head back and try to cough
It had to be fifty years old, the pine that had been felled earlier in the afternoon, and whose trunk was now stacked for pickup by the curb. It didn’t know it was dead yet. Th...
Friday I bought and downloaded the absolutely brilliant Reunions album by Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit. A few singles have been out for a while, and I’d been eagerly awaiting this first full listen for months. And about halfway through it,...
This is a post from my ancient blog, orginially going up on this day in 2011, about the events on this day in 2004.
It was a beautiful, warm, sunny spring morning in Chicago. Monday never felt so good.
There was so much change in the air for us. My j...
The other day I did a curbside pickup of some lab glassware—as one does during pandemics—and the guy threw a Sudoku book in the box. He probably thought he was being nice, or maybe he just had a lot of stock and wanted to get it off his...
I’m starting with a picture of Arlee I took while we were walking earlier this week. Largely because it’s a cool picture, but also in no small part because I know that putting a picture at the top of the post means my banner headshot won&...
sanity matrix
Friday Five was a custom at a previous blogging locale where one would share five usually unrelated thoughts, none of which ever got developed much beyond a couple sentences or maybe a paragraph. Gonna give it a shot here.
Like so m...
I thought the right thing to do was to let him pull the new vanity up the stairs by yanking on the dolly, while I stayed below to push and steady from beneath. If something went wrong, I didn’t want him ten steps up and stuck between the 100-po...
Right up front: Neal Stephenson is my favorite author, and Cryptonomicon is my favorite book. Yet I remain objective about his body of work and its flaws, and in particular, I’m not afraid to call out that Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, his most rece...
Don’t tell me not to worry.
Don’t tell me not to worry about my 79-year-old father with chronic lung disease.
Don’t tell me not to worry about my kids missing a quarter (semester? more?) of classroom instruction.
Don’t tell me...
(video clip) I couldn’t have known while watching it live that this bat drop, recorded at Strikes a few weeks ago, might have been the last one I’d see. Preparations for baseball tryouts next week had been proceeding apace for almost ten...
On the face of it, it was cathartic to spend several hours yesterday dismantling ~10 years of Lego creations to box up for donation. Entropy had already taken its ruinous toll on the largest structures, leaving a lot of mid-sized substructures that...
I’m hard at work on an email subcription thingy for this blog. I can reliably be counted on to spend a ton of time on the infrastructure of a thing before I actually use the thing. Examples include pedalboards I’ve built, offices I’...
Today’s the day! My band, Tiny Bit of Giant’s Blood, has released our first full-length album, Gigantosaur. We’ve been working hard for months on this one, and it’s a relief to finally have it out there for people to get into ...
Before and after, left-to-right: I repotted lemon tree 4.0 last weekend. We upgraded her from a 10-inch pot to a 14-incher. For those who are new here (that’d be everyone), this is a plant that I’ve been growing since last winter from a...
Well, that woke me right up.
Internet service wasn’t available on today’s flight from Boston to O’Hare, so I wrote a little, had a glass of wine, and dozed the second half of the flight. I was groggy but starting to come out of it w...
I bought a new pair of pants this weekend, and put them on this morning for the first time. When I reached into the pocket, I found the above note. So, I guess, “new” pants. I hope the previous owner enjoyed his breakfast. Last night was...
I’m breaking up with MapMyRun today. It’s over. The thrill is gone. There are a lot of other fish in the ocean, all of which can do the most basic thing that a run tracking app should do, which is, you know, to accurately track your fucki...
On Saturday, I got together with a bunch of old friends who happen to be amazing musicians, and did a couple of sets of covers for an interesting fundraiser. It’s this concept called Craftsman Cafe, the likes of which I haven’t seen befor...
Jamelle Bouie writes in the Times this week that the antifederalists saw this coming:
So too could the earliest critics of the Constitution. In talking and thinking about impeachment, observers and participants have gone on (and on) about the foundi...
So I find myself for the second time training for a Ragnar while nursing an Achilles injury. At a time when I really should be racking up street miles, that’s the worst thing to do. I’m left with cross-training, such as elliptcals, statio...
about the blogger Your friendly proprietor splits his time between the suburbs of both Chicago and Boston, never far from the Lagrange points described by the gravity wells of family, work, and recreation. Interests include, but are not limited to, p...
What if humanity is an instance of the Peter Principle? A group of hominids on the savanna with above-average cleverness and opposable thumbs woke up a few dozen millennia later and found themselves in charge of a civilization of nearly ten billion, ...
That purple shamrock’s recovery is nothing short of a miracle. We should all be so hardy.
And lemon tree 4.0 is kicking all sorts of ass. Choose your metaphor for 2020.
Odds and ends:
See that lemon tree in the middle? She’s growing pretty fast lately, though in something of a checkmark shape which I don’t think is ideal. I’m just going to let nature take its course, or at least as much as nature is involved with th...
I haven’t given an update on the lemon tree project in a while. Here they are. I took them outside for a better pic; they have lived in my office since they made it out of the basement grow box.
It’s kind of hard to believe these two plants came from...
The lemon tree project waits for no one. That guy on the left is finna be culled this week, leaving me with two candidates. Eight sprouts, six plantings, five seedlings, three survivors, soon two. I may pot them both.
Gonna be tough to get these ladi...
Improvisation. It’s chilly down in the work room, only about 64°—not quite where I want my seedlings to be. So I went out to the garage and dug out some ancient Christmas lights, the old school C9 style. These used to adorn the front yard of my grand...
For Christmas I got a cool little lens kit that clips onto a phone. There’s a telephoto, fisheye, wide angle, and a macro which appears to have a depth of field of a couple millimeters. It’s a bit of a production to attach it right, so it’s not the s...
I put a lemon seed in a flower pot just now. At least I’m pretty sure it’s a lemon seed. Sharon puts slices of lemon in her water and I found it near the cutting board. It’s definitely some kind of citrus seed and I don’t think there have been any se...