I confess I’m feeling something like writer’s block lately. Not because I don’t have ideas I want to explore, but because I find myself overwhelmed by the political and epidemiological crises that are unfolding around us. My thought...
My fourth attempt to grow a lemon tree in a pot, while far and away the most successful in the series, appears to be tracking to a denouement in the compost bin as did the other three before it. About a month ago, the edges of some leaves started tu...
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in over thirty years as an engineer, it’s something like a nerd’s refactoring of the Maya Angelou quote: when you see a problem in a system, believe it. A strange message in a log file, a sque...
I’m usually pretty bad at predicting the future, but I nailed one thing this year: knowing I needed to take today off from work because I wasn’t going to be in any kind suitable mental state for it. I wasn’t entirely sure if I was g...
I’ve never lived through a hurricane. In the Midwest, the natural disasters come at you too fast to do anything but run down and hide in the basement. You don’t have a lot of time to prep, or to fret. So I can only imagine what it feels l...
charlatans
Another post about the blog infrastructure itself. I know. But the events of the larger world are a little too overwhelming to get my arms around at the moment, and my beloved White Sox hiring a walking, talking Blue Lives Matter flag for...
It’s a little hard to tell exactly when I started, based on the half-gigabyte dataset which I have to navigate without any signposts other than filenames and JSON tags. I’ve gathered this: I made my first friend on May 26, 2007 (yo, Ken)...
UPDATE 2020-10-23 20:15 CDT
I simplified the whole thing. Now there’s just a single opt-in step. You still get a confirmation email, but you don’t have to click anything to make it work. I also went into the database and just updated ever...
OK, I think the subscription system is finally ready to go! Big, big thanks to the beta testers who helped shake out the bugs.
But I suppose the question you may be grappling with is why? Why should I subscribe? And what exactly am I subscribing to? ...
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 test...
