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Packing for the UK
What I learned from packing for a two week trip. -
Configuring the Garmin Forerunner 245 Music
A technical walk-through of my watch settings. -
Running with the Garmin Forerunner 245
Centering exercise in my life. -
2021-22 Seattle music playlist
Help I'm alive! -
Leaving Evernote
Switching from Evernote to Notion after 13 years. -
2020-21 Seattle music playlist
Eleven songs summarizing the last year. -
Archiving Seattle Public Schools K-5 school content
How to make a copy of your kid's electronic school content. -
Emacs for email: HTML and replies
Post-processing my reply content to clean it up. -
Anki flashcards and the countries of the world
Memorizing facts such as the NATO phonetic alphabet. -
Seattle "cutting questions"
Questions that help you know whether you would identify as a Seattlite. -
Writing "tips of the day" + some Emacs tips
Learn quickly by learning something small each day. -
Exercise routines
Getting started with exercise again! -
Home organization techniques
Finding patterns for making our place more organized. -
2019-2020 Seattle music playlist
My ten songs summarizing the last year. -
Making mnemosyne redundant
How I created three copies of mnemosyne in three different locations. -
KEXP's Black Lives Matter songs from Tuesday June 2, 2020
On Tuesday, June 2, 2020, John Richards played a really powerful Black Lives Matter set. All music was from Black artists. There were no air breaks except for eight minutes and forty-six seconds of silence for George Floyd.
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Teaching a kid about web services
Yesterday I showed my kid the first part of this silly video about web services:
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COVID-19 and Cynefin's "chaotic" domain
Recently I've been learning more about the Cynefin framework, a framework that's existed for over twenty years. (I've added a "management patterns" wiki page where I describe it a bit, along with a couple of other approaches I have found useful.) Here's an 8 min 30 sec YouTube video from the creator about Cynefin. Essentially, work can be in one of five domains: simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder.
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COVID-19 haiku
I-5's empty at
the Friday rush hour. We've sealed
our doors, washed our hands.
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A catalog of my programming projects
The types of projects/code I've developed over the last ~15 years. -
Late 1990s work sounds
Sounds I recorded when working as a student at Wake Forest in the summer of 1998. -
Merging Google Photos from Google Takeout
How I merged my Google Photos into my "life archive." -
Building an email archive
Creating a structure for importing historical email. -
Seattle wiki page
The start of a list of things to do and places to eat. -
Web site wiki
I created a wiki to track reference content. -
Seattle music playlists
Created my 2018-2019 music playlist! -
Being more present with my phone
Prompting myself for why I'm using the phone, each time I unlock it. -
Codex Seraphinianus
The delight of not knowing. -
Improvement through expansion and contraction
Find possibilities and then weed through them. -
Writing in Emacs
Working on how to focus on writing in Emacs. -
org-mode todo setup so far
How I'm using org-mode for my task list so far. -
Acceptance while striving
How do we accept the present while wanting things to be different? -
Doing work as it shows up
Unplanned work can be the most important work. -
init.el in org-mode
Learning more about Emacs, a little at a time. -
Bisecting to find when a problem occurred
Bisecting is extremely simple but super useful. -
Backups and archives
On the importance of backups and archives. -
A catalog of Seattle ads
Ads from the Stranger vol 28 no 13. -
The freedom to name yourself
Calling people what they want to be called. -
Social media creepiness assessments
What tests could we develop to identify how creepy a given social media platform can be? -
Trust and service levels
Service levels are better than nothing, but they are subordinate to a trusting relationship. -
Org-mode website
How I'm building this website. -
Slow computers
Diagnosing why computers are slow. -
Technical knowledge over time
Common tool knowledge can become uncommon; uncommon tool knowledge can become rare. -
The unknown
Being aware of, and open to, the unknown. -
Checking email with gmailieer + notmuch + Emacs
What I've learned so far in trying to check my email locally, rather than using Gmail. -
Missing features
How do you know when a product has a missing feature? -
Accepting snow
Tomorrow's it's going to snow, whether we accept it or not. -
Habits vs. tasks
When is something a habit? When is it a task? -
Tips for moving across the country
Lessons learned in moving from Virginia to Seattle in 2015. -
Day-to-day browser extensions, utilities, and accessories
What I like to have for day-to-day computer use to make working simpler. -
Perl one liners for daily use
Short code snippets I use regularly in my work. -
Foundational community assumptions
Communities have foundational assumptions that become noticeable when you move. -
My execution system
How I've been getting things done -
Shell script templating
A low-fi approach to configuration management. -
Seattle music playlists
YouTube music playlists I've built over the last three years. -
Emacs and org-mode
In which I describe my descent into Emacs and org-mode. -
Kindle workflow
In December I acquired my first e-reader, a Kindle Paperwhite.
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Homebrewer's Clubhouse in Winston-Salem, NC
My friend Jon Eilbes has started a business, the Homebrewer’s Clubhouse in Winston-Salem, NC. They sell all the raw ingredients you need to brew as well as kits to help you get started!
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Using South to change a Django model's parent class
I recently wanted to introduce a new parent model for some of my Django models. (The model is called “PayableModel” and is used for any model for which you might pay money.)
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The best way to protect your identity is to lie
“Assume rational actors.”
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Social media sites chosen like music, not like cell phones
Yesterday I read this article, “I’m 13 and None of My Friends Use Facebook.” There have been many of its ilk. I’m wondering though if people select social media sites less like how you choose a cell phone, and more like how you choose music.
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Everything ages
Recently we’ve been teaching our son that everything ages.
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Celery, gunicorn, and supervisor
I use webfaction to host my web sites, and they are great!
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Django environment setup
I have been doing some programming in “Django,” which is awesome. Django is a Python-based web programming framework.
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Time
Recently I built a scheduling application for my work web site. It’s pretty awesome.
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Chrome setup
In the spirit of “basic things I do to make my life easier,” here’s how I have Chrome set up:
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bash helper stuff
I get fixated a little on how to be more “efficient.” Part of that includes setting up my environment so it works well. When I’m using bash (a UNIX shell), here are a couple of things that’ve helped save time:
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Stuff You Should Do when building a wordpress site
Update 4/25: added a section about menus.
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Biannual blog update
Every couple of years I seem to update my blog. So, here goes.
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FreeBSD on a Lenovo H430 desktop
I used to use FreeBSD a lot. (FreeBSD is an alternative operating system, kind of like Linux. It is the basis for OS X and many other things.) However, ever since I stopped being a systems administrator I haven’t had a FreeBSD machine. Well, last week our Apple Time Capsule (wireless base station + backup device) died, and I wanted to try to “roll my own” server that could be our wireless access point plus backup system and more.
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Two selves: experiencing and remembering
Please watch this TED talk by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate. In economics and other fields, people have been trying to measure happiness–how happy are various groups, how happy countries are compared to one another. I’ve seen Economist articles about quantifying happiness, like The Joyless or the Jobless (Nov 2010).
Kahneman deconstructs this quantification by saying the issue’s more complicated: do you care about happiness in the moment or do you care about happiness remembered?
His presentation addresses people’s fundamental assumptions about who they are. We have two sides: an experiencing self, who lives only in the moment; and a remembering self, who feasts on what we (remember we) have done in the past. The remembering self, for almost everyone, is the dominant one–it makes the decisions about what we should do next.
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"Video Games" by Lana Del Rey
Our local public radio station, WFDD, has several HD radio stations, including one that plays a lot of “xPonential Radio.” When we lived in Raleigh I got spoiled listening to WKNC, NC State’s student-run radio station that would play lesser-known modern music; WFDD’s HD radio station #3 is the closest I get to WKNC over the air here in Winston-Salem.
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What is your time horizon?
I have a hypothesis: different people think in different “time horizons.” By that I mean, some people think way into the future and past when they make decisions or observations, and other people don’t. Maybe this is just obvious?
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Hundreds and thousands of regrets
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We think we know what's happening, but really we don't
In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few. –Shunryu Suzuki
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Why people play Kingdom of Loathing
This post is about a game, Kingdom of Loathing (KoL), and what I’ve learned about how the game works and how it motivates people to keep playing. Despite this dry analysis, the game itself is very funny.
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Learning Aperture, and my photo workflow to date
2022-12-03: I noticed several 404 errors for this old blog post, so I restored it.
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