Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor, yadda-yadda-yadda. Simply having a first-aid kit in your pack is neither going to keep you safe, nor magically save somebody’s life if you have no idea how to use it. If you climb outdoors, do yourself a favor and take a Wilderness First Aid or a similar class.

First of all, your kit should be appropriate for your level of training and for the environment you’re going to find yourself in. If you’re not qualified to perform a cricothyrotomy, then there’s no need to bring the implements. Likewise, heat exhaustion is probably not going to be a problem on an ice climbing trip.

On January 1st, 2012 I sketched an idea—an activity tower for my yet to be born son. Cooking is a big part of our family life, and I wanted my future son to be able to participate in this activity.

The idea was to build the tower out of 3/4-inch plywood, using only a saw and a drill. Here’s what I came up with in SketchUp:

Requirements

This article outlines my setup and workflow for writing documents using Markdown and pandoc. This is a workflow that I personally find natural and convenient. There are some very important limitations (discussed below), but I’ve been successfully using this workflow for quite some time and it seems to be working great.

Main requirements for my workflow were:

• plain text editing
• keeping track of multiple revisions
• collaboration with multiple simultaneous remote and offline authors
• support for multiple target output formats
• automated publishing (through an external build system and such)

Limitations

Note that publishing is a one-way process in this workflow. If you publish on a Wiki, then you’ll need to find a way to pull the changes from Wiki back into your “source” document. I’m using Git-MediaWiki bridge to publish/update articles to/from our corporate wiki. I’ve also looked into replacing MediaWiki with gitit which uses Git as a backend and therefore would have allowed me to push/pull to it directly, but presently the feature set is not complete enough to be a viable replacement.

Turtles in my navel are having an argument: “It’s not my turn to take out the trash,” hisses Greg, “why do you insist that it is?” A vein on his right temple is pulsing a steady 60 beats per minute; he manages to stay mostly calm – he loves Patricia, after all.

The sun just popped up from behind my left breast. The snails of the morning chill are chased away by the spreading beams of warmth. I’m getting hungry and the turtles in my navel are getting louder. “It’s always your turn, you lazy git,” screeches Patricia – they are having this argument almost every morning. Greg and Patricia are in their late sixties and have lived together for at least forty years. This routine is so efficient by now that it doesn’t distract them from their other morning rituals. Patricia is chopping mushrooms on their tiny kitchen table, precariously perched on the northern slope of my navel, while Greg is sitting at the opposite side of the table hiding behind his newspaper. Across the navel, in a big greasy wok, snails are sizzling with anticipation. “So, do you want your breakfast or not?” — Patricia is unrelenting, and Greg is getting up to take out the trash.

I made this recipe a number of times and the results are always excellent!

• Prep Time: 15 minutes
• Total Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 eggs
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 cup whole milk
• 1/2 cup crushed dark chocolate
• 1/2 cup fresh cherries

Method

1. Place the crushed chocolate (tiny solid chunks taste better than shaved flakes which tend to soften or even dissolve) and the pitted and halved cherries (you can use canned cherries, but make sure to drain and dry them first) in separate bowls and refrigerate for a few hours.
2. Whisk the eggs in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy, 1 to 2 minutes. Whisk in the sugar, a little at a time, then continue whisking until completely blended, about 1 minute more. Pour in the cream and milk and whisk to blend.
3. Transfer the mixture to an ice cream maker and stir until almost ready.
4. About 5 minutes before the ice cream is ready, add the chocolate and the cherries, then continue stirring until the ice cream becomes stiff.
5. Transfer into a storage container and place in the freezer for a few hours.

Yield

This recipe make just over 1 quart of delicious ice cream depending on the size of the eggs and the amount of chocolate and cherries. I always get too greedy with the fillings, but can you blame me?

It’s been six months since I switched to Dvorak. My current typing speed is 56 words per minute with the average error rate of 6.4%.

It is slightly slower than the 60 wpm I had with QWERTY just before the switch. And the error rate should be below 5% to consider my typing accurate.

Some might say that it’s a failed experiment—not only do I not type 40% faster than I did before the switch, as I hoped, my typing is also slightly less accurate.

Ingredients

• 1 package of fresh salmon from Costco (approx. $11) sans 5 ’tail’ inches
• 1 jar of kosher flake salt from Trader Joe’s (about 75 grams)
• 2 tbsp assorted whole pepper (black, white, whatever)
• bay leaf ad libitum

Method

1. Cut the pieces of salmon in half, wash them and dry with paper towels.
2. Rub some salt into salmon.
3. Sprinkle some salt and peppers on the bottom of the pot, and lay the first piece of salmon flat in the pot. Take some peppers and press them into the salmon, then sprinkle some salt as well.
4. Place the remaining pieces on top of each other, repeating the procedure with pepper and salt. You should use up all the salt and pepper by the end.
5. Place a saucer or a small plate on top of the salmon stack, and put some weight on it (half a gallon of water in a container will do just fine).
6. Let the pot stand uncovered on the kitchen counter for half a day at room temperature and then move it still uncovered to the fridge.
7. In another 36 hours the salmon is ready to be served and enjoyed with your favorite brand of Czech beer!

I was cleaning up the address book on my PDA the other day when I suddenly realized that Palm OS is going to die pretty soon! Yes, I think its days are counted and here’s why.

Programming for the Palm OS platform has a very distinct “embedded” smell to it. Memory management is a mess, supporting different screen resolutions is a major pain in the butt, and instead of a real file system developers have to deal with this stupid notion that everything is a database. There might have been reasons for it a few years ago but not anymore. And Palm fails to recognize this fact and deal with it appropriately.

As I was going through my archives the other day, I came across a few of my poems that I wrote in college (you know, everyone is a poet when nineteen). I’ve tried my hand at translating a couple into English and found it to be extremely difficult (mostly due to the lack of ability on my part), so I took it as a challenge, and attempted to translate the shortest and least rhymed one. Here’s the result:

A meditative piece in which I explore the notion of productivity as applied to the craft of a software developer (and other such crap).

Yesterday I spent twelve hours hunting down a most bizarre bug. I flipped through literally thousands of lines of code, I set dozens of breakpoints only to realize that those places were being hit hundreds of times, and it is virtually impossible to debug it that way. I tried everything I could think of, but nothing helped and by the end of the day I was totally exhausted and pretty much ready to choke somebody.