Rock climbing First-Aid kit

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.
Jun 26, 2012 | 394 Words | Read more…

Kids' activity tower

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: I didn’t want to use the traditional joinery, like a box joint.
May 5, 2012 | 243 Words | Read more…

Markdown + Pandoc Workflow

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.
Jan 15, 2012 | 1274 Words | Read more…

Turtles in my navel

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.
Aug 18, 2010 | 232 Words | Read more…

Cherry Garcia ice cream

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 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.
May 29, 2010 | 228 Words | Read more…

Dvorak, progress update

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.
Aug 16, 2006 | 160 Words | Read more…

Salted salmon

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 Cut the pieces of salmon in half, wash them and dry with paper towels. Rub some salt into salmon. Sprinkle some salt and peppers on the bottom of the pot, and lay the first piece of salmon flat in the pot.
Apr 25, 2005 | 199 Words | Read more…

Palm OS is dead

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.
Nov 15, 2004 | 278 Words | Read more…

A little bad poetry

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.
Apr 29, 2004 | 109 Words | Read more…

Programmer's Productivity

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.
Dec 18, 2003 | 307 Words | Read more…