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Apr 18, 2025: Just watched Bladerunner (the “Final Cut” edit) with my son who really enjoys cinema. He loved it - which was not a guarantee! But it is …
Apr 16, 2025: At the first middle school track meet of the season. With wind chill adding to already low temps, I think it is officially too damn cold for a track …
Apr 11, 2025: Saw Väsen in concert last night. I wouldn’t have picked this show, but five minutes in I knew that I was listening to two absolute masters of …
Apr 8, 2025: Long day. Spent much of it trying to explain that you can be creative AND productive.
Apr 4, 2025: Another Friday, another manhattan on the rocks. The stock market is so (understandably) insane that I should probably stockpile some cocktail …
Apr 2, 2025: Spent the day remembering how to Dougie
Mar 31, 2025: Spent a long time in the flow today. Wrote a file parser. Deleted Duolingo with tremendous satisfaction after rising to “diamond league”. …
Mar 28, 2025: Went down the rabbit hole of fixing the way I organize my music tracks (including file naming) while preserving all of my playlists in the DJ …
Mar 26, 2025: I’ve managed to set aside an overwhelming sense of dread by staying busy. There is plenty to be done here and now that is useful and meaningful, even …
Mar 25, 2025: I have learned much about Duolingo since I started using it. I feel like it encourages a kind of obsessive meta-gaming that actually works against …
Mar 24, 2025: Mega appreciation post for micro.blog. The ability to manage multiple sites from one place, with per-site cross-posting to other social media …
Mar 22, 2025: I just re-recorded my latest DJ livestream. I had a ton of technical issues during the live set and my heart wasn’t in it. The re-record is at least …
Mar 22, 2025: Had friends over last night to celebrate the end of the work week. One of our guests was also our chef for the evening, commandeering our kitchen to …
Mar 21, 2025: Yesterday and today, back at my own drafting table. I am familiarizing myself with a previous tinkerer’s unfinished prototype, with the goal of making …
Mar 19, 2025: Multi-modal journey into the head office this morning. Along the way, I listened to a discussion about how things went sideways in the early …
Mar 18, 2025: Testing out a micro.blog plugin. I’ve had this banger stuck in my head for days, now.
Mar 18, 2025: Yesterday’s various news items fostered in me a sense of existential dread. To combat the sensations of helplessness, I accomplished much before …
Mar 17, 2025: We finished filling the first 20-yard dumpster yesterday. 10 years of living in a place means not having to think about what is truly important to …
Mar 16, 2025: Yesterday we took apart the collapsing remains of the garden walls. A tangle of rotting boards and wire fencing. The neighboring townsfolk are not …
Mar 15, 2025: Concert last night; a famous chanteuse from the old city. Nostalgia for a time half-remembered. Afterwards, we sat around the kitchen, drinks in hand …
Mar 14, 2025: This showed up on Hacker News today; pretty amazing read on the technical construction of social engineering attacks: …
Mar 13, 2025: This morning I wondered about living in a reality distortion field that was so strong, I could not see any possibility beyond what my curated army of …
Mar 12, 2025: There was a certain gloominess in the workshop today. The afternoon ice cream helped lighten the mood, and I left determined to make a brighter …
Mar 12, 2025: Putting on my top hat and monocle to head into the office today. It’s a space that is new-ish to my compatriot tinkerers and yet it is also …
Mar 11, 2025: Evening situation: improving. (rye manhattan on the rocks, like god intended)
Mar 11, 2025: I’ve been re-reading an email I sent yesterday. It’s one of those situations where I know I responded in the right way, but I still feel uneasy about …
Mar 10, 2025: Needed a place to clear my head that was relatively anonymous. Too much shit going on in the world.
Oct 17, 2023:
Regarding Social Media - Don't Split the Difference
I’ve been trying to figure out recently how to make social media work better for me. I am stuck between two “worlds”. On the one …
Jun 6, 2023:
Tech Transfers
One of the hardest things that any engineering team can do is to inherit a software project from another team. And yet, my team at Red Hat has to hand …
Mar 7, 2023: Refocusing Creative Energy Last Thursday, my regular D&D group of 25 years gathered on Zoom and I ran the last session of a long-running campaign. It was a relatively rare …
Jan 12, 2023:
After Decades, a Waking Dream
When I was a kid, I had some dreams that were so vivid that the sensory experience of them was almost indistinguishable from being awake. On Monday …
Dec 27, 2022:
December 2022
I don’t even know where to begin with this month. I have strong emotional reactions to just thinking about it, but why bother trying to capture …
Nov 28, 2022: Goodbye, Dad My father passed away yesterday. I’m still very numb about the whole thing, still processing, but I didn’t want this moment to go by …
Nov 17, 2022: Supporting Grief A few weeks back, one of my coworkers (we’ll call him Adam) had a major health scare and was hospitalized for a while. Another of my coworkers …
Nov 7, 2022:
N7 Day
I’m a big fan of the Mass Effect video game franchise. I’ve played the main trilogy through so many times that I could talk you through …
Nov 1, 2022: Meta Problems I’ve always used Instagram to promote my DJ hobby stuff. I know it is owned by (and integrated with) Facebook, which I actively dislike, but I …
Oct 22, 2022: Projects Coding Projects I’m nhr on GitHub. Here are some of my more interesting projects: Shiftzilla While I was part of the OpenShift team, I was …
Oct 22, 2022: About Me I’m a career technologist, writer, and hobbyist dj with about a dozen other hobbies as well. If you want to connect professionally, reach out …
Mar 15, 2022:
The Ides of March
Twenty years ago today - the Ides of March, 2002 - I enlisted in the Army National Guard. Unlike most of the young men and women going through …
Feb 8, 2022:
Fast Food
When I was in high school, I had a fast food job in the local shopping mall. I was in Danbury, CT, which was close enough to New York City to attract …
Dec 18, 2019:
Fedora 31 on the Razer Stealth GTX (Late 2019)
My hunt for a shiny new laptop always starts with the best of intentions, but well-intentioned laptops usually don’t come with gaming-ready GPUs. What …
Nov 12, 2019:
2019: Year of the Spartan
In October of 2018, I got my annual physical and came face-to-face with the reality of my current weight and fitness levels. I was at 30 BMI and at my …
Apr 20, 2018:
TGIF
Here at The Internet Shipyards, Friday night is cocktail night. Today’s special guest: the Rusty Nail, also known as the World’s Simplest Cocktail.
Dec 6, 2016:
That App You Love – Headed to DevConf.cz!
Starting back in September I published a series of articles for the Red Hat Developer Blog under the series title “That App You Love”. I’m psyched to …
Mar 18, 2016:
A Sunbeam for Mia
We lost Mia today. I’ve always read posts like this with some amount of indifference because in the back of my head I am thinking “this is just an …
Feb 18, 2016:
Advice From an Open-Source Hiring Manager
In Decemeber of 2014 I transitioned from fifteen years of being a developer into being one of the people managers on a really amazing team here at Red …
Aug 13, 2015:
Comments on Backing Up a Linux Laptop
My primary workhorse right now is an HP Omen running Fedora 22. Thinking and talking about how to restore my work environment from a total failure, I …
Jun 10, 2015:
New Challenges, New Tools
I almost feel like a traitor, which is a weird way to feel about consumer electronics. But my next laptop is not going to be a MacBook. Our current …
Oct 20, 2014:
iCloud “Family Sharing”: Great Feature Unless You Use iTunes Match
Family Sharing provides users with a way to share purchases from their iCloud/iTunes account with up to five other people. Additionally, this feature …
Oct 11, 2014:
Where to Post? Finding Yourself Amongst Ello, Facebook, and the Glut of Social Media
Ello is a social platform that has been the subject of some buzz recently. Either by design or by accident, Ello is squarely positioned as the …
Sep 12, 2014: TL;DR: Stop Expecting Achievements to Make You Happy A moment of clarity from the folks at HuffPo… Here’s the best part: When you detach happiness from achievement, these five things that happen are the …
Aug 26, 2014:
OS X to Fedora 20: The User Experience, Pt. 2
Just tuning in? Have a look at Part 1 to find out how I installed Fedora 20 on a MacBook Air and why I am so interested in trying to duplicate or even …
Aug 18, 2014:
OS X to Fedora 20: The User Experience, Pt. 1
A little background here: I have been a Mac enthusiast for a number of years now. I would not say that I am religious about OS X, but if the OS X user …
Jul 27, 2010: Frozen, Victorious Bastion shook his head, and the ghastly images faded away. Glancing up, he could see that the others were watching him. No one was shocked or …
Mar 16, 2009:
Protecting Important Data
My recipe for not losing important stuff on my home desktop system…
Dec 18, 2008: How not to optimize a site with AJAX I’ve inherited a project that is seeing some performance issues. We knew this was at least partly to blame on the UI, but most of the problem is …
Jul 23, 2008: The Hospital The quiet evening stands still; a tapestry A history woven in sodium light A memory Hospitals never used to bother me; I would follow my Dad to the …
May 5, 2008: CMSART in Worcester Pulse My search and rescue team, and more specifically, one of our most capable and dedicated members, got some great press in this article. If you live in …
May 5, 2008:
It's who you are
Last Friday, my dad performed the last surgery of a career that has spanned over thirty years. By my conservative guess, based on a minimum of two …
Feb 20, 2008: A thought exercise in film Got this idea from drama_kween - here’s a quote from each of 15 different movies that I like. I’ve picked some fairly obscure ones (movies …
Nov 18, 2007:
Why yes, this -is- the right week to tear out all the plumbing...
Thursday morning we discovered serious water damage in our living room ceiling, directly below the upstairs bathroom. Annika called the insurance …
Jul 23, 2007:
Phone status
I sent out mail to a bunch of folks today to let them know that our home phone is offline for the time being. If I forgot to mail you, well, our home …
Jul 19, 2007:
Sunrocket'd
Well, that was a bad call. SunRocket basically imploded this week, and I’m unlikely to see a prorated return on my flat $200 for a year of …
Jun 8, 2007: In memoriam Elena passed away at 12:55 this morning. She was surrounded by her family and close friends. She stayed with us long enough to see her sister Maria …
Jun 5, 2007: I am watching something beautiful (This post is about Elena. Shes not doing very well. I invite you to read this, but I don’t want you to have to.) I am sitting on a couch. In …
May 24, 2007: Farewell, Brix After giving the whole thing some serious consideration, I am ending my career with Brix Networks. I have had a tremendous seven years there, and will …
Nov 17, 2006: Another day, another small miracle Elena is out of surgery now. The surgeon said that the procedure went very smoothly, and that the tumor was very easy to identify and remove. …
Nov 13, 2006: Number two in a series I have been lax in spreading this news, probably because the fac’t hasnt sunken in for me yet. But to tarry further would be a great disservice …
Oct 19, 2006: How we become our grandparents Last weekend I had the privilege of DJing at the wedding of some friends. I’ve unofficially DJed a few parties, but never something as involved …
Oct 17, 2006: The new lieutenant Jane Immelheim leaned against the wall of the situation room, her face a picture of zen-like calm. Her hands were wrapped around a coffee mug, and the …
Oct 16, 2006: When does a resume become a C.V.? When you publish something! And let me tell you, its a page-turner. Oh well; you gotta start somewhere :-)
Mar 19, 2006:
The spectacular deaths of computers
Without going into too many details, I started Sunday with two computers and finished with none. Hardware problems were the order of the day, and so I …
Mar 2, 2006: Old-skool blogging After some consideration (and paranoia about the direction things seem to be going on the web), I decided to reign in control over my own ideas …