Last weekend the twelfth Hackers On Planet Earth conference, subtitled The Circle of HOPE was held at the Hotel Pennsylvania by 2600 Magazine. As with most years, I made my cross-country pilgrimage to New York City to attend. I flew out on Thursday morning with the eventual goal of making it to my hotel early enough that I could order in, relax a bit, and get to sleep early to shake the inevitable jet lag so I could be somewhat functional the next day. Modulo the usual difficulty in catching a ride from JFK, I made good time and accomplished …
Coat with Dr. Martens Wonder Balsam using included sponge. Be sure to work balsam into stitches and exposed edges. I ordinarily don't like to shill for particular products, but I started using this stuff to help break in my boots (it makes the leather softer, so it adapts to your feet more readily) and I was wearing them clubbing within a month of getting them (instead of six months to a year). It's amazing stuff.
It's been an interesting couple of weeks, to be sure. While lots of different things have been going on lately, none of them are related in any particularly clear or straightforward fashion, so fitting all of this stuff together is going to be a bit of a struggle. You may as well kick back with the beverage of your choice in a responsible fashion while I spin this yarn.
I suppose it all started with wardrivingin northern Virginia many years ago. In a nutshell, I had loaded Windbringer up with a rather small for the time USB GPS unit …
I've been keeping quiet about the mass school shooting in Florida some weeks ago because it's such a hot-button topic, and many people speaking out are catching harrassment and death threats - even the students who survived the massacre. Of course, the National Rifle Association went on the record as saying, quote, "The NRA doesn't back any ban." Meaning, of course, they'll do their damndest to hamstring any new legislation that has to do with guns. It's also worth noting that there were multiple law enforcement officers - trained and armed - at the school, and they did nothing. Which isn't surprising to …
As I write this, it's roughly a week before my 40th birthday. I'm sitting in a hospital waiting room tapping away on Windbringer while Lyssa undergoes surgery to remove a cataract from her left (and only working) eye.* When this post goes live on the day of my actual 40th birthday, more things will undoubtedly have happened. I don't know how much time I'm going to have in the next few days, so I guess I'd best take advantage of the spare time I have due to how busy I've been lately.
It's now 2018. Don't ask me how we made it, but we did.
Regular readers have probably been wondering what's been going on that I haven't posted much. The short form, and the honest answer, is that I haven't had it in me to really post, aside from some stuff that I copy-and-pasted out of my notes, polished up a bit, and saved. The holiday season is always a busy time, and my life is no different from anyone else's in that regard.
Lyssa and I flew back to Pennsylvania at more or less the last minute about halfway through …
I guess I should wish everybody out there a happy Thanksgiving that celebrates it.
I haven't been around much lately, certainly not as much as I would like to be. Things have been difficult lately, to say the least.
Around this time of year things go completely berserk at my dayjob. For a while I was pulling 14 hour days, capped off with feverishly working three days straight on one of the biggest projects of my career, which not only wound up going off without more than the expected number of hitches but has garnered quite a few kudos from …
This week, it was my turn to suffer a somewhat debilitaring kitchen accident.
Last week, Lyssa nearly took the tip of her thumb off with a chef's knife while helping to make pizza for dinner, an accident which resulted in several stitches to reattach the flap of skin that ordinarily formed the end of her left thumb.
Last night, while helping to make dinner I accidentally grabbed the handle of a skillet that had spent the previous half-hour in a 400 degree Fahrenheit oven. With my entire hand. There are (still closed) blisters on four of the five digits on …
I'm still around, just been too busy to get a lot of other stuff done really. I need to get a couple of articles written and maybe a tutorial or two. My overall health seems to be on an upswing right now, which is a really good sign. First good sign in a while, really.
It's funny, how the tools that you already have are the ones you tend to be afraid of using, because you don't know what'll happen. Confidence is one of those things that comes with knowing what the hell's going on, or at least having a …
