Category: Personal

  • Lawn mower won’t start after winter storage

    Last year was the first time in a while that I mowed a lawn. The decision to mow the lawn myself was because I couldn’t stand the idea of shelling out at least 160$ per month for something that I could knock out in around an hour on a Saturday…

  • I beat PHP and so can you!

    By request from Bill Martin, an abridged history of my relationship with the bastard child of programming languages, PHP. Ahh PHP. I love it. I hate it. For well over a decade, I slung PHP day and night. I got into PHP at the tail end of version 3. Prior…

  • Two weeks with Firefox and DuckDuckGo

    In a post-Snowden world, it’s hard to not be concerned with privacy and security. I wax and wane with my own interest (and paranoia) and recently decided to give Firefox and DuckDuckGo a shot for the month of February. Unfortunately, a full month ended up being a bit too ambitious…

  • The Final Redesign

    You read that headline correctly. What you’re looking at right now is the final redesign for my blog. Nothing could be better than this. Okay, you got me. I know that there are better designs out there. Freezing my blog’s design has nothing to do with how it looks and…

  • 2016 Recap

    A few months back I outlined my 2017 goals and figured it would be good to touch on some of the highs and lows of the past 12 months. The biggest thing on the list from this past year is that we moved from Tampa, Florida to Austin, Texas. My…

  • My 2017 Goals

    Without goals, we are aimless. I thought I had come up with a great opening line for this post only to find out that it’s actually a quote from a book I have never read. Thanks Google 😉 My lack of originality aside, I do believe in goals. Goals are…

  • Losing friends to the great beyond

    Found out I had lost another friend from the wayback machine not too long ago. We were great friends back in school and kept up online fairly regularly ever since then. I knew he was damaged goods, but I had no idea that he was considering checking out. I’m very…

  • Closed sourcing an open source project

    Most of the time, folks are talking about making projects open source not closed. Companies use it as way to get some press and to position themselves as being altruistic by giving back to the community. I used to be that guy. Recently, I came to realize that one of…

  • The soundtrack to your feelings

    I’ve heard it many times before, “this album is the soundtrack to my life”. That’s not me, or at least the album that I feel that way about has yet to be produced (or I’ve yet to composure it myself? ;). That said, there are a few songs that just…

  • Making a house a home

    Last Tuesday I flew back to Austin, Texas from Chicago, Illinois. During the trip I came to realize that Austin simply isn’t home, not yet. It became unbearably apparent during the flight home. Quality of life is up, but we’ve yet to settle into our new house. We lack a…