Random Geekery
Collecting my attempts to improve at tech, art, and life
Marginalia
Posts that are personal or site-related with no intentional enlightenment.
Dec 31, 2018 (Updated Feb 16, 2019)
Marginalia · personal ·
Writing these late night thoughts is as close as I get to making resolutions.
On Modesty And Imposter Syndrome
Oct 21, 2018
Marginalia · personal ·
Take a deep breath. Relax. You got this.
Sep 30, 2018
Marginalia [sauntering] · exploring ·
Last weekend I wandered the trails of Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park.
Sep 9, 2018
Marginalia [sauntering] · exploring ·
I sauntered up the main trail of Mount Si this weekend.
Aug 19, 2018
Marginalia [sauntering] · exploring ·
Island Center Forest contains roughly ten miles of trails. I walked about six of them yesterday. Today my feet hurt.
Aug 7, 2018
Marginalia · music · seen ·
Dog and I saw a Pearl Jam logo tag while walking near Easy Street Records this morning.
Jul 8, 2018
Marginalia [sauntering] · exploring ·
Today I explored Fauntleroy Park, a 28 acre park in West Seattle with some nice trails.
Theme Change and Pieces Section
Jun 29, 2018
Marginalia · site · buy me · drawing ·
Yeah I switched the theme back — with some changes. May take a bit for the CDN to catch up. Also still experimenting with how to organize things I want to sell.
Jun 10, 2018
Marginalia · personal ·
I stopped smoking cigarettes two weeks ago. For now I vape instead. Time to put down some notes about what other habits I had to adjust.
May 13, 2018
Marginalia · site ·
Mar 27, 2018
Marginalia · links ·
As mentioned on Twitter:
An hour and a half for a fifteen minute interview of which they used ten seconds for their two minute bit but OMG I'M ON TV
(and they finally stopped showing my number in the clear)
Sep 20, 2017
Marginalia · site ·
Trying to add Disqus comments once again. I adjusted permalinks, since the old
/:section/:year/:title/structure seemed to confuse Disqus. Here’s hoping. I assigned aliases to content so that old links should work.Aug 17, 2017
Marginalia · books ·
What have I been doing with my spare time? I've been reading books. Not too much. Mostly tech.
Backing The Flask Mega Tutorial Kickstarter
Jul 9, 2017
Marginalia · python ·
Miguel Grenbergs’ Flask Mega-Tutorial and book helped me understand using Python’s Flask microframework. Well, somewhat. My understanding would improve if I used it more. Haven’t taken advantage of the opportunity yet. Anyways - of course I decided to back his Kickstarter for updating the Flask Mega-Tutorial.
Jun 14, 2017
Marginalia · site · disqus ·
sigh Disqus discussions are hooking up to the wrong URLs again. Assigning discussions for posts to URLs that don’t point anywhere. Working on it, and also looking at alternate discussion tools.Amazon Donates Space For Mary's Place Home
May 11, 2017
My main code hobby project is for Mary’s Place, a local homeless shelter network in Seattle. It was immensely satisfying to see their director’s face when I visited Amazon this morning.
Mar 28, 2017
Marginalia · personal · site ·
New Twitter Account Just For The Site
Mar 18, 2017
Marginalia · site ·
Follow @randgeekery if Twitter is your news feed.
Mar 17, 2017
Marginalia · site · disqus ·
Disabling comments until I figure out why Disqus insists on loading the same discussion for all 2017 posts. Not crafts, just posts. I spent almost a week trying to figure this out, as multiple rounds of one day fixing followed by a couple days wondering if UrlMapper finished yet. Very frustrating. Comments are welcome via email or the social network links along each page.Maybe Ration My Time In Hot Take Land
Mar 13, 2017 (Updated Mar 15, 2017)
Marginalia · personal ·
I dunno, folks. Over the years I have seen so much outrage - sincere or feigned - on social media. Then there’s the echo chamber problem. Yeah. Nice thing about an RSS feed is that I’m guaranteed to see everything I subscribe to, but there’s no personal insult in unsubscribing.
I think maybe I could spend less time on Twitter and Facebook. Not give them up. They remain a source of great conversation. But this nonsense takes up brain that I just can’t spare. Some of my online friends cut themselves out completely, and they like it. Perhaps I should follow their example. Besides, each of them that moves on means one less bit of signal in the noise.
There is so much noise.
Nov 20, 2016
Marginalia · site ·
Another one of those “no I’m not dead” posts. Instead of writing I’ve been drawing quite a bit this year. The writing will resume. For now, enjoy a sample of my favorite sketches from the last several months.
Jun 21, 2016 (Updated Jun 13, 2018)
Watching YAPCNA videos, and the most important to me today is Ed Finkler’s talk about mental health among developers. His OSMI project - Open Sourcing Mental Illness - aims to improve workplace and community awareness and resources for mental health. Good stuff. Many domains and communities need this effort, and his chosen community is tech. Worth checking out.Oct 2, 2015
Marginalia · space ·
Scientists discovered Pluto had a moon when I was six years old. This is what they had to work with.
Mar 28, 2015
Marginalia · site ·
I enjoyed importing the coolnamehere content so much last weekend that I decided to import the posts from a neglected Blogspot blog this weekend. jekyll-import simplified the actual import process, though I still had a lot of manual cleanup to perform.
Mar 23, 2015
Marginalia · site ·
I got bored of the old coolnamehere pages effectively sitting outside of the site because of the way Jekyll - and pretty much every other static blogging system - treats pages as secondary to posts. It makes sense, anyways. Once you stop bikeshedding about where to put content in your elaborate directory structure, it gets easier to add stuff.
Starting The Coursera Programming Languages Course
Oct 3, 2014
Marginalia · personal ·
I signed up for the Programming Languages course by Coursera. I may even complete it. See, I signed up for a Scala course earlier this year, but did not get past the first video. That made me sad. Scala is one of those things that I would like to learn.
Jun 23, 2014
Marginalia · pelican · site ·
I know. I’m fickle. Maybe this one will stick for a while. Edit: Nope.
May 21, 2014
Marginalia · site ·
I’m not using Wordpress at the moment. Unless and until I change my mind, you should probably look here for the newest content.May 15, 2014
Marginalia · site · emacs · org ·
I have been exploring GNU Emacs recently. As part of that exploration, I decided to use o-blog. Why? Well. I want to blog more. I want to use Emacs more. I got tired of my WordPress blog. o-blog sits on top of Org mode, which is the Killer App of Emacs for me. Org mode is amazing. o-blog is nifty, and relatively easy to get started with. I have fiddled with the o-blog templates to suit my tastes. I replaced browser-side Less CSS with a bit of Sass at build time. Eventually I’ll port the Wordpress posts to o-blog and maybe the old static pages to something involving org-mode.
Fantastic Foods' Sloppy Joe French Bread Pizza Recipe
Apr 12, 2014
Marginalia · food ·
About ten years ago, my wife got me to start experimenting with vegetarian food. I started with what I knew best: boxed things. Fantastic Foods has a few tasty boxes such as mixes for sloppy joes and tacos.
Blogroll because what the heck
Mar 20, 2014
Marginalia · site ·
John Davidson asked me to link to his Rails Tutorial pages. Seems reasonable enough. Exit links are just in a sidebar menu for now. I may give them their own page when I have a half-dozen or so.Dec 26, 2013
Marginalia · emacs ·
Right. I am going to attempt to follow Ryan Macklin’s suggestion to write at least 250 words per day. They don’t have to be good words. Fortunately, I have this blog sitting here.
Aug 9, 2013
AlphaCard generously donated a badge printer & supplies for Mary’s Place day shelter in Seattle.
Jul 23, 2013
I’ve got a pretty nice flow here. It’s easy to make quick posts and have a mini blog along with the lengthy stuff - whenever I get around to those.
Jul 20, 2013
Yeah nothing to see here at the moment. I’m trying out BlogPress, since I want to start making more short posts. Most of them won’t be this short.Jun 8, 2013
Marginalia · site ·
I just wanted to mention that the old coolnamehere content has been uploaded. There is an explanatory note here on the blog, too.
coolnamehere -> Random Geekery
Jun 5, 2013
Marginalia · site ·
So I used to have another site. I also used to have a Yahoo email account. The domain name was registered under a Network Solutions account using the Yahoo account. All was well for years.