Grasshopper lands
A ten story tall rocket hovers in the air and then returns safely to the launch pad. The future is now, and I’m amazed.
Continue readingRoderick on existential terror
Continue readingWhat I realized in that moment was that the lights of the city, the electric light, has formed a kind of dome over the cities where we live. And it is a protective dome, a protective shield, that shields us from full awareness of how deep and infinite space is. So we sit in our cities, and our electric lights have blanked out the sky, for us, and we no longer have first-hand experience of the existential terror that is available to you at any point in time if you just try and spend one night outside on the beach or in the forest.
Roderick on self-hatred
The route to thinking about, caring for, and contributing to, the happiness of other people, is found by first loving oneself. Continuous, inward-facing self-hatred helps no one.
That’s my paraphrase of John’s sentiment from Roderick on the Line episode 60, at about 1:08:00. He points specifically to the northwest during the grunge era. But that form of self-reflection continues to this day inside of chronic self-deprecants, of which I have too often been one. Recovering.
Continue readingJohn Hartford - Austin Minor Sympathy
Japan's incredible shrinking building
Guessing you’d have to construct the skyscraper with this capability initially, with a “cap” at the top that can be lowered as each level below it is dismantled. Very cool.
Continue readingThank You, Liz Lemon, for Being You
“She’s the type who can yell at her male boss and put him in his place, she’s the type who goes to bat for her friends, she’s the type who goofs around by pretending that a toy train is her robot penis and will wolf down entire sandwich in front of a TSA agent so she doesn’t have to throw it away before going through security.”
Blerg.
Continue readingFelt this earthquake yesterday evening
Came home before 5pm and plopped down on the futon. A few moments later felt the futon bouncing very slightly and heard the “ticking” of picture frames re-positioning against the acrylic wall paint. Thought it was activity at the nearby construction site, but they had all gone home for the day. Very cool!
Continue readingDon't trust your assumptions about yourself
Don’t trust your assumptions about yourself, and don’t apply them to others. They’re probably wrong.
– calinet6 on the Hacker News post, A (Short) Rant About Working Remotely
Continue readingApple's calendar file (iCal) with US Holidays
Perfect for importing into Google Calendar. Shhh, don’t tell! Landing page is here.
Continue readingProblems Solved in 2012
Wherein I recap the things I’ve done and learned this year as a software developer (mainly at work). I’ve fixed many bugs and uttered many curses. Through it all I’ve constantly strived to make the code a better place.
Amazon Web Services
- Video encoding instances Launch/Start when there’s a backlog, and Stop/Terminate when there’s not.
- Said goodbye to Amazon SQS for job queues, and hello to Redis. Hello consistency and speed.
- Learned that one must always specify timeouts for AWS calls. Especially for SimpleDB.
Node.js
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