December 2, 2016

motorcycle learnings at 250 miles

Two new learnings at the 250mi point: The backpack straps down to the back! ![]({{ site.baseurl }}/assets/backpack_straps_s.jpg) The balance of the bike feels so much better with the backpack low and riding without weight on my shoulders is so much more comfortable. Ear Plugs are amazing! I noticed earplugs being worn on The Long Way Round and decided to try it out. It is really surprising how relevant noises (other cars, etc) make it through fine, but how much nicer it is to not have the wind noise!

December 1, 2016

Useful homebrew formula

Last week I was telling Paul about things I have brew installed on my work laptop. I pulled a full list as I was doing some upgrades and stuff this morning. Glancing over it a bit, here are some of my favorites/most usefuls: autojump for a usage-adjusting cd – given a partial string it just goes to the most-used directory with that prefix. I have autojump aliased to j to shorten it up even more.

November 30, 2016

KLR-650 first month & american gumball

Yesterday I finally got the title for my motorcycle and realized that I’d owned it for exactly one month! ![]({{ site.baseurl }}/assets/klr650_first_ride_s.jpg) So far, I haven’t done anything very adventureous – still getting used to riding again. I had a couple things that were making me nervous about it: The bike gets warm (>1/2 way on the heat gauge, but still significantly below the red) tooling around, usually on my commute home in the evening.

October 14, 2016

stocks and options from 30k feet

One of my friends at work asked me if I had any book recommendations for learning about stocks and options. Mentally, I break trading down into two general classes of trading: index-type and “exotic” trading. By exotic trading, I mean picking individual stocks/options and actively trading. This runs counter to the more conservative buy-and-hold, index-based, hands-off approach. For the exotic trading, I learned most of what I know from a class with Professor W.

September 26, 2016

streaks vs statistical streaks

Hacker News et al are obsessed with streaks, but I think they have some problems: A single regression resets to zero. There’s not an easy way to gradually ramp up your streak-commitment over time. I prefer a different approach: statistical streaks. Suppose I made a commitment to do something differently on 2016-08-26, and did it for the next 5 days; then my 30-day statistical streak avg = 0.

April 24, 2016

i fucking love mangoes

Specifically, the Philippine Brand Dried Mangoes. They are amazingly good. But there is a slight problem. Costco sells them in 30 oz bulk packs, which is 20 servings at 160 calories/serving or 3200 calories total. Left to my own devices and lack of self discipline, I could probably eat (and subsequently regret eating) the entire bag of mangoes. I need a self-check to disgust myself and impose a bit more of a speedbump than an already-opened bag provides.

April 15, 2016

switching over to https

One of the things I’ve been meaning to do forever is switch things over to https. By “things”, I mean the set of websites I run for some family and friends. I tried it out with my personal website first, then flipped over the rest. implementation notes I used the letsencrypt start guide to generate the certificates. Modified the nginx config to: a. serve ssl/https traffic on port 443 for the given domain with the proper https certificates/etc.

January 2, 2016

inspired by magicmirror

I’ve been really inspired by the MagicMirror project. The basic idea is getting a piece of mirror glass and putting a monitor and computer behind it, then having a status page show some pertinent information about the day (like weather, calendar, news, etc). So it looks like a regular mirror, but when you look closely, it shows the extra information. I’d like to put one in the bedroom to replace our tall mirror.

December 30, 2015

individual sealed ibuprofen & zyrtec

Today I made some individually sealed ibuprofen (Advil) and cetirizine (Zyrtec) packets: ![ibuprofen]({{ site.baseurl }}/assets/ibuprofen_s.jpg) I did it by cutting about a two inch strip of vacuum sealing bag, then doing several perpendicular seals far enough apart that I could pop a couple of pills in it. ![ibuprofen strip]({{ site.baseurl }}/assets/ibuprofen_strip_s.jpg) Why bother? Mostly, I want to keep a few doses in my backpack / car, but don’t want them turning into dust.

December 29, 2015

first canning adventure: brandied pears

I’ve been wanting to get into canning for a while. It was finally time to take the plunge. I made brandied pears. One of the really striking things is how simple the ingredients list is: pears lemon juice sugar water brandy Here’s the setup just before I started: ![canning prep]({{ site.baseurl }}/assets/canning_prep_s.jpg) Allison got me a pressure canner/cooker for Christmas: ![pressure canner]({{ site.baseurl }}/assets/pressure_canner_s.jpg) It’s huge! After I cooked the pears I packed them