Bussing home

Trying the WordPress Android app after about a year. Seems much better.

Tara says she and the kids made a cake today, and I'm pretty excited to have a piece. :)

Why Makespace is crazy-useful

UPDATE: In 2016, Makespace discontinued the service I described below. It still operates in certain select cities. Not mine though, so I had to get all my stuff delivered back to me. It was quite disappointing.

I keep meaning to share this. When we moved up to Portland, we knew we were getting into a smaller apartment for 2 adults and 2 kids. There just wouldn't really be any extra storage for out of season clothes. I was getting worried, then I came across Makespace.

Makespace is a service where, for $6.25 a box per month, you can ship boxes to them for free, they store them, then when you want one back they'll ship it back to you. The only thing you need to pay for in addition to that $6.25/month per box is when something is shipped back, and the longer it is stored in their warehouses the less costly it is to return to you.

We use it a lot for storing out of season clothing, our wedding attire, and some things we can't really utilize in our current apartment but we can use in the future.

This is a discount code link that gets you $75 off if you're interested: https://makespace.com/invite/5Gn/

Working at Dark Horse Comics

After a great time working with the most excellent Ben and Blake at The Canary Collective since 2013, I've moved to a Senior Developer position at Dark Horse Comics. I started last Monday.

It's been a great experience so far! Besides the fact that employees receive large stacks of comics just because, the rest of the devs and staff are pretty great. The stack is really impressive, self hosted openstack installation with a large number of servers to serve up all the digital comic content. Also I'm being introduced to monitoring and alerting tools I wasn't aware of like New Relic, Sentry, etc. It's good stuff. They also believe in cross-training, so I get to pair program with people in the team who use entirely different programming languages. It is awesome and I'm excited to grow my knowledge base.

Having a commute has been a nice change too actually. It gives me time to decompress before arriving home with the family, so I can be more present and not thinking about work elements so much.

All in all, very happy. :)

Best question I've ever seen

Today I came across the best question I've ever seen:

Would a mermaid be kosher?

The fascinating part is this issue was addressed before the year 200AD.

Monday Music; inMomentum

Morning! Listening to this to power my Monday. It helps me to zone in on what I'm working on.

Sunday Adventure

Great walk this morning to Albina Coffee with the whole family. Started off quite foggy but ended up being beautiful blue skies on the way home.

fixed some bugs

I fixed two outstanding bugs for Nickelpinch and also tested an enhanced feature, and it totally works! Marching towards launch.

Loss of focus

I am working on something, deep in the process. Suddenly, I hit a wall and I need to look up an answer via online documentation, Stack Overflow, etc. I switch apps to my browser, and there it is, all the tabs I had open before. "Oh yeah, that was a neat article I should finish reading that. Oh, this link looks interesting.."

Five minutes later I totally forgot why I left my code editor, and go back to it. "Oh right, I need to look up X." I switch apps to my browser. Sometimes the cycle repeats.

Does this happen to anyone else? I just realized the breakdown is at that moment when you see all your old tabs. What I need is a hotkey to open a new browser window and just use that. I could also close all tabs before leaving the browser, but sometimes I need to go back and reference something.

Either way, it is infuriating.

Passed by

So my bus drove by my stop with a 'Drop Off Only' message. Guess everyone wanted to bus in today. At least it's not raining!

Lunch out, and other things

Went to lunch with Sven from Forge today. Had some really good conversation on home design, designing for resiliency, etc. A kindred spirit!

Tonight I'm really wanting to finish some debugging with Nickelpinch to get it to v1.0. Seriously and for reals, it is only 2 hrs left.

Once it's done I'm am not sure how I will proceed with it. I know I should revamp nickelpinch.org and update screenshots, etc. That all sounds horrible though.

Documentation is needed. A more accurate and concise "Why this could be helpful for you".

I'll post an update to see what I actually end up doing.