90% is often the perfect amount

Tools of the trade – multi-brush, grout scraper, and broom Before (left) and after (right) cleaning the garden Still a long stretch of the garden path to clean It is spring time where I live, which besides chirping birds and blooming flowers means also spring cleaning. In particular, I have spent at 10-20 hours over the last several weeks cleaning the paths in our back yard. Over the winter…

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Closures in PHPUnit dataProviders

Today I was working on a PHPUnit test at work for testing Elasticsearch. In this case, I wanted to make sure that the data that I was indexing was findable. Basically I wanted to run a search for a given query and check that the results were as expected. I wanted to run this search and evaluate process for a number of different search terms. The only difference with each test would be the query…

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Roxanne

In the summer of 1998 I attended a music academy in Los Angeles for a week. I had met some of the teachers at the Percussive Arts Society Festival in Iowa earlier that year and impressed them, so they offered me a free ride. I just had to pay to get there and for a place to stay. My uncle lived in Los Angeles, so I stayed with him for a couple days before the camp started, which was quite fun. I…

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BASH history and GNU screen

I can’t remember exactly when or where I learned this. I would guess sometime between 5 and 10 years ago, while I was working at Nuance Communications. I likely learned it from stackoverflow.com, though it is possible I learned it from a colleague. I have been using GNU screen on a nearly daily basis at work for nearly that long. It is very helpful when connecting to a remote server with a…

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Found in Translation

Last July I had an accident which caused a traumatic brain injury. Since then I have recovered considerably. I spent three weeks in a rehab facility near Cologne in November. During that time I did lots of hiking, reading, writing, and thinking. While hiking, verse started coming into my head. The last time I wrote much poetry was when I was about 13, writing song lyrics for heavy metal songs. I…

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Twenty years ago today

Twenty years ago today I missed the University of Michigan vs. Ohio State University football game for a date with a stranger I met on the internet. It was the best decision of my life. I brought along a deck of cards and a cribbage board to the Cafe Verdé coffee shop in Ann Arbor, in case we ran out of things to talk about and needed a way to help pass the time. I didn’t need them. We talked for…

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How loud is a wind turbine?

Germany has a goal to stop using coal power plants by 2030. The plan is to install a bunch more solar panels and wind turbines. We already have quite a few wind turbines, but we need many more. According to many, the current bottleneck is not industry, but rather bureaucracy. It can several years to get approval to install a new wind turbine. Frequently, it involves citizens in the area…

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Panama sunrise

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I'm not creative

I’m not creative

Last year I hear my son say “I am not creative”. I think he is wrong. I think what he really meant was that he is not that interested in traditional art projects like drawing and painting. Since he doesn’t enjoy them, he doesn’t do them often, and therefore he is not particularly good at them. I am quite similar – I actually did really enjoy drawing when I was in elementary school, but once I got…

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TIL: Elasticsearch timeouts

Lately at work at Tumblr I have been working on creating feeds of posts based on the country in which they were published, or the country in which users liked or reblogged a post. I didn’t want to do a simple filter, but rather use a boosting query to boost localized content, while also accounting for the fact that if there wasn’t any content published from your country, you would still see…

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Don't walk around with empty hands

Don’t walk around with empty hands

In the winter of 1999, I worked as a rough carpenter for about 5 weeks. I was going to be studying in Germany for a semester, and I had a couple months off before I left. My dad used a connection at church to get me a job for a little while to earn a little bit of pocket money. They told me all I needed was a tool belt and a hammer, which my dad graciously paid for. I learned a lot in those 5…

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Design details

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Weeds?

The neighbor across the street from my apartment planted some Fox Glove , which some people consider a weed. This is actually a pretty common practice in Germany, where people will plant some flowers right up against their building. Before it started flowering, another neighbor was kidding him about not weeding by his house, and he mentioned that he had actually planted them, but I couldn’t tell…

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WordCamp Europe

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Thinking, waiting, fasting

Several months ago I re-read the book Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I had read it in my first-year tutorial in college back in 1997 (an English translation), and decided after 25 years, I would read the original in German. I didn’t remember too many details from my previous read, but I did remember the general themes, and as I read, some of it began to become familiar. I have read a fair amount of…

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MacOS tip of the day: Preview redact and combine

MacOS tip of the day: Preview redact and combine

Yesterday I was preparing my taxes, and wanted to deduct my donation to the WikiMedia foundation. I couldn’t find an actual receipt, but I did have my bank statement, so I decided to just black out the other purchases. After I put a black box on them, Preview gave me a popup saying that the text would not actually be deleted, and that maybe I want to use the redact tool. I don’t know how long…

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In Living Color

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