Author: Rob
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Ukrainian Outsourcing
I had the most bizarre confrontation last year in my gym locker room — a place that is supposed to be a bastion of privacy, comfort, sometimes camaraderie — from which I haven’t really recovered. Charles is a jovial sort of guy. He’s in his mid to late 50s. He’s gregarious and extroverted, often seeking…
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The mystical comfort of music
Immediately following the 2016 US presidential election, the very last place I wanted to go to for comfort was my church. I’m not alone in this. I attend a fairly-conservative, mostly-white Republican Evangelical church in a similarly populated town. As a registered Democrat, I suddenly felt politically and ideologically “naked” among my fellow parishioners like…
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Customizing Chrome’s “new” tab
Ever bore of the new tab screen in Chrome? It’s what you’re presented with after doing a CTRL + T. Well, with the magic that is extensions, you’re free to change this. There are a host of replacements available on the Chrome Web Store. But I’ve always appreciated a low-tech, unobtrusive approach. I’ve used the…
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Email, the new Todo
Shockingly, over a year has elapsed since I last spoke about my digital life-hacking. That’s a pretty terrible commitment to the discipline of writing and contemplation. I can blame that on so many things: raising small, needy humans; steadily growing home-improvement lists; active social calendars; too many screens and not enough books. But the truth…
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The king is dead, long live the king.
What I’m reading a lot on social media is a very determined effort to falsely equivocate either Obama or Hillary Clinton with Trump (whether their characters, their campaigns, or their future presidencies). In my view, this is particularly disingenuous. To put Obama’s presence and stature or Clinton’s experience and dignity up against Trump’s impulsiveness…
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Mishandling errors
For the past 3 years, I’ve been working full-time as a software engineer. This has been a substantial, if not calculated, change for me. I’d been an hardware engineer for longer than I care to think about. Perhaps the biggest, while subtlest difference between the two career paths that I didn’t see coming is this: determinism. I…
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Day 30+: a postlude
(Copyright Vectorbelly Webcomics) While the rest of the world is preparing for super sportsing, I’m taking the opportunity to tinker. This post is a continuation of the GaSiProMo challenge I took part in a while ago. Today’s update brings in the next stage of that project with my OsRAM LED display: better packaging. The goal here is to…
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Darth Rob
In honor of this new Star Wars movie I keep hearing about, I thought I’d dig up some photos from my past, when I was braver and perhaps even nerdier in my love of Star Wars. Here is my costume from 1999…
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Day 30: final day
I’ve got most of the bugs ironed out in my display interface, but not all have been squashed in the driver portion. In other words, the method in which I can input text into the OsRAM is working nicely (I’m using a serial port console), but the nuts and bolts of how strings are sent to…
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The lack of file tags in Windows
So, I’m supposed to be working on this month-long challenge. But hey! I found some other project to work on. It’s in service of my recent computer switcheroo, with which I’m a little obsessed lately. Since recently switching from OS X on an iMac to Windows 10 on a laptop, I sorely miss file tagging.…