Life After God by Douglas Coupland My rating: 5 of 5 stars I have an embarrassing number of highlights, underlines, and margin notes in this book. I’m a picky person with picky tastes, and yet this is one of those few books that just resonated with me deeply. It’s format is unique, which I think …
Author Archives: Rob
Cargo
I’m a sucker for a good zombie movie. There’s just something about that mix of post-apocalypse and body horror that makes for the perfect sub-genre.
Sharp Objects review
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn My rating: 4 of 5 stars This was a pretty great debut novel. I’m so impressed with Flynn’s sharp wit. She has this acerbic dissection of everyday relationships that is both hard to read, yet difficult to quit. As soon as I read Gone Girl, I was hooked on her …
de-Facebooking my life
I sometimes can be mistaken for a curmudgeon. Perhaps it comes with age. Perhaps it’s my field which breeds overly particular engineers obsessing about better ways of doing things.
TortoiseSVN + Escape = tears
So I’m nearly done committing my software changes using the normally amazing TortoiseSVN. I’m about 200 words into this tome, documenting all the arcane bits of changes that I feel will aid the future Rob and other devs understand why I did what I did. And what should I do at that ill-timed moment? I …
Cordifying battery things
In my house, we have a ton of “batteried” devices. Having small children, in this modern age, one tends to collect a lot of toys, tools, crafts, and associated appliances that require an array of batteries. Triple- and double-As are in high demand, though 9V and even the C cells are occasionally used. Don’t even get …
Einstein’s religious thoughts
I found some old collected daily calendar Einstein quotes that rang true to me recently. Enjoy… I think that a man’s moral worth is not measured by what his religious beliefs are, but rather by what emotional impulses he has received from nature. To sister Margarit Goelmer, Feb 1955 One cannot help but be in …
Android visual automation programming
My day job has me thinking about automation for a living . And while I try not to bring the office home with me, these concepts tend to follow me around.
Master vanity renovation
I replaced the old, nasty vanity and sink in our master bedroom with a new (to us) double sink. It took me forever to do, since I’m not so great at texturing and plumbing, but my wife was understanding with the slow progress. 🙂
The broken engineering interview process
Imagine yourself in an interview, sitting in front of 5-10 others of your field. Midway through, the group’s questions drift from the personal and work experiential to the assessing and cross-examining. They ask you to step up to The Whiteboard, marker in hand, and prove what you know. Never mind that you’re not fresh out …