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.
Category Archives: Personal
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 …
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.
Redesigning our family finance
The art of personal finance has been a topic of interest for me for most of my adult life. Some people feel strongly about it, choosing all manner of tools, software, processes, etc.; while others employ no real system at all, opting for a more intuitive sense of financial decision-making. That’s a wide spectrum of …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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…