I’m a career technologist, writer, and hobbyist dj with about a dozen other hobbies as well.
- 1 part Drambuie
- 1 part cheap scotch
About Me
The Ides of March
Twenty years ago today - the Ides of March, 2002 - I enlisted in the Army National Guard. Unlike most of the young men and women going through in-processing that day in Boston, I was already a college graduate, I was already married, and I …
Fast Food
When I was in high school, I had a fast food job in the local shopping mall. I was in Danbury, CT, which was close enough to New York City to attract a lot of business from urbanites looking for a change of scenery on the weekends. This made for very …
2019: Year of the Spartan
In October of 2018, I got my annual physical and came face-to-face with the reality of my current weight and fitness levels. I was at 30 BMI and at my lowest amount of regular physical activity in years. The trend was not good.
My wife encouraged me …
TGIF
Here at The Internet Shipyards, Friday night is cocktail night. Today’s special guest: the Rusty Nail, also known as the World’s Simplest Cocktail.
I can’t overstate how cheap the scotch should be. If it …
That App You Love – Headed to DevConf.cz!
Starting back in September I published a series of articles for the Red Hat Developer Blog under the series title “That App You Love”. I’m psyched to announce that “That App You Wrote”, my followup presentation, has been accepted as a talk at …
A Sunbeam for Mia
We lost Mia today. I’ve always read posts like this with some amount of indifference because in the back of my head I am thinking “this is just an animal” and “this is not a person”. And so I forgive you for feeling the same way. I understand that …
Advice From an Open-Source Hiring Manager
In Decemeber of 2014 I transitioned from fifteen years of being a developer into being one of the people managers on a really amazing team here at Red Hat. All told, my first year in this role has been a tremendous learning experience for me. If you …
Comments on Backing Up a Linux Laptop
My primary workhorse right now is an HP Omen running Fedora 22. Thinking and talking about how to restore my work environment from a total failure, I came to the conclusion that there are three primary things that need to be preserved…
Item 1: …
New Challenges, New Tools
I almost feel like a traitor, which is a weird way to feel about consumer electronics. But my next laptop is not going to be a MacBook. Our current development work on OpenShift requires easy access to a docker service, and Boot2docker just doesn’t …
iCloud “Family Sharing”: Great Feature Unless You Use iTunes Match
Family Sharing provides users with a way to share purchases from their iCloud/iTunes account with up to five other people. Additionally, this feature enables you to create iCloud accounts for children, and to manage the purchases and content …
Where to Post? Finding Yourself Amongst Ello, Facebook, and the Glut of Social Media
Ello is a social platform that has been the subject of some buzz recently. Either by design or by accident, Ello is squarely positioned as the anti-Facebook, which immediately places it in a similar space in people’s minds. That’s a great deal for …
TL;DR: Stop Expecting Achievements to Make You Happy
A moment of clarity from the folks at HuffPo…
> Here’s the best part: When you detach happiness from achievement, these five things that happen are the key ingredients to success. Disconnecting happiness from achievement is the best way to achieve …
OS X to Fedora 20: The User Experience, Pt. 2
Just tuning in? Have a look at Part 1 to find out how I installed Fedora 20 on a MacBook Air and why I am so interested in trying to duplicate or even surpass the user experience that I previously enjoyed with OS X.
The Cloud
Cloud-based mail, …
OS X to Fedora 20: The User Experience, Pt. 1
A little background here: I have been a Mac enthusiast for a number of years now. I would not say that I am religious about OS X, but if the OS X user experience is a philosophical application of “opinionated software”, then I find myself in …
Frozen, Victorious
Bastion shook his head, and the ghastly images faded away. Glancing up, he could see that the others were watching him. No one was shocked or concerned; they wore their professional detachment like masks. He blinked, glanced up at the cold winter sun …
Protecting Important Data
My recipe for not losing important stuff on my home desktop system…
Redundant disks
I set up a pair of disks in a RAID 1 configuration to be the “home” folder on my system. RAID arrays can be accomplished numerous ways. I do this in software …
How not to optimize a site with AJAX
I’ve inherited a project that is seeing some performance issues. We knew this was at least partly to blame on the UI, but most of the problem is down in the application. Fine; we’ve got a plan for the application-level issue and …
The Hospital
The quiet evening stands still; a tapestry A history woven in sodium light A memory
Hospitals never used to bother me; I would follow my Dad to the nurses station Wait quietly for him to conduct his rounds and watch people get better.
You never got …
CMSART in Worcester Pulse
My search and rescue team, and more specifically, one of our most capable and dedicated members, got some great press in this article. If you live in New England and are interested in volunteering with a search and rescue team, check out the Central …
It's who you are
Last Friday, my dad performed the last surgery of a career that has spanned over thirty years. By my conservative guess, based on a minimum of two scheduled surgeries per week plus countless emergency room calls, his total career count would have to …
A thought exercise in film
Got this idea from drama_kween - here’s a quote from each of 15 different movies that I like. I’ve picked some fairly obscure ones (movies and quotes); good luck with your guesses. When you’re out of guesses, you can follow the …
Why yes, this -is- the right week to tear out all the plumbing...
Thursday morning we discovered serious water damage in our living room ceiling, directly below the upstairs bathroom. Annika called the insurance company and they had their emergency response crew out to assess the damage around 5 on the same day. …
Phone status
I sent out mail to a bunch of folks today to let them know that our home phone is offline for the time being. If I forgot to mail you, well, our home phone is offline for the time being.
SunRocket, we hardly knew ye and now we’d like to give …