Archive for 2014

Apparently titanium rods are tougher than the bits in my drill press. Who woulda thought that?

I have never understood the faulty logic that just because I have time to work for myself for free that I should, by extension, have time to work for free for random people I meet.

Converting an old Lenovo X61 in to a Ubuntu box for experimental work. Though I may junk it and just buy a cheap $200 ASUS T100 as a replacement. The price of capable hardware keeps falling so dramatically that often it is not worth the salvage work to re-purpose an older device.

Nixie tubes – they hurt when plugged in and you touch the wrong bit of metal.

Loving on PhantomJS today. Wish the integration between NodeJS and PhantomJS were tighter, but happy that it works at all. Now if I can just figure out how to convert this Markdown to a PDF I will be happy. Any suggestions? Oh, what am I working on? A little app that takes my blog posts…

Warlords of Draenor showed us that the Horde can be quite orc-anized when they need to be. Hah! I made a funny.

I often get asked by students about career advice: Learn to write a memo. Join Toastmasters International. Show up. Don’t let other people distract you.

Stop trying to set goals and start setting a direction. Goals show you a fuzzy future of where you are trying to get to. A direction shows you where you will most likely end up.

I have always found it hard to teach software engineers that “measure twice, cut once” is a good rule to live by.

Ooops! Ran out of demi-glace. Time to make a new batch. Well this going to be 3 days I won’t get back. However… Demi-glace itself is mighty unimpressive. It is a foundational ingredient in many sauces and dishes, and without it, a lot of French cooking would be the poorer for it. The French have…

If your start-up is in “stealth mode” it means you don’t have any traction and aren’t generating any either.

Never tell the guy who is president of the incubator and an ex-engineer that started one of the Fortune 500 that “learning to program is a waste of my time. I should just be coming up with the ideas and telling everybody else what to do.” It was a cringe worthy moment for everyone in…

Want to get better at what you do? Join Toastmasters International.

A CTO of a start-up that doesn’t do any engineering is akin to an Executive Chef who doesn’t cook. How can you take the CTO seriously when they strategize about a technology solution? Or the Executive Chef seriously when they tell you how to season a dish? In a start-up, you’re not here to pontificate,…