I don’t see my family as often since I’ve moved to San Francisco. This weekend I’m home for the Easter holiday. Its nice to see everyone. Additionally, I have a backlog of tech support for my parents and grandparents. I’ve installed software purchased months ago, done updates that they weren’t even [...]
Holiday Tech Support
April 11th, 2009Sarah Snow Stever
November 23rd, 2007I am very sad. Two weeks ago, my cousin Sarah had a stroke and died. She was 35, two years younger than me.
As kids, Sarah and I, (along with her sister Rachel) would spend weeks in the summer staying at my grandparents house, playing and doing the things that ten year olds do [...]
Michigan Taxes Graphic Design Services
October 1st, 2007The state of Michigan, in a bid to become the most confusing state to operate a business in, has passed a sales tax on a bizarrely random selection of services. These services include such illustrious professions as astrology services, social escort services, and graphic design services.
The enumerated list of taxable services (sec 3d) [...]
Ruby versus PHP or There and Back Again
September 23rd, 2007Well, I imagine that this opinion piece by Derick Silvers will cause some conversations: 7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails. The gist being that a big bang rewrite of an existing code base is always a risk and that Rails is optimized more for the greenfield case. [...]
reCAPTCHA – Combining Distributed Problem Solving with a Web Service
May 30th, 2007I ran into an interesting project this morning called reCAPTCHA. In the spirit of distributed computing solutions, such as folding@home, it tackles a difficult problem by splitting it up and farming the pieces out. What makes this interesting is that instead of having computers solve the problem, people do.
ReCAPTCHA actually tries to solve [...]
Where do you get your Wi-Fi?
May 6th, 2007Sometimes you just have to get out of the house or out of the office. And some of those times, you have to use the internet as well.
I’ve collected a (short) list of places around town that have Wi-Fi. I usually use the Wi-Fi at a small local coffee shop. They are [...]
Looking forward to 2007
January 4th, 2007Well, I’m finally back in town after the holidays. Let me tell you, I’m glad to be home. Between multiple holidays and taking my grandma to her cancer treatments in Ann Arbor, I was gone far too much of last month.
My Grandma is doing well. They used an experimental new procedure called [...]
The Coding Apprentice
March 29th, 2006Ok, maybe I watch too much reality TV, but I’d like to see a show called “The Coding Apprentice.”
Starting with 18 candidates, each week, they are randomly divided into teams of 2, 3, or 4 (perhaps solo on odd weeks). Then a charity is selected with a need for an application. Each team [...]
Hump Day Blues
February 1st, 2006I’m in a foul mood today. What good is having a blog if you can’t rant a bit?
To doctor X: We had an appointment at 11am. You called and asked us to change it to 10am. We were your first patient of the day, we came at 10 and you didn’t see [...]