Uncategorized Woodburn Oregon Tulip Festival 2019 This morning I got up around 5:30AM to get to the Woodburn Tulip Festival around 7AM to try and catch some sun between weeks of rain while the tulips were near their peak in the fields. It was muddy and I was slipping like crazy but I really enjoyed
Uncategorized A glorious pi hole I recently heard about an intriguing project called pi-hole. You use a cheap tiny raspberry pi computer that runs on your local network, and it handles all your DNS. It's essentially just a database of ad servers that run as a blocklist after grabbing DNS from popular services
Uncategorized American healthcare still sucks I picked up my prescriptions yesterday and my new health plan gave me a 90 day supply of pills. This is how it used to be, but for the past 6 years my previous plan only gave out pills for 30 days at a time. Though it sounds minor, it&
Uncategorized Stubborn thinking There's a glorious plan for a rails-to-trails project in my neck of the woods in Oregon. It's been planned out for years and funds have been raised. For good projects like this, there are so many available grants (in the millions of dollars) that the county
Uncategorized Optimizing for outrage I'm dismayed to see Twitter and Quora optimizing for outrage lately in their quests to keep users engaged and using their services at any cost. Twitter has made two recent changes that prize outrage over user happiness. The first is inserting recent trending news into my list of
Uncategorized Content moderation has no easy answers This morning I read Casey Newton's expose of Facebook moderation problems at the Verge. Let me be clear upfront: content moderation is tough and I have no idea how to solve it at internet scale—in fact I'm not even sure it's possible to
Uncategorized Two months with Blue Apron I'm coming to around to meal kits about five years too late, but in an effort to help share the dinner workload at home, around the new year I decided to try out Blue Apron twice a week at first, and now three times a week. Going into
Uncategorized A stupid Internet of Things story Recently my Nest thermostat started getting aggressive about going into Eco or Away mode to save energy. Normally, it's probably fine but our winter has been a bit chilly this year and I've started to notice. I'll be working in my home office for
Uncategorized One Moto I went to the One Motorcycle Show in Portland this past weekend. It was an interesting mix of bikes of all shapes and sizes and styles. It was held in a huge warehouse with probably 7 or 8 giant rooms filled with bikes, but was choked with people and tough
Uncategorized Emoji magic This Emoji Mosaic site is really incredible. I don't know how someone on a free github install created something so magical, but it takes any image and turns it into a mosaic made up of emoji. It works best with high contrast photos of recognizable things, so I
Uncategorized Cars are boring af now At the Portland Auto Show last night, I spent hours jumping into and out of pretty much every car on the show floor from every manufacturer present showing off their lines. Growing up in Southern California at the heart of car culture, I've been enamoured with cars my
Uncategorized Advanced operators, still useful in this day and age While Google increasingly tries to guess at what you're searching for, it's good to be reminded there are still a such thing as special search operators and Google still supports 42 of them. I've been using the web now for 25 years and almost
Uncategorized The sharing economy I stayed in my first airbnb in SF last night (hotels were sold out because of a urology conference) Thoughts after an eventful first night: * It came with a Nest thermostat, which hundreds of random people have used, making the task of guessing what temps everyone wants at what time
Uncategorized My year in movies Late in 2017 I remembered I'd always had an account at Letterboxd, but I barely used it in the past and didn't know what I'd ever use the site for. But in early January, I decided that I'd log every film I
Uncategorized How are stories kept a mystery in your mind? I woke up from a nightmare where my daughter was injured and it “shocked” me awake. I was having a pleasant dream about a day walking around with family in Montreal, a city I’ve never visited before. It was lovely and fun for what seemed like ages, until a
Uncategorized A visit to the Olympic Peninsula I've lived in Oregon for over 15 years now, and I realized in all my trips to Seattle, I'd never explored anything further west than Olympia, in the middle of the state. I've always wanted to visit Olympic National Park and I knew it&
Uncategorized X-treme BMX Mary Poppins The new Mary Poppins has been out for a week so I'm gonna talk about the only WTF moment for me: the extreme sports moment in it (skip this if you consider a critique of a scene a spoiler) At one point in the film, they need to
Uncategorized The Great War I saw Peter Jackson’s WWI movie They Shall Not Grow Old where they restored clips frame-by-frame and colorized them, and then combined those visuals with audio recordings of soldiers talking about the war, and on the surface it was an interesting project that really brought home how young everyone
Uncategorized hashtag rich guy goals Lately I've thought of all the ways my life would change if I ever became a rich guy. Think of this as an action plan, if I ever got to act this way. It's sort of like becoming a prepper, it's just I'
Uncategorized My first second line One of the best experiences on my recent trip to New Orleans was getting to witness a second line brass band parade from start to finish. I was there with a friend documenting the work done by the social clubs that put them on, and as much I tried to
Uncategorized Visiting the Whitney Plantation/Slavery Museum When I read Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy a few years ago, I remember being shocked not just by the stories about today's justice system, but the revelation that the first slavery museum in the US was opened to the public just a few years ago. Hundreds
Uncategorized Nine years It was nine years ago today that I fell at home after passing out, and later learned I had a tumor growing at the base of my brain. Since then, it's been good news as a drug regimen helped shrink the tumor and restore my hormone levels. I&
Uncategorized What do the new emoji mean? I've been a fan of emoji for many years, and every year I love seeing the new ones get released. They enter our phones and most of them are pretty descriptive, but you never know how people will adopt them, which of them will hit meme status, and
Uncategorized *Spoilers* for season 2 of Patriot on Amazon Don't open this post until you've watched the entire second season of Patriot, and then only after you've watched season one as well. It's the most fucked up comedy/action movie-like TV show there is. Smart and funny, and thought-provoking too.