Executive summary: Dissatisfied with my blog’s response time, I looked into a variety of options. For about a month, I tried a wpengine experiment whereby I moved everything to them. It didn’t work out, but I learned a lot along the way. I’ve been dissatisfied about the page load times of my blog for a long […]
WPEngine experiment Read More »
Since I’m starting a new major project, the family wanted to spend a lot of time on a staycation this weekend. One of the activities was a field trip to Creation Station, a store with, well, bunches of stuff that you would have tossed out, except when you see a lot of them neatly arranged, it
Hard Drive Destruction Read More »
Long ago, I hit the threshold where the number of accounts I had and needed passwords for exceeded my ability to remember them. I thought it reasonable, then, to have tiers of passwords: Banking and financial – alphanumeric, mixed-case, non-alpha characters. An unpronouncable base plus an unique addition for each institution. Shopping (where a
As GPS-enabled phones become more popular, there have been a lot of geocaches placed by people using phones. Many of these will have serious “adjustments” to their posted coordinates because the person placing it just took a single reading, using whatever their phone was reporting and called it good. Usually these adjustments are anywhere from
My first iPhone hide Read More »
The other day I came across Stefan Wehrmeyer‘s very interesting tool, Mapnificent, which estimates how far you can go by public transportation in a specific period of time (defaulting to 15 minutes). There is an option to indicate you have a bicycle available. Obvious uses of the tool are looking at commute times and evaluating
Since the phone tracks where I’ve been, I thought it’d be fun to map it out using Pete Warden’s iPhoneTracker application. I spend the most time in the Pacific Northwe’t: I had forgotten about my trips to San Jose: While I was in Houston and New Orleans (separate trips), there was some opportunistic geocaching, spreading
iPhone 4 travel map Read More »
When I first heard someone mention the term dolphin kick, I thought it was a reference to the 1980s Patrick Duffy show, Man from Atlantis. The BBC says the dolphin kick “replaces a standard underwater leg kick with a whipping motion that minimizes water resistance.”[1] It’s a little easier to make sense of this if
King Neptune, outside Mardis Gras Land A few weeks ago, I spent a week in New Orleans at Supercomputing 2010. (Sometimes my job has perks.) I wrote a really long summary of this for internal use, but thought I’d share some of my notes: Jack Dongarra of Oak Ridge National Labs offered his perspective