Circle Around the Rockies: Seeking Fresh Powder Edition

Mountain Collective? Check! Car? Check! Hotels? Check! Snowboarding gear? Check! This is the second instalment of the yearly Spring Break Snowboarding series. Last year’s was about the West Coast, this year it was all in the Rockies. I went with my amazing friend Michael again, and we had an absolute blast! The Mountain Collective, for those of you that joined this time around, is a loose group of ski resorts that all banded together to combat the evil empire, a. Continue reading

Firewire Unibrow Timbertek - The Review

It seems impossible that I’ve had the Unibrow for just two months! It’s grown on me so fast, it feels like we’ve been best buddies for a very long time. So here my impressions of my new BFF in the ocean. First Impressions I wrote about the Unibrow briefly when I mentioned Firewire Demo Days. They hold them frequently enough that I got a chance to form an opinion. Not a good one at first: the board is very narrow and it takes a while to get used to it. Continue reading

Legendary Creatures (all letters)

Legendary creatures for no reason< Letter Main Candidate Secondary Comments A Alp Antaeus B Banshee Basilisk C Centaur Chukwa, Chimera D Dragon E Elf Encantado F Firebird Faun, Fairy G Garuda Gorgon, Goblin, Gnome, Griffin H Hydra Hippocamp, Hesperides I Incubus Imp, Irin, Inugami J Jinn K Kraken Kinnara, Kobold L Lilith Lindworm M Mermaid Mogwai, Manticore, Mandrake, Minotaur N Numen Nawao O Ogre Ouroboros P Pegasus Phoenix Q Qilin Quetzalcoatl R Rompo Revenant S Sphinx Siren, Sandman T Titan Thunderbird U Unicorn V Vampire Valkyrie W Werewolf Wyvern X Xana Y Yale Z Zombie

Turning a Fixed Width Site to Variable Width Using Web Technology

I love my Y50. The 4k screen resolution gives me both a chance to see a lot more on a single page and much better and crisper text if I want to see it normal size. The only downside? Software that assumes pixel sizes. It doesn’t really matter what I am looking at: anything that comes with predefined pixels turns into a microscopic smudge. It’s completely impossible to realize what the buttons do in the Gimp, for instance. Continue reading

The Nazi Wonder Weapon Revealed: Die Glocke

Research for the new novel is almost completed. There are going to be twists and turns that will make a helicopter spin, and I decided to keep with the strength of In the Mission: a novel about a deep mystery wrapped in a conundrum, where science parallels art which parallels the otherworldly. Somewhere in the depth of the research (and it goes very deep), I found myself mired in a strange story. Continue reading

Humans: a Sexual History and the New Moon Theory

There is an interesting principle in biology, named Haeckel’s Recapitulation Theory: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. In simple terms, that means that you can read the whole evolutionary tree leading to a species just by looking at successive development stages of the fetus. We start looking like single-cell individuals, “evolve” into bunches of cells, eventually “turn” into fish, then lizards, then monkeys, etc. It’s not as simple as that, and the principle/theory has been refuted/rejected. Continue reading

Speedtesting Your ISP, Command Line Version

I currently pay an obscene $66 for 25 MBit/sec Internet. On top of that, I had to pay a mandatory $99 equipment fee for an enormous modem, and another $99 fee for mandatory installation. Just as I was done with my first year promotional price and things “reverted” to the “regular” price of $66, I received a message. I had been underbilled, apparently, but I was lucky and they were not going to backcharge me. Continue reading

Why I Gave Up On Facebook

You probably noticed if you follow me on Facebook: I’ve barely been on there in the past two years. I’ll log on, once in a while, mostly because I remember it’s someone’s birthday and I wish them well on the channel I know they use. But for myself, I am over it. Why? There was a time when Facebook was cool. That was, of course, before I was on it. It’s when you had to have a . Continue reading

What Auxiliary Language Should You Learn and Why

As you may know, among the many languages I speak there is Esperanto. When the average American hears the name, the reaction is probably either Huh? for those that never heard about it, or the general notion of a failed project for those who have. Also, in general, you’ll find that those that have an active opinion will say that nobody needs a made-up language as a form of communication any longer, since everybody speaks English. Continue reading

Emergency Update

In case you were on here yesterday, for a brief period (a very long hour for me) the site was down. What happened? A confluence of things: The main hard drive filled up with an ever-expanding collection of source code I split said source code onto several machines, requiring a re-installation of the SCC software I ended up with repositories incompatible with the old version of the SCCS So I had to update the operating system Which updated everything, making my configuration files pretty much unusable Here is the skinny. Continue reading