Sep 18, 2026

[draft]

Sep 17, 2026
Creatures of a day! What is anyone?
What is anyone not? A dream of a shadow
Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men
A gleam of splendour given of heaven,
Then rests on them a light of glory
And blessed are their days.
Pindar, Pythian 8
Sep 17, 2026

A brief programming note

Sep 16, 2026

[draft]

Rhyming “ocean” with “ibuprofen” is among the reasons I love Phoebe Bridgers.

Jan 5, 2026

React's "missing" useOnMount & useOnUpdate hooks

I have recently been slowly converting some old class-based React components to hooks-based functional components as part of some broader changes, and added some custom hooks to help migrate some legacy patterns that depended on class-component lifecyle methods like componentDidMount and componentDi… read the rest

Oct 30, 2025

Shaker side tables

Years ago, my step-dad made me a walnut side table in a Shaker style (he made all his kids & step-kids different pieces of furniture to remember him by):

Walnut side table
The walnut side table with my step-dad, Dick.

As gifts for my mother, sister, & brother-in-law I made a set of 4 tables built on the same pattern in… read the rest

Nov 30, 2023

Cometeer

I recently learned about Cometeer, a new take on instant coffee, from a James Hoffman video. I didn’t get to participate in the taste test he organized using Cometeer to ensure consistency across partipants, but I thought it would be an interesting way to try some new roasters that aren’t locally av… read the rest

May 6, 2023

Recent woodworking projects

I’ve recently (as in “over the last year-ish”) finished several projects I’m somewhat satisfied with. I’m slowly turning an ash tree that used to stand in my family’s yard (and contained my childhood treehouse) into furniture for my own apartment & some for family as well.

read the rest
Apr 18, 2022

iOS to Android and back again

I recently bought an iPhone 13 Mini, and I’m a bit grumpy about it.

I owned 5 different iPhones between 2008 and 2017. By 2017, I hadn’t been using OS X for a while (I’d switched back to Linux due to a general frustration with Macs feeling like increasingly locked-down machines on top of a few years … read the rest

Feb 7, 2022

SShing to unpredictable IPs behind a bastion

A pretty common security measure for cloud infrastructure is an SSH bastion: you have a bunch of servers you may need to SSH to at times, but you obviously don’t want all your servers open to the public Internet, so you designate one server as the SSH bastion, which can be appropriately hardened and… read the rest

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