Working Title

brief notes on things
  • Reopening statement

    Here’s how I see the reopening question:

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  • Plague Journal: Day 12

    By my calculations, we have been under restrictions since March 25th. This is some of my current thinking about the pandemic and the response to it.

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  • New Projects

    We are all finding new ways to cope with the current crisis. I’ve started a few projects this year to keep my mind off viruses.

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  • Happy Holidays

    It used to be mildly entertaining watching the country tear itself apart. Now it’s just boring and tedious. For those of you caught up in the current impeachment nonsense (and it is all nonsense, on both sides) I’d like to remind you that what you’re watching is two sides arguing about power neither of them deserves or has used for your benefit. We are less safe, less free, and more uncertain that we’ve been in the course of my lifetime.

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  • The Usual Chaos

    Here I am, up at 2:30am again. Lots of stuff going on this week, time for a brain dump.

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  • New blog theme, now with 90% less content

    Time for a change. I’ve updated the blog theme, and revised some of the content. All of the old beer review posts are gone now, because it didn’t make sense to keep them around.

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  • kubernetes experiments

    I’ve been playing around (learning) kubernetes, and decided to start a project that woud have some practical application. Unfortunately, most of the kubernetes tutorials that you find on the Internet fall into one of two categories:

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  • blog reboot

    It’s been a while.

    I know this about myself: I’m easily distracted. I also know that my drive to journal and blog has diminished quite a bit in the past 15 years. There was a time when, between my public blog, posts on other Internet forums, and my personal (handwritten) journal, virtually every aspect of my life was in some way being recorded.

    I could talk about the circumstances that caused me to change there, but it would take a whole book to explain everything, and frankly, the details are both painful and boring to me at this point.

    I’ve continued to bake, and there should be some new posts about that soon.

    I’ve taken a full-time position, so my life has settled down from the constant hustle of consulting/contracting.

    I’ve settled into my new home, 2500 miles from where I’ve spent most of my life.

    My children are grown. We’ve burried a dog, and adopted a kitten.

    We’ve been busy, but (apart from “social media”, which seems both pervasive and impenitrable these days,) much of that will go undocumented.

    I’ve been dabbling in golang. I’ve written a bit of python code. I’ve learned ansible.

    I’m going to try and keep this updated more frequently. That’s a promise I’m making to myself.

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  • Another Rye Bread

    Sourdough Rye. This loaf looked like a failure, but the taste and texture are prefect NY rye.

    A post shared by Jim Nicholson (@thejimnicholson) on

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  • Spelt Bread

    Spelt bread. https://goo.gl/i320NH

    A post shared by Jim Nicholson (@thejimnicholson) on

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  • Rye Bread

    I’ve started a project to come up with a half-decent rye bread recipe. In all my years of bread machine usage, I’ve never come across a rye bread result that actually … tasted and looked like rye bread, I decided to come up with my own. My bread machine attempts have been unmitigated failures, though, so I’ve abandoned automation for the old-fashion method. This is my first attempt.

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  • A Christmas Poem

    This year
    we managed to get
    about as far away
    from Bethlehem as you
    can get and still
    not come up against
    someone’s silly border enforcement.

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  • Better Onion-baked Chicken

    Ingredients:

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  • Drive to Oregon Day 1

    Moving across a country as large as the United States is a hard thing, especially when you carry the accumulated possessions of a lifetime. We are being relocated, so we have the luxury of having a van company to handle the task of actually getting stuff from New Jersey or Oregon. What isn’t factored into that, however, is the reality that just the packing alone is a huge job. Literally everything we sent has to be in some container, with the exception of furniture. Even then, every piece is individually wrapped in a mover’s blanket before it is put on the truck.

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  • Capital Craft

    I went to Capital Craft and had a couple of flights. Besides excellent food, Capital Craft is a great place to go if you want to try many excellent craft beers. They have a great menu (always changing,) and they have reasonably priced flights that let you sample them all without turning your liver into a puddle and your wallet into pocket lint. Even so, I took a designated driver.

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  • Display percent of disk space used on volume

    Useful for writing monitor scripts, creating trigger events based on percentage, etc.

    df / --total -x tmpfs | tail -1 | awk '{ print $5 }'
    
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  • List Makefile targets

    This snippet can be helpful if you frequently work with large Makefiles.

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  • Disable gnome screensaver from command line

    Works for gnome 2.

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  • Disable gnome screensaver from command line

    Edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf to add the following two lines in the daemon section:

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  • Drinking the Rails Kool-Aide, Revisited

    A few years ago, I jotted down some thoughts about working with Rails in an Agile environment, under the somewhat provocative title I’ve used for this post. Here are some of those ideas. I’ve expanded on some, commented and clarified others. By no means an exhaustive list, here are some of the paradigms I’ve used when developing with Rails:

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