Here I am sailing my lovely Ilur class sailboat, Cloud Atlas, on the St George River estuary in Maine. Its a placid evening, and I’m just lazily moving along under full sail. The tiller is held by a “huntingford helm impeder”. This is like a lashed tiller, but it permits quick adjustments.
I have a list of improvements and maintenance though. I’ll post it here.
Paint the floorboards, foredeck, thwart, and sternsheets.…
When I started working for Fresenius Medical, a coding challenge we often gave to interview candidates was to code a hexagonal grid. They only had to pseudo-code it, on a whiteboard. This was an interesting challenge because there are so many ways to approach it. The only classy solution I’ve seen is on the D3 frontpage. This is a pure javascript solution. But there are various CSS solutions to the problem also.…
I made a nice little weather plugin for WordPress. It was a trade-in-kind project I did for the Salem Willows Yacht Club, and you can see it on their site (and on this post). It displays wind velocity and direction in addition to the general weather condition.
The plugin gets data from the awesome OpenWeather API. Because it caches the requests for data, it can’t call for updates more frequently than every five minutes.…
I updated one of the first static sites I created: ErikaMumford.net. This site is pretty simple: it has my mom’s poetry on it. I added content management. I made it a few years back, using Jekyll, which is a static site generator (SSG). The content is just pages that consist of markdown files. Like all SSGs, Jekyll “generates” the site at build time. On the server, only static HTML files are served.…
This was a pleasing app to develop. I wanted to make a mapping application that showed what birds are being observed in what locations. Ebird helpfully has that data. However, Ebird’s own site does not make it easy to find the information I want. So, I made this app…
I bought this on a whim, thinking I wanted to catch up with Sebastian Junger. I have not read War, or Tribe. Maybe I should—it might give me some context on where he’s coming from.
Freedom does not disappoint, although I did find it frustrating. The writing is utterly fascinating. Short anecdotes from colonial history, railroad engineering, anthropology, etc, all seem to add up to a meditative discourse—between Junger and himself—on the nature of freedom.…
It has fascinating plot certainly. I need to be careful not to give any spoilers. Let’s just say it is set in World War II, and half the book is set in Germany and half in France. It’s a coming-of-age tale for a girl in France and a boy in Germany, both of whom have lives utterly transformed by the horror of war.…
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