PhotoShelter has their own API and I’ve been meaning to play around with it for awhile. I’ve never worked with an API before, and my JavaScript knowledge is “functional” at best, so this meant I’d be facing a learning curve. To get up to speed, I visited Codeacademy and started their JS course. I made it about half way through before I got restless and wanted to start working with the API.
Earlier this week a coworker complimented me on my website. Excellent! But realizing that people might actually be looking at this site, I decided I should put in a little more effort and improve some of the things that have been on the to-do list for a while. Here are the key improvements:
For the last year or so I’ve been using an old Linksys WRT54G router running the open-source DD-WRT software. This was particularly useful when it was operating as a wireless repeater, but it hasn’t done too well as a stand alone router. The truth is, the “G” has only 8MB of RAM… only half the amount of the more popular WRT54GL. I regularly experienced “drop-outs” and “lock-outs”, and rebooting was a nightly, sometimes hourly occurence.
Enter the Asus RT-N16. More…
I just bought an iPhone 5. This is kind of big news to me, because this is the first smartphone I’ve had in 10 years.
That’s an impressive statement not only because I’ve managed to survive (and thrive) in the age of the iPhone without one so far, but also for the fact that I had a smartphone 10 years ago, before smartphone was even a term. In fact, thanks to my big brother, a sales rep at Verizon, I had Verizon’s first smartphone: the Kyocera 6035.
And I loved it.
The 6035 ran Palm’s OS, and used a stylus and buttons to navigate the monochrome screen. You could enter text directly on the screen once you learned their special shorthand alphabet. I’d love to blame my poor penmanship on my mastery of the palm shorthand, but it was probably screwed up long before that. More…
There’s a lot of discussion going on right now about gun laws, and I see a lot of pro-gun posts from some of my friends on Facebook. Most of these consist of graphics that feature a one-liner or something to that effect, and the arguments they make are pretty weak. I hate dumb arguments, and am naturally drawn to pointing out their logical falacies; however, in doing so I risk starting a flame war and being branded anti-gun, which I’m not.
While I wasn’t raised in a gun household, and never owned one myself, I’ve never been particularly against them. Thanks to friends and family (and, you know, living in Michigan), I’ve had quite a bit of exposure to them, and have had occassion to recreationally fire handguns, shotguns, and rifles. Like everyone else, I’ve also witnessed guns being glamorized in books, TV, and movies.
I’m a fairly pragmatic person. I’m also a nerd, so it made sense to me to lay out my thoughts on practical arguments for handgun ownership in a pro-con spreadsheet. More…