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Gardening with no space

2014-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

While visiting a friend in St. Louis, he showed off his recent gardening efforts. I was impressed at how much work he’d put into it, and how wonderful it looked. Living in San Francisco has many upsides, but one drawback is that it can be easy to lose touch with actually growing something.

Thus I decided to put together a small windowsill garden, and see how well it fares with apartment living. Beforehand, I gathered up some supplies:

Specifially, I got:

4 windowsill pots (plastic), ~60cm by ~20cm by ~20cm
2 spearmint plants
2 onion chive plants
Potting soil

You’d also need a cutting tool of some kind, a little bit of workspace, and gloves if you prefer.

I picked spearmint and chives, because both need a moderate amount of sunlight, but can deal with the occasional bit of fog. Also, I like mint juleps and mashed potatoes with sour cream.

First up, I needed to introduce some drain holes in the bottom of the pot, because too much water can be just as bad as too little:

Now the problem was, how to avoid getting water or dirt all over the floor with our newly ventilated pots. I decided to use the unmodified pots as drain pans, which worked out pretty well:

Next up was filling the base of the pots with a layer of soil for the plants to rest on:

Then it was time to prepare the plants. The ones I picked up specifically had a biodegradable cover surrounding them. No shaking out the roots required. So we cut off the label…

…and removed the top lip and bottoms of the biodegradable cover…

…and placed the plant in the pot:

Lather, rinse, repeat for the other plants, then fill the pots up the rest of the way with potting soil up to the lip of the plants:

And try not to fall out the window admiring our assembly work:

2014 Goals

2014-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Setting goals for the new year, and then breaking them within a few months, is a time honored tradition that has been going on all the way back to the Romans. I’ve fallen into the same trap as many others, telling myself “this year’s gonna be different”. Over time, I’ve tried to figure out how to make goals I actually achieve by the end of the year. This year, the rules I’ve come up with (using RFC 2119 style) to keep myself on track, are that a goal:

MUST be definitive.
SHOULD be quantifiable.
MUST be accomplishable.
SHOULD NOT rely upon others to complete.
MUST be published.
MUST NOT be discussed in public.

The first challenge is setting goals that are reasonable, but a stretch. The mantra “you can’t improve what you can’t measure” seems reasonable, but is difficult in practice. Some of my goals for this year then are based on data I collected in 2013, some are based on things I know I should track more carefully, and some are based on personal preferences entirely.

The second challenge is publishing something but not discussing it. In the past, I’ve gotten bit by talking up something before I actually did it. My solution this year, is to publish an obscured version of the goal at the beginning of the year, and publish the unobscured version at the end. That way, I’m held accountable, but I don’t get the mirror neuron warm fuzzy from talking about it before it’s actually done.

So, for 2014 my goals are:
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These were encoded with SHA256 & a salt. I’ll publish the salt & the original text after December 31st, 2014, along with a report card scoring how well I met each goal. Happy 2014!

2013 Year In Review

2013-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Looking back, 2013 was a fantastic year personally, full of new experiences and adventures. I went the route that it was better to have experiences, than to have material posessions. I guess it’s too early to be certain, but at least right now, that definitely feels like the better choice. Some of those experiences included:

Traveling around the world, after 17 years of living vicariously through travel shows.
Helping out my friends at Whitetruffle & Minted with some of their infrastructure.
Celebrating Jen & I’s 10th wedding anniversary by sightseeing around California.
Helping Jen get two of her bucket list items checked off (Running in the NYC Marathon, and driving a really fast car).
Having an absolute blast working at PagerDuty.

I’m grateful to know so many wonderful people (around the whole world!), and to be fortunate enough to have had so many adventures.

Of course, it’s not all roses. There were some not-so-great things this year, such as the NSA leaks by Snowden, or the various governmental turmoil, and the often-occuring-but-never-acceptable natural and manmade disasters that took far too much life. I feel frustrated, and often search for more things I can do to help, but sometimes wonder how any amount of effort will make a difference. How do I balance out these two extremes?

Meanwhile, I think it’s time to plan for 2014.

Concealed Cupcakes

2012-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

A recent experiment in concealed cupcakes.

Start with basic chocolate cupcakes (devil’s food in this case):

Top with milk chocolate frosting (OK, OK, so I used frosting from a can. I haven’t found the time to make frosting creamy like that yet.):

Grind up oreo cookies (without the stuffing) into a fine powder:

Apply the powder to the frosting:

You may need to do a couple of coats to get the right look:

Use green candy (in my case, some green apple licorice happened to work out well) as grass/plant shoots:

Find very small adobe clay pots, and rinse well (or not, depending on your desired level of realism):

Watch people be confused, and bring enough to share:

30 Days

2012-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Between a coworker’s recent successful experiment to do a blog post every day for 30 days, and the need to post various code fragments and kitchen experiments, I’ve been pondering my personal posting preferences.

Some things I’ve realized:

I don’t want to invest a huge amount of energy into Facebook/Google Plus/even sites like Twitter and Flickr. I’m becoming more and more “get off my lawn” about them for a variety of reasons (tired of being abandoned when someone pivots their business model, tired of being the product for advertisers instead of paying for the service, etc, etc).
Many of the sites I enjoy/respect have very minimal, but polished, appearances. They also tend to stick with the same layout for years to decades at a time.
I don’t have a need to “post early, post often”. If my “Cool URIs” only had a year and month field, I still probably wouldn’t have many colisions.
I have a need to post things involving many different bits and pieces (photos + code + writeups), and most of the WYSIWYG editors I’ve seen on sites like Tumblr and Posterous either can’t do it outright, or do it in a fairly broken way.
However, I’d still much rather someone else run the server that’s hosting my pages. It’s been 4 years since I ran a personal server full time on the Internet, and I’d rather not start that back up again.

For now, I’m going to go with the combination of Github Pages + Markdown + Jekyll and see if it feels better or worse than the previous itany of service providers that have all gone down the Geocities route.