What I'm reading
Alexa
April 11, 2017

I got an Echo a few months ago. It's pretty cool. So far my favorite things are the timer/alarm so I can remind myself to stop coding, the weather, the news, and my very favorite, the ambient sounds (Sleep Sounds is my favorite). The Echo makes it so easy to sit down, set a timer for an hour or so, put some ambient noise on to cut down on distractions, and work until the time is up. If I want to go for a walk before dark, I can ask when sunset is and set an appropiate alarm. I also got the basic Hue starter kit so I can turn my lamp on/off.

When I found out that you can use js to write skills (apps) I had to make one. I wrote a basic quotes skill I call "The Spiritual Scientist" It reads out quotes from great scientists like Einstein or Sagan that have a spiritual bent to them. You can checkout the code here if you'd like.

Bird Sounds drives my cats crazy :)


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MEAN!!
January 25, 2016

Just finished my first real project in the MEAN stack.  It's a contact manager that allows you to create and edit names, phone numbers, email address' of every one you know.  You can see the code here on my github.

I must admit, I'm in love with the MEAN stack. Ever since I learned how to do ajax requests back in 2005 I've seen javascript's potential.  I had to climb over several learning curves to finish my contact manager.  NPM, Jasmine unit tests (both front end and backend), gulp, node.js, express.js, but having put in some long nights it feels good to finally have it all under my belt.I

I'm particularly impressed with angular.js.  I know react.js executes much faster, but angular has a much better separation of concerns.  Just don't manipulate the DOM in your controllers.  I threw the front end of my contact manager together without much thought to the look feel, just wanted to get something working.  Once I had it all working I decided to go back and make it look nice.   I spent about a week playing around with different colors and layouts in static files.  Once I was happy with, it took me about 3 hours to go from static files to a functioning site thanks to angular!


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Just finished tetris
February 15, 2015

I just finished writing tetris in angular.js.  It uses angular.js for the over all structure, hammer.js for the mobile events, and the HTML 5 canvas element for displaying everything.  You can try it out here.

You can view the code at my github page.


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I got cats!
March 04, 2014

OMGCATS!1!

Look out internet, I got cats!

My wife and I adopted two rescue kitties, both eight months old.  Gypsy (left) and Corduroy (right) are both super sweet.  I grew up with animals so it's great to have them.  They are both very shy still but they are warming up to us more and more everyday.



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Corporate Psychopaths
October 26, 2012

This is a very interesting paper on the cause of our current financial crisis (PDF warning)

It's hard to believe that a few bad apples can spoil the bunch, but it makes sense.


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