Archives
Below is the list of the long(er) form writing I’ve done on my blog.
Looking Back on Dvorak
It’s interesting to look back at how life changes over the years. Before this year, my last post on this blog was March 24, 2014. On that day, I posted about how I was distracted by trying to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout. A month and a day after that post, I got married. Since then, I have moved six times (including two new states), switched jobs twice, had a wonderful baby girl, and traveled to a bunch of new countries including New Zealand, Morocco, and Switzerland. Oh yeah, and I learned Dvorak, too.
I'm a ham! KJ7SIL
My ham radio license was issued this week! I have a technician class license, and my callsign is KJ7SIL.
Now I need to figure out how to actually make a successful transmission. I have a two-meter handheld radio that I can receive a couple of the local repeaters, but I haven’t been able to key one of them up. Which either means that I have something misconfigured with my radio or it just doesn’t have enough power to reach the repeaters. Hopefully my dad - who is a very experienced ham - will be able to help me figure it out when he comes to visit.
Book Review: Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus
I very highly recommend the book Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus by Nabeel Qureshi.
This book has increased my respect for Islam. I am impressed by the discipline Muslims have. For example, every day they pray three times. And not just in private either - they are very open about it. It can even be a social thing. I wish rituals like this were more common in Christianity to encourage a more consistent prayer life.
Book Review of Shape Up: The Hipster's Waterfall
I have finally finished reading Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters by Ryan Singer after many months. Now that I’ve made it through the book, I would subtitle it “The Hipster’s Waterfall.”
To be fair, it is a thought-provoking book. It has some good ideas for new techniques in managing software projects. It is well written and clear, and I think Singer does a decent job of arguing for the processes and techniques he recommends. I just don’t agree with some of his more foundational points and therefore I do not agree with the general thesis of the book.
Book Review: Prey by Michael Crichton
I did not enjoy Prey as much as I thought I would. I think there are a couple of things that I struggled with while reading it.
The first thing I struggled with was actually a problem with the type of topics that Michael Crichton likes to take on. I think of his writing as near-term science fiction. It’s definitely science fiction, but it isn’t far-fetched science fiction that takes place centuries in the future. It’s the type of science fiction that I could imagine happening tomorrow. Usually, I appreciate that, since it explores ways that the world could be different today. However, it can also backfire.
State = Busy
I have been very busy, but that’s no excuse. I’m lowering the bar for things that deserve a blog post. This particular post will feature things I’ve been thinking about and doing.
Things that have happened
My sister and her kids came to visit a couple of weeks ago. It was a fun visit! Everything was made more complicated by COVID, but it all turned out OK.
I crashed my mountain bike on Sunday, which was not fun. It was one of the higher speed crashes I’ve had. My front tire washed out on a corner and I slid quite a ways, scraping up my knee (even though I was wearing knee pads) and somehow hurting my pinky, which has been the most debilitating result of the crash.
Mortality
I’ve been listening to the book Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. I’m a few chapters in, but I’m already finding the book very informative and thought provoking.
Gawande paints a compelling picture of what it means to grow old in our society and how old age has changed in recent history. Living over the age of 70 used to be a fairly uncommon achievement, but with modern medical advancements, it is almost commonplace. That fact has many implications for how the elderly are treated, and how they want to live in their twilight years.
Book Review: Skunk Works by Ben Rich
Skunk Works by Ben Rich is a memoir about Rich’s time working at the Lockheed Skunk Works. The Skunk Works is a small, secretive, advanced research and development organization within Lockheed. Rich relates his experiences from first being tapped by Kelly Johnson - the founder of Skunk Works - to design some systems on the U-2 spy plane to taking the reins when Johnson retired to his own eventual retirement.
The philosophy of the Skunk Works is what stood out to me in the book. Skunk Works isn’t just a secret department within Lockheed. The Skunk Works philosophy emphasizes small, flat, tightly integrated teams that have autonomy to make decisions about their projects. Kelly Johnson’s 14 rules and practices provides a map for the Skunk Works to operate. Engineers are required to visit the shop floor to interact with those machining the parts and assembling the aircrafts. Outside inspections are kept to a minimum. Unnecessary documentation must be eliminated, but important work must be comprehensively reported.
Clojure Web Application Building Blocks
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m rebuilding this website using Clojure.
When starting a new project, I find you often have two choices: start with a batteries-included framework or build up the framework yourself from your own code and any libraries you might want to leverage. I usually choose the first when I want to get something up and running quickly. I choose the second when I want to learn as much as I can and have fun tinkering along the way.
Did Abraham Believe God?
I have been reading Saying No to God by Matthew Korpman. The general thesis of the book seems to be that God invites us to stand up to Him and argue with Him as part of our relationship with Him. I think I generally agree with that viewpoint. However, I’m not yet half way through the book, and after the second chapter I almost stopped reading because of one assertion.
Clojure Markdown Parsing Benchmarks
I am working on setting up a new system for publishing content. I have a few different categories of content that I’m interested in creating. I’ll have to determine exactly what the taxonomy will be, but the broad categories will probably be computers, mountain biking, and more personal stuff including relationships and religion. The first step towards this new system is just to replace the technology behind this website.
This website is currently generated statically using a very old version of jekyll/octopress. Static site generation is really nice, but I think I’m going to want to add some more interactive features like small applications. Therefore, I decided to replace this static site generation approach with a Clojure application.
New Habits
This blog is ancient, but let’s start a new habit with it. Let’s publish something. Every day. It doesn’t have to be on the blog, but writing is one of the easier things I can do. I also have a bunch of videos on my harddrive that I could edit and upload to YouTube. I just want to be creating something that I can point to every day.
I am actually a bit surprised that I was able to get the tooling for this blog back up and running after all these years. All it took was installing rbenv, an old version of Ruby - 1.9.3 - and an old version of bundler - 1.0.14 - and then everything worked. I hope to get a new site up before too long. I’ve started working on it here, but as you can see it has stalled. It’s hard to find time for things like that with a baby!
The Great Dvorak Distraction
I am pretty fast at typing. I am by no means the fastest ever, but I can hold my own. I don’t really worry about how fast I can type, but I do slightly worry about repetitive strain injuries. Therefore, I have allowed myself to be distracted from learning to read faster. I have been playing around (yet again) with learning the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout, and I am (still) convinced that it is dramatically better than the traditional QWERTY layout.
One Week of Reading
Well, I have been trying to read faster for about a week. My progress has been . . . disappointing. Granted, I have not actually “practiced” that much, but I have done a fair bit of regular reading, and most of the time I am conscious of trying to read faster. However, according to the first resource I consumed since embarking on this speed-reading adventure, I should spend time practicing if I really want to get fast.
On Learning to Read . . . Faster
I am a slow reader. I have known this for a while now. I have even tried to do something about it at one point, but a recent post by my cousin made me realize just how much potential reading speed I’m missing out on. She took the staples reading test that has been going around recently and found that she reads at 748 words per minute.
On the Uncertainty of Everything
I watched a series of videos of an interview with Richard Feynman today. I highly recommend that you make the time to check them out. (If you don’t know who Richard Feynman is, you should look him up.) While watching the interview, I gained insight into a number of ideas.
One of these is the nature of knowing things. Feynman shares an anecdote of one interaction with his father. He asked his father why a ball in a wagon will roll to the back of the wagon when the wagon is pulled forward. When I heard this question, I immediately thought to myself, “Inertia.” But Feynman’s father answered, “Noone knows… The accepted belief is that things that are moving tend to stay moving and things that are at rest tend to stay at rest unless something pushes them, but noone knows why that is.” I found that very interesting and enlightening. There is a difference between knowing the name of something or being able to describe it, and knowing the why and the how of something. Why do objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion? Feynman expounds further on what it means to Know something throughout the interview.
Why No Touchie: Upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10
I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 this evening and the first thing I noticed was that my touchpad no longer worked… Of course, I immediately suspected that “touchpad-indicator”, the application I installed to disable my touchpad when I have a normal mouse plugged in, was to blame. However, I decided to do some searching around first and found a couple of forum posts about similar problems. After reading about their woes, I decided to just try removing touchpad-indicator (sudo apt-get remove touchpad-indicator). After running that command line and restarting, everything worked fine. I don’t know what changed in the upgrade. Perhaps it would work again after reinstalling, but I’ll probably wait until having the touchpad enabled annoys me again before trying.
First!
First post! Aww yeeeeah, I win. Seriously, though, these are the beginnings of a new blog which I have formed using the Octopress platform (some of you may have already figured that out from the theme). You can see the source of any changes I’ve made (mostly just creating my own posts/pages) here: https://github.com/xonev/StevenOxley.com.
If you would just like to learn more about me, you can go to the About page.
I still haven’t figured out exactly what I’m going to be making this blog about. Undoubtedly, the majority of the posts will be technical in nature, but I may also throw in the random “just-for-fun” post now and then. Hopefully we’ll all be enriched by whatever it turns into.