August 24, 2018
Continuous Deployment of Jigsaw Blog to Digital Ocean Droplet Using Bitbucket Pipelines
Well, after my last post about updating my Jekyll blog, I got on a roll and went ahead and ported my blog over to Jigsaw. Like I mentioned in that post, I’ve enjoyed Jekyll, and I think it is a great blogging engine. But Jigsaw (and Laravel) has been a breath of fresh air, and something new to play with. Through this process, I tweaked the design again, but more importantly, I pieced together a...
ReadAugust 14, 2018
New Blog Design
I've been tweaking my blog a lot lately, due to several factors. I've enjoyed using Jekyll for the past year (and Octopress, which is based on Jekyll, for years before that). However, I've recently discovered the incredibly satisfying Laravel framework, and the fine folks at Tighten have created a static site generator for Laravel called Jigsaw. A couple weeks ago I decided to give Jigsaw a...
ReadNovember 28, 2017
Oliver Jeffers Book Signing
It's no secret that I love children's books. I can't recall a time when I've been to an author book signing event, and tonight we had the unique opportunity to see Oliver Jeffers. Over time we have checked out many of his books from the library, and one of his titles, A Child of Books, made it onto my books website (linked above) as a favorite. We decided that this would be a fun experience for...
ReadJuly 24, 2017
Panic Shouldn't Do Upgrade Pricing
Earlier today, Dan Counsell wrote: The main reason Panic went with no upgrade pricing is because the Mac App Store still has no way of doing paid upgrades. If the Mac App Store didn’t exist then I’m 100% sure they would have offered upgrades. I believe Panic plan to launch Transmit 5 on the MAS at a later date, so not having to deal with upgrades gets rid of this one major headache....
ReadJuly 15, 2017
Owen's Super PID
Our son Owen has a blood disorder called thalassemia. One thing this means is that he must be on a chelator drug to help his body get rid of iron. He is on Desferal, which is administered via a subcutaneous injection pump. My wife is active on several thalassemia Facebook groups, and there is much discussion regarding Desferal pumps. We quickly came to understand that if our home health services...
ReadJune 8, 2017
Side Project - Kids Books
Having two kids, ages 6 and 2, I've made regular visits to the library in the past couple of years. I like to track certain things in my life. Not to a crazy extent, but I guess I just like data. As we've read through piles of children's books, I've thought it would be neat to track which books we read and when, and even possible "rank" them in a way. Well, I've finally turned this into a little...
ReadMay 29, 2017
Blog Moved to Jekyll
I've spent some free time over this holiday weekend moving my blog over to Jekyll. I've wanted to move my blog some something else for a while, since Octopress is practically out of active development at this point. Jekyll made some sense because Octopress is just a specialized Jekyll. I may lose some of the nice opinionated-ness of Octopress, but Jekyll has come a long way and it is used by tons...
ReadMay 15, 2016
GTRI Day at Six Flags
Yesterday my employer had its Family Picnic Day at Six Flags. This is a great way for all the families to get together and have fun without having to spend much money ourselves. We enjoy spending time with some of my coworkers and their kids, and it's just fun to ride a roller coaster every now and then. Here are a few pictures from the 2016 Six Flags picnic. This was our second year taking...
ReadMarch 5, 2016
Focused Work
There has been some discussion lately on some podcasts lately about how we can be the most productive in our work. I've recently made some intentional changes in these areas, and hearing these conversations in other places has made me think even more about it. Three things stuck out to me: Having a dedicated space for work is important. If your office is also the room where you read books,...
ReadOctober 20, 2015
Easy Grade for Mac Released
Easy Grade on iOS has been doing great for the past couple of years, and now I'm happy to announce that I've just released the Mac version of Easy Grade. Why the Mac, you say? There are a number of reasons to not bother with the Mac version (mainly that most teachers have a school-issued Windows laptop), but there are other reasons for doing it. As of this year, Apple merged the developer...
ReadJune 8, 2015
Sometimes Freemium Works
Looking at the variety of ways to make money in the App Store is always a fascinating discussing to me. In Freemium is hard, Marco reflects on Shuveb Hussain's experiment with taking a paid app freemium: Freemium is hard. Its effectiveness depends on where you can put that purchase barrier in your app. Many app types simply don’t have a good place for it. I've thought about this a lot...
ReadMay 11, 2015
Problems With the Scribd iPhone App as an Audiobook Player
I have a moderate commute (moderate for Atlanta standards), so I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks. I found out recently that Scribd offers a fairly large selection of audiobooks for a reasonable price, so I signed up for a trial to give it a shot. The user experience with this app has been so bad that I felt compelled to write up a list of its shortcomings here. Hopefully they can...
ReadMay 5, 2015
Making Free/Busy Work in a Hybrid Exchange Environment
Over the last month or so at my day job, we ran into an unnecessarily tricky scenario trying to get free/busy working between our on-premises Exchange environment and a federated hybrid environment. My main purpose in writing up this experience is because I hope people can find it via a web search and not have to commit hours upon hours of time with Microsoft solving it. The problem was that...
ReadApril 6, 2015
Minimizing Twitter
Life has changed a lot for me recently, this being the best example of that. I've thought a lot about what is actually important to me, and how I spend my time. Even though I wouldn't consider myself a heavy user of Twitter, for a while I've realized that I should probably cut back on the time I spend consuming this stream of consciousness from the internet. Going to China helped, because...
ReadDecember 24, 2014
Books I Read in 2014
I didn't make a blog post about the books I read in 2013, probably because I only read 8 books (see my Goodreads profile.) 2013 was also a hectic year - I should have blogged about that, but in short, I finished grad school, bought a house, sold a house, went on a mission trip to Guatemala, and started a company. I picked up the reading pace again in 2014, so I thought I'd continue the tradition...
ReadOctober 3, 2014
Hearts Scoreboard - The best Hearts score keeping app for your iPhone/iPad
In June, I went to a condo with some guys for a weekend as a sort of preliminary bachelor party getaway. These particular friends love the game of Hearts. In college, when I was playing Spades multiple times a week, they were probably playing Hearts twice as much. I wasn't surprised when I got sucked into a game of Hearts during this weekend at the beach. As we were getting set up, we of course...
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