Category: Geek

Tech­nol­o­gy, Sci­ence, etc.

For the past few years, each April 26th I have to look up why it’s “Alien Day”. The date is named after the plan­et LV-426, where the xenomorphs are first encoun­tered in the orig­i­nal, 1979 Rid­ley Scott film. Well, I’ve been a fan of the hor­ror-sci­fi fran­chise since I saw the sequel, Aliens. I’ve since watch any film in the series (good and bad) and read a lot of the comics. So, any­way, hap­py Alien Day to my fel­low sci-fi fans.

Aliens
Some comics, graph­ic nov­el col­lec­tions, and my attempt at draw­ing a xenomorph from cir­ca 1996.

Software Engineering

This past week of Feb­ru­ary was Nation­al Engi­neers Week, and it’s always an excel­lent time to learn about dif­fer­ent engi­neers today as well as those whose shoul­ders we stand on. I haven’t prac­ticed engi­neer­ing as a pro­fes­sion­al in over eight years, but I still work with engi­neers and struc­tur­al engi­neer­ing every day at Bent­ley Sys­tems.… Con­tin­ue read­ing Soft­ware Engineering

Remembering Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy passed away ear­li­er today. If you asked many peo­ple, they might tell you that they hear Mor­gan Free­man’s voice in their head when they imag­ine the voice of God. To me, it will always be Leonard Nimoy. That placid, chain-smok­ing-induced growl that, in part, made Spock such a won­der­ful char­ac­ter of his fills… Con­tin­ue read­ing Remem­ber­ing Leonard Nimoy

Published
Categorized as Geek, Life

The End of RadioShack

RadioShack announced today that they have filed for Chap­ter 11 bank­rupt­cy. They will close about 2,400 of their stores with many of the remain­ing loca­tions being pur­chased by Sprint. This is more-or-less fit­ting, giv­en that the brand has basi­cal­ly gone from the go-to sup­ply store for elec­tron­ics parts to a cell phone reseller. I hon­est­ly… Con­tin­ue read­ing The End of RadioShack

Published
Categorized as diy, Geek

My FitBit and Me

In ear­ly Jan­u­ary, Angela and I got match­ing his-and-hers Fit­Bit One’s to start track­ing our activ­i­ty. Ange­la’s actu­al­ly been wear­ing a pedome­ter for years now. But the Fit­Bit does a lot more data track­ing than a sim­ple pedome­ter. I’ve been wear­ing it every­day since then. There a few tech­nolo­gies I’ve adopt­ed that I would con­sid­er life-chang­ing.… Con­tin­ue read­ing My Fit­Bit and Me

A DITA & DITA Open Toolkit Reading List

I was in the process of reor­ga­niz­ing my com­put­er sci­ence and tech­ni­cal writ­ing shelf today dur­ing lunch when I began to notice a pat­tern: I have quite a few books relat­ed to DITA and the under­ly­ing tech­nolo­gies of the DITA Open Toolk­it. Well, this isn’t by coin­ci­dence. It’s a big part of my job and… Con­tin­ue read­ing A DITA & DITA Open Toolk­it Read­ing List

Regular Expressions versus XSLT

Last week I came across an epic rant with­in a forum thread1 about why using reg­u­lar expres­sions for pars­ing XML is a bad idea. The <cen­ter> can­not hold it is too late. The force of regex and HTML togeth­er in the same con­cep­tu­al space will destroy your mind like so much watery put­ty. At first, I… Con­tin­ue read­ing Reg­u­lar Expres­sions ver­sus XSLT

I have read numer­ous times how Gene Roddenberry—the cre­ator of Star Trek—pre­ferred the eyes and mouth of an actor play­ing some alien not be obscured by make­up. The the­o­ry goes that this allows the actor to actu­al­ly, well, act and the audi­ence bet­ter empathize with the char­ac­ter. This makes good sense on a series like Star Trek, where the inter­ac­tion with aliens is often less shoot ’em up and more diplo­ma­cy and moral dra­ma. How­ev­er, I had nev­er con­sid­ered this point extend­ing to dogs.