Posts

Trying to be all cool and tough this weekend, I was being a bit sloppy with a chainsaw. I’ve had the chain come off plenty of times before, but never had it tangle so badly I couldn’t immediately get it back …

• Fresh-ground cinammon. Finally nailed my colors to the mast on this and threw out the ancient McCormick-or-whomever spice container we have had for years. Made sure to sniff the contents first to give myself a fuller …

For … reasons, I fed Claude a bunch of my Internet posting history. In retrospect, much of the worst of it

• Metafilter comments (not so bad)
• Reddit archive (not great)
• Twitter archive (very not great)

I wanted to see how well it could mat…

I write all my notes and drafts in …

I have been thinking a lot lately about these two fellows.

If you are not lucky enough to know them already, those are Harold and George fr…

• Mutiny After Midnight - I know I mentioned it last time but it’s just so good. Between this and Sound & Fury, he’s cornered the market on Rolling Stones-style ‘70s scuzz rock and I love t…

• Milk Street’s tacos arabes
• Tom’s Crossing
• The fact Hardcover exists, a site to replace Goodreads, which has been dead sin…

I was well into my 30s before I realized my mother’s aphorism on relationships, “Fits find each other” had a positive meaning. Because my mother and her sister both taught in special education and because their side of the family is from …

Do you, like me, often find yourself in internet arguments for no good reason and want to reply with a dead-perfect response GIF so everyone will clap and love you even more but the response you want is actually stored in your bookmarks in the superior …

I recently automated the download of one of my favorite cryptic crosswords, both because I am nerdy and because it went behind an extravagantly high paywall. In the process I decided I wanted Sunday mornings to be even more leisurely and made the script …

Didn’t expect to be back so soon, but I got busy doing something^* this weekend and what I was listening to finished and Spotify’s Recommended let me know The Beths have a new album out and it’s just as good as the last one …

Trying something new, here are a couple of things I’ve been playing on repeat.

Safely inside my Dad Rock, Springsteen-inspired category, I think I found this via Xgau’s Substack. The whole album is amazing and the previous one is great too …

Because I drive myself insane replicating this when I find I want autocomplete on Windows, here are the steps (as of January 2017 anyway):

• pip install pyreadline
• pip install ipython[shell]

Except right now step 2 fails when installing scandir so I grabbed it …

Dear Josie,

On the very off-chance I don’t get a chance to barrage you about this a thousand times, here’s a lesson on weasel words. Take a look at

Always be suspicious when politicians or advertisers (if there’s still a difference) don …

For the second time in a few years I’ve found myself doing a number of Django upgrades. It’s a good thing: I’m happy the framework I chose to base most of my work on when I went solo has stayed relevant. But this time I …

I know it’s been a while and I really should write more often, but this is just a quick one for Google to index in case it happens to someone else: I recently wrote my first vue.js component and was really pleased with …

INT - BEER STORE - DAY

CREEPY GUY, a man in his late 50s in hiking shorts and an ankle brace is paying for a popsicle at a beer store at 10:30 in the morning with the change from what is either a …

I’ve been thinking about exception handling a lot recently. A., because I’m stultifying and B., because it’s been a source of contention in the codebase I’m responsible for. I wrote some formal documentation last week to try to normalize our approach, but I’m …

In one of those “Why did I even look at the terminal” moments, I noticed Solr stopped working properly in a local Django setup. Initially I ignored a slew of 404 errors when Haystack tried to reindex because … well because who the hell cared? I …

At the beer store just before 3pm. I always get a little nervous when a car pulls in and someone from the backseat gets out.

• DUI?
• Underage driver?
• Just plain crazy?

Thankfully it was number three. After the young guy got out …

• I get why people with kids feel like they need a bigger house: I’m trying to adjust a crib in situ and it feels like parallel parking a parade float in Rome
• “No hon, I’ll do it during the week when the house …

Just a short note for anyone else who runs into this nonsense: I could not get the current version of wxPython to install in a useful way using homebrew. brew install wxmac --python --devel to install into my Homebrew-controlled Python install worked …

I’m doing some work profiling a large Django application and I was running into this weird error when I tried to aggregate the stats with gather_profile_stats.py which comes with Django. It kept throwing TypeError: zip argument #1 must support iteration if there were two profile …

I’m trying really hard to take parenting magazines seriously, but they seem to be written for a demographic that straddles dense and insecure. The latest unsolicited offering from Parents—

is apparently for people who don’t already know ice cream cake and enou…

Helping people with a job application is not something I do. Unless you accidentally send it to me when asking your friends to review your cover letter before applying to be president of a bank. Especially if the email ends, “Constructive not your usual Tom. Thanks.” This …

INT - NIGHT - a fundraiser from University of Rochester calls TOM who has the phone on speaker while holding JOSIE. We join the call in progress …

• Caller: “Sir, no amount is too small.”
• Tom: “Well, I make like ten cents…

From time to time a client on WebFaction will experience a hiccup in their memcache process. It’s not obvious at first unless the site is under heavy load (New Relic is a huge help in diagnosing the problem); this post is just a central …

“I’ve put relatives in the ground with fewer tears.” — my mom

Last Sunday night we had to say goodbye to the gentlest soul I will probably ever meet. I’ve tried to figure out how to write this since then but it all comes out as a jumble …

New Relic’s basic agent (and the free 30 days of Pro we got up front) have been a huge help on one of my largest ongoing projects. Wanting more insight into our server after a mystery incident yesterday morning, I’ve …

Because I always forget and because I am getting into the good habit of connecting via SSH for everything, here’s a note to myself on how to get SSH deployment keys running in my typical process:

• Use or generate a key
• Add the key …

As befits what was an all-male school, the highlight of my 20th high school reunion occurred in the men’s room near the end of the night (with a conversation at the urinals).

Him: “What brings you here?”

Me [assuming he meant something other than the …

EXT - DAY: An outdoor concert/ festival between acts. Our hero, TOM, just growing into his impossibly handsome looks in his late 30s strides purposefully toward Port-a-Potty Row. His path is interrupted by THE STRANGER, a younger man. Before T…