During a summer many, many moons ago, I helped to build the bookshelves (“stacks”) in a library at Texas A&M University. I don’t remember its name, but the building was related to the animal/veterinary sciences program there.
My lasting memory of that project is that one of my coworkers would sing this song every day, “Hush, hush, keep it down now, voices carry.”
“When the soul becomes the warrior, all fear melts, as the snowflake that falls upon your hand.”
~ from the Kung Fu tv series
One thing I learned on vacation this week: It doesn’t hurt to ask for the “biggie” hotel room. Turns out they had a really nice discount on this nice size suite, which was much more comfortable than the usual little hotel room. (This room is a “mini suite” at The Lodge at Santa Fe, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. From March, 2015.)
A Gimp “oilified” view of Nolan Ryan’s windup. I got the original image from this YouTube video.
I’ve often wondered about the difference between the terms emptiness and interdependence in Buddhism, and came across this excellent Accidental Buddhist blog post recently, which includes this paragraph about a conversation the Dalai Lama had:
I was just reminded that the Visual Scala Reference is a very cool project.
Linux crontab FAQ: How do I schedule Unix or Linux crontab jobs to run at intervals, like “Every five minutes,” “Every ten minutes,” “Every half hour,” and so on?
Solution: I’ve posted other Unix/Linux crontab tutorials here before (How to edit your Linux crontab file, Example Linux crontab file format), but I’ve never included a tutorial that covers the “every” options, so here are some examples to demonstrate this crontab syntax.
Somehow I’ve managed to write 620 pages of the second edition of the Scala Cookbook without knowing about AsciidocFX, a WYSIWYG Asciidoc editor.
My software tells me that I took this photo of the big open sky here in Broomfield, Colorado on January 26, 2014.
I’m a fan of many Tom Hanks movies, and I’m also a fan of his comments in regards to COVID-19:
“We don’t know what’s going to happen with COVID-19. The idea of doing one’s part, though, should be so simple: Wear a mask, social distance, wash your hands,” Hanks told host Hoda Kotb. “That alone means you are contributing to the betterment of your house, your work, your town, your society as a whole. And it’s such a small thing. ... It’s a mystery to me how somehow that has been wiped out of what should be ingrained in the behavior of us all.”
People who knew us at the end might be surprised by this, but one thing I wish I had asked my business partner more often was, “How are you doing? Really, how are you?”
While working with the sbt and Mill build tools recently, and updating Scala and Java versions like crazy, I’ve been trying to verify some things in my Scala applications. Just now I wrote this little Scala 3 / Dotty application to print out all system environment variables and properties:
Kind of a weird situation: I’ve been thinking about moving lately, and that led to the thought that if a doctor told me I only had six months left to live, I know where I would live. But I generally like a lot of things about Colorado, so I live here. Hmm...
SBT FAQ: How do I show the Scala version that SBT is using?
Short answer: Issue the scalaVersion command at the SBT prompt.
Longer answer: I was having a problem getting a certain Scala feature to work when I compiled my code with SBT, and even though I knew I had set the Scala version in my build.sbt file, I wanted a way to double-check that SBT was indeed using that Scala version. That’s when I found I can issue the scalaVersion at the SBT prompt.scalaVersion
I always wondered if this ever happened: Three people were injured when a whale collided with a boat (or vice-versa) in the waters just north of Juneau, Alaska.
This is a photo of a sidewalk in front of an art museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. (Sorry, I don’t remember the name of the museum and I’m too lazy atm to look it up.)
I applied a Gaussian Blur effect to the cars on the right and the bright stuff at the end of the corridor (using Gimp), and it’s amazing how much that makes the rest of the image “pop” out. Nothing else has been altered.
Just like my Jenny Lane Cottage painting, this is another small version of a “faux painting” I recently created from a photo. This one is of a sidewalk in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The complexity of this image was in removing several modern aspects from the original photo, including signs that were on those green columns, and cars that were in the street. Everything after that is what has become fairly standard work with Gimp for me, including making it look like an oil painting, and signficantly modifying and enhancing the colors.
This is a photo of a sidewalk that I took somewhere in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I love the colors and artistry of the city.
