Riding the Springwater Corridor

This weekend, Kim and I rode bikes from our apartment in the Lloyd District of Portland to the Tacoma Bridge, following the Esplanade and the Springwater Corridor. The ride took a couple of hours at our mild, Sunday-morning pace, and it offered gorgeous views of the Willamette River and Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. Spring and …

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May 9, 2010 – 4:10 pm | Posted in life | Comments Off

Learning Clojure

Clojure is a new functional language for the JVM. This post is a collection of links, articles, screencasts and free books I’ve found to help me learn the language and understand functional program design. Key features Here are some key features of Clojure that I find extremely interesting: Designed for concurrency A Lisp dialect – …

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April 28, 2010 – 7:51 am | Posted in technology | Comments Off

This Time It’s War

My favorite board game ever has to be Aliens, published in 1989 by Leading Edge Games. If you’ve never played it, there is a Flash adaptation available, which seems to be free. I was introduced to the game in the early 90s by the same guy who taught me how to play Dungeons & Dragons …

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April 27, 2010 – 9:18 pm | Posted in games, life | Comments Off

Sound Problems with Ubuntu

The other day, I stopped hearing any sound effects on my Toshiba Satellite work laptop, which has an Intel HDA sound card. I’m running Karmic Koala, so I rolled up my sleeves and dug into the cause. As an experienced Linux user I’m familiar with the occasional driver problems due to using computers effectively designed …

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February 16, 2010 – 10:23 am | Posted in technology | Comments Off

No NIC on a Windows 7 VMWare image

Today I ran into trouble configuring a Windows 7 guest on a Linux host: Windows 7 couldn’t find an appropriate driver for the virtual NIC. The solution was in this forum post. Basically, I had to manually edit the VMWare image’s .vmx file (while the virtual computer was turned off) and add the following line: …

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February 8, 2010 – 10:19 am | Posted in technology | Comments Off

Deploying Fat Free CRM to Heroku

I just finished deploying a Fat Free CRM install with all the under-development plugins to Heroku. Starting out with Saturn Flyer’s write-up, I learned a few things along the way, and now I have a cool Rails-based sales app to play with. Working with a read-only filesystem The biggest stumbling block I had was realizing …

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January 17, 2010 – 10:18 am | Posted in technology | Comments Off

How to Extract Craigslist Locations with Nokogiri

Solace is a web app I created to search multiple Craigslist locations for the same query. It uses YQL to make the search, but in order to generate the YQL queries I first needed to generate a list of all valid Craigslist locations. Update: Full source code for Solace is now available on GitHub. There …

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December 2, 2009 – 10:16 am | Posted in technology | Comments Off

Coastal Bookstores

Kim and I are heading to Coos Bay this week to celebrate Thanksgiving with the Davidson clan.  I am already thinking of books — is that wrong? My favorite thing to do on the Oregon coast, other than spend time with the in-laws and all of our super-adorable nieces, is trawl a couple of my …

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November 22, 2009 – 9:59 am | Posted in books, life | Comments Off

Ghanadrew

This month I reopened the blog I wrote on my trip to Ghana in 2006, in an archived state and with a short introduction. The original title of the blog was “Ghanadrew,” which I kept for the archive.  You can read it online at: http://ghanadrew.blogspot.com

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November 21, 2009 – 11:44 pm | Posted in writing | Comments Off

Reading Murakami Five Years Later

Kim and I have been reading The Wind-up Bird Chronice, one of Haruki Murakami’s best-known novels, for the past couple of months.  It has taken us a long time to get half-way through the book.  This is my second reading, and I am surprised to find that the author’s style, themes and approach leave me …

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November 20, 2009 – 10:47 pm | Posted in books, life | Comments Off