A daytrip to Breezewood

I'm keeping this short so that they actually get published. Don't expect anything elaborate.

I used Thanksgiving's low-traffic to checkout some sights near Cumberland.

  1. Paw-Paw Tunnel along Maryland 51 (Scenic Byway)
  2. Abandoned PA Turnpike Tunnel
  3. Breezewood PA Junction

Paw Paw Tunnel

The Paw Paw Tunnel was underwhelming, mostly because the …

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Society of the Spectacle: Thesis 60

Where I write for the sake of writing. No promise of quality. Here is an attempt at interpreting thesis 60 of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.

The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embedding the image of a possible role. Being a …

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Constructing tests for legacy code

Every company has legacy code sitting somewhere that isn't well understood. Maybe it was written long ago and the original authors have moved on. Here's a high ROI approach to getting that code tested.

The code I have in mind was written in a time when priorities were different, the …

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Using Goatcounter on NearlyFreeSpeech.net

Here's some quick and dirty notes on setting up GoatCounter on Nearly Free Speech dot net. There are some rather opaque hoops you need to jump through in order to setup the service. I make no claim that this tutorial is perfect, but hopefully it helps someone else who is …

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Hunting for a Link

There you are, browsing the web, maybe using a popular search engine. You enter your query and scan the results for a title that answers your question. There it is! You see it, the third result. You move your mouse to click.

And what's that? what's happening? You've clicked on …

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Mayan writing... for English

Let us begin with a simplified version of the Mayan writing system. That is, we will encode English phonetically with the glyphs that represent sounds in Maya. We won’t have all the sounds, but oh-well!

Use the included syllabary to construct words from the associated sounds. Syllables in Maya …

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Hydroponic Lettuce!

To stave off the miserable Pittsburgh winter I started collecting plants and lights.

One strategy I used was to start a small Hydroponic garden of lettuce. I followed the guide on Hydroponics Indoors almost exactly. I found the website very helpful, and when I emailed the owner a clarifying question …

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Python string concatenation

I spent a little bit of time looking into Python string concatenation times. I learned that newer versions of Python implement an optimzation for the plus equals operator. In the future I'd like to know what this optimization is. It seemed simple enough to escape by introducing an intermediate variable …

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