Went to a Code & Coffee meetup yesterday and had fun. There were a lot of new graduates there and it took a while to get through introductions, but everyone had something cool to share and I learned things.
The building it was held in had an exposed concrete…

I promised progress updates on my form handler project when progress appeared, and appeared it has! And I have a newfound appreciation for unit testing.
The project name is now fohago, which stands for form handler written in Go. Great name, I know. I’m pronouncing…

On Monday we went to the Ryerson Conservation Area to look for cicadas. This year is a big deal because two broods are tunneling to the surface at the same time, with Brood XIII emerging in the Chicago area after 17 years underground.
After we stepped out…

The above screenshot from Mailhog is an email sent by my form handler as the result of a form submission 🎉
This means multiple things are working:
the HTML form posted to the endpoint /hello123 fohago matched /hello123 to the form ID hello123 in the configuration…

Went to bookclub last night. It’s a secret music venue within walking distance that you’d pass right on by if you didn’t know what to look for. One of the smallest venues I’ve ever been to, truly a hole in the wall place. Bought a cool sticker to put on the…

Excited about the news of a new Age of Mythology game in development from the same people who worked on Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition. I loved playing as the Norse in the original AoM, and thoroughly enjoyed the campaigns of both the base game and…

When I last wrote about my form handler project, I had gotten the basic features working: take a form submission and send me an email. This made me so excited that I stopped working on it for the last three weeks. Today I picked it back up again and made…

After three months of searching, I started work at my first job in Chicago this past week! I’m on a network deployment team doing hardware setup and wireless signal strength heat mapping, which is fun because networking is a special interest of mine. While…

Here’s some links I enjoyed in the last few weeks and some music to peruse them to.
Up first in music we’ve got a single from London bass thumpers Dog Race, titled “It’s the Squeeze”. Flowery spoken word overlays borderline grunge, and there’s some neat distortion…

Watched Inside Out 2 at Alamo Drafthouse this weekend. It feels weird going to the Texas theater chain in Chicago, but it’s been my favorite for years and I love that I can still watch movies there. At this point it’s tough for me to get excited about watching…

Longlegs is a comedic drama about an autistic FBI investigator revisiting her childhood trauma.
Nicolas Cage plays a religious schizophrenic dollmaker—an exact description of my own mother.
Does the dollmaker make the dolls? No, he shuffles doll parts around…

Hello! It’s been a wild month with the new job and commuting and brat summer, which means more time actively doing things and less time to contemplate the next big navel gazer of an article. I’m tired on the train to work and tired on the way back, client…

I made a little update to the site today to fix how browsers were loading files needed by other files. The custom font I use and the random quote in the header loads in slightly faster now because the browser is downloading all the files it needs at the same…

Syncing Obsidian over iCloud is a lot less painful now that iOS 18 is out. I can individually set folders in iCloud to stay downloaded, and setting this on the Obsidian folder had great results: Obsidian now takes 15.11s to become interactive on a cold open…

Some wild stuff has surfaced in my RSS reader this week about WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg’s corporate-but-very-personal war with WP Engine, full of absolutely S-tier corporate maneuvers.
I could hear the tiny *squelch* of braincells dying within my…

Picked up The Way Things Work (David Macaulay, rev. 2023) and Thing Explainer (Randall Munroe, 2015), along with Matthew Inman’s new game Horrible Therapist.
The Way Things Work holds a special place in my heart. I checked out the 1988 edition from the library…

Last month we went to a Moth Story Slam at Fitzgerald’s and had a great time. I’ve been listening to the podcast off and on for years and it was fun seeing how these things play out in person. The theme was comeback stories, the storytellers couldn’t use…

Over the past year I’ve been engaging with the email spammers who live in my junk folder. The legion of virtual assistant spammers who make throwaway gmails were getting downright noisy, so I decided to brighten their day with a random effin’ birds image—whichever…

My favorite part about this photo didn’t make itself known until I was exporting it for this post: whoever painted the door last took care to paint around the sticker.
The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group would like you to know that the little plastic…

Leaving Mastodon and Bluesky earlier this year was a great decision and I don’t regret it one bit—except for the part where some of my friends don’t blog at all and I miss them terribly. But that’s okay because the intense doomscrolling burnout continues…