https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/ Recent content on Kestrel's Nest Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Tue, 25 Jul 2023 21:45:12 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2023-07-25-echos-from-another-time/ Tue, 25 Jul 2023 21:45:12 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2023-07-25-echos-from-another-time/ Years ago I was given my first prescription for daily brain meds. I have a hard time getting new habits to stick, so early on I hit upon the idea of giving Charlie a treat at the same time, and in no time he was in charge of reminding me it was time to take my meds. It was a job he took very seriously. Eventually other cats joined the family and it wouldn’t do to have only Charlie get treats. https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2023-07-24-goodbye-charlie/ Mon, 24 Jul 2023 21:45:12 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2023-07-24-goodbye-charlie/ I lost my best boy Sunday morning. For the last eight years, he was never far from my side and we took care of each other. I tended to his physical wounds he had as a tiny foundling (in the parking lot of a liquor store in the middle of a thunderstorm) after I adopted him and he took care of my mental wounds, which ran just as deep. He wanted to be wherever I was, always watching and preferably helping. https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-12-20-my-tweets-have-come-home-to-roost/ Wed, 21 Dec 2022 04:17:16 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-12-20-my-tweets-have-come-home-to-roost/ The Twitter archiver that @darius made is really neat. It takes the zip file of your archive from that site and it spits out a fully searchable static website of all your public tweets (that aren’t replies to someone else). It was super easy to integrate right into this Hugo-powered website, right here. Most of my tweets are shite, going right back to 2007, but there’s some gold in there and I’m glad to have them at my fingertips in a space I own. https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-12-01-tis-the-season-for-bloody-jesus/ Fri, 02 Dec 2022 02:39:39 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-12-01-tis-the-season-for-bloody-jesus/ Tonight was the annual Athens Christmas parade, also known as (by a friend of mine, anyway) “Athens Annual Let’s Do Weird Shit Day”. I’ve been regaled for years with tales of the strangeness at this parade, ranging from “Rotisserie Jesus” (a bloody live human Jesus on a spinning cross) to last year’s hippy who thought it would be a good idea to use a roadkill great horned owl as a hand puppet and thrust it in the faces of kids lined up along the route. https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-11-30-solving-puzzles-with-code/ Thu, 01 Dec 2022 03:10:01 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-11-30-solving-puzzles-with-code/ The Advent of Code is upon us once again. Every year Eric Wastl weaves together a daily series of clever challenges into a delightful story. They can be solved in any language and method you want, including brute force, and I look forward to it every December. Which is an odd thing to say maybe considering I’ve never made it further than a dozen days in. It just seems like every year the work project I’m on catches fire and needs my full attention and my drive to work on coding challenges for fun just fizzles out. https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-11-29-day-full-of-good-things/ Wed, 30 Nov 2022 03:15:51 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-11-29-day-full-of-good-things/ It was a day full of good things. Here they are, in chronological order: read two chapters of Dan Moren’s book “The Bayern Agenda” while drinking coffee in the hot tub before work the things that didn’t work in my new project yesterday started working attended my first standup with my new teammates ate a delicious chicken pot pie for lunch returned a library book that was six years overdue and wasn’t charged a fine voted in the senate runoff election got a delicious dirty spiced chai installed gitea at git. https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-11-28-first-day-on-the-job/ Mon, 28 Nov 2022 16:12:28 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-11-28-first-day-on-the-job/ As a software developer that gets loaned out to other companies, I tend to have quite a few “first day on the job” days. Today was one of them, joining a team working hard to get a new bio-lab robot on the market. As is typical with joining a new project, I spent the entire first day trying to figure out why nearly nothing in the README actually worked. Computers are the worst. https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-11-27-like-the-legend-of-the-phoenix/ Mon, 28 Nov 2022 03:47:22 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-11-27-like-the-legend-of-the-phoenix/ I used to be a prolific blogger, back in the very early days of the form. Had a few things “go viral” before that was a thing, meaning they were seen and talked about by dozens of people, but I was comfortably C-list in that small world. As my online time got eaten up by other things, like farming and starting a family, my posts became shorter and less frequent and eventually just … stopped. https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-11-27-migration-complete/ Sun, 11 Feb 2001 15:31:47 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-11-27-migration-complete/ I’ve come out the other side. Amazingly enough, I only had to reinstall two applications: my virus scanner and web browser. All my email survived. And, my first impressions are great. I like Windows 2000. I am using Stardock’s wonderful Object Desktop, so my GUI doesn’t even look like Windows to begin with, and changing to W2000 didn’t affect me there at all. If you picked up my laptop right now, you would think I was using Apple’s OS X. https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-11-27-os-migration/ Sun, 11 Feb 2001 10:05:11 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2022-11-27-os-migration/ Today I migrate my laptop from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 Professional. I’m scared. https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/then/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/then/ This page is all about what I have done. As things roll off the now page, they’ll show up here. It was last updated on January 7, 2023. What I finished reading The first six stories (three novels and three shorts) of Dan Moren’s Galactic Cold War series. These are spy thrillers set across multiple star systems colonized by humans. Both aspects are very well done and each story has been better than the last. https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/now/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/now/ This page is all about what I am doing now. It was last updated on January 7, 2023, and will be edited as things change. Where I am now Living in Athens, GA in a home I had already been renting for five years before my partner and I bought it several months into the pandemic. Who I am around now Our house has three people and three cats. The people include me, my partner, and my youngest daughter who spends every other week with us. https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/upcoming/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/upcoming/ This page is all about what I am planning on doing in the not too distant future. As I get to them, they’ll leave here and appear on my now page. It was last updated on December 21, 2022. Where I will be Athens, early January 2023, for the B-52’s final concert of their farewell tour Las Vegas, mid-January, for my employer’s annual all-hands gathering Atlanta, late January, for Inuhele, Atlanta’s annual Tiki Weekend. https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/mytweets/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/mytweets/ I was an early adopter of Twitter, going back to when its main interface was via SMS. Somehow it managed to completely replace all the writing I was doing on my blog, something I had been doing for nearly a decade. The Musk takeover made me realize I needed to reclaim my words and my online presence. The way he turned it into a (not so) proverbial Nazi bar made me realize I couldn’t be in both places.