Life, hobbies, and everything other then tech stuff and work.
Background Since 2014, my team at Middlebury has been using the “ELK” stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, & Kibana) to aggregate and analyze our application, webserver, PHP, and CDN logs. Over the years I’ve built dashboards and visualizations that allow us to monitor application health and performance, drilling into problem areas and…
How can we compare grow-lights when they don’t have consistent performance measurements advertised? Might electricity draw be sufficient?
By now many folks have seen Geoff Boeing’s really neat charts of street orientation that highlight how “gridded” (or not) the layout of city streets are: US Cities World Cities Since Geoff was kind enough to provide a full open-source tool-chain, I decided to tweak it to chart the orientations…
This entry was original published as a Ride Report on the Adventure Rider (ADVrider) forums. The only changes are reformatting to flow as a single article. Prologue Day 1: Down the Green Mountains Day 2: Across New England Day 3: Acadian Entry Day 4: Fundy Crossing Day 5: On the…
Today I found unexpectedly good reading in Middlebury’s new 2012 Town Plan. The document is really well done and its quality highlights the vigorous engagement between the town, its citizenry, and businesses that makes this a fabulous place to live. While all 226 pages are worthwhile, I found Section 2.13 …
In 2005 I took a 3-week trip around Turkey with my parents and brother. Mid-way through this fabulous trip we met the affable Roland Pfitzenmaier, a German man touring the middle east on a Triumph motorcycle. While I am someone who usually travels with a full load of gear —…
One of the joys of participating in a CSA is exploring new vegetables and foods that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about or thought to eat. Last year we received husk cherries, red carrots, bok choy, several types of kale, purple potatoes, and at least 4 varieties of beets in…
My current woodworking project is a Mission-style bookshelf that I designed to match the sofa table that I built last year. The bookshelf will sit below a window to the kitchen, so it is low and extra wide to fit that space. To support the weight of the books without…
A hundred yards from the aptly-named Bittersweet Falls Road, the Beaver Brook cascades over a formation of marble and dolomite to create a beautiful 18 foot cascade. Above Bittersweet Falls, the Beaver Brook cuts a deep ravine through layers of black slate. The gorge can be difficult to traverse without…
Over the course of the past year I built this cherry sofa table based on a design by Scott Gibson in Fine Woodworking’s “Furniture” book. All frame joinery is mortise and tenon, while the drawers use doweled rabbit joints. The finish is boiled linseed oil topped with 3 coats of…
