Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Over a year ago a life-changing event showed up in the middle of Katie and I's simple lives, something that complicated and enriched our little family forever. Noah Emerick was born. Since he arrived we've endured an onslaught of dirty diapers, interrupted nights, and half-hearted adherance to his…
Sitting south of the town of Rockland and the famous Minesota Mine is a long buff overlooking the Military Hills. The bluff is not especially tall, staying below 1400'. Other outcroppings along the Trap Hills and Gogebic Ridge easily close in on 1600'. In fact, if it wasn't for Irish Hollow Cemetery…
It's pretty easy to shuffle a list/array in PHP. There's a function, shuffle(), that will simply randomize the order of elements. It also assigns new keys to the array, possibly a side effect of the internal algorithm that it uses. However, if you want to partially shuffle an array, there is no…
A cold breeze drifted up from the small bay and through the trees. Finally. All day I had been hiking through stifling heat of the forest near Mount Benison, unseasonal heat that had sapped the energy out of me, and even the narrow waterway of Huron Bay offered some relief. With a grateful sigh I…
Grouping is an insanely powerful regex feature that is often underutilized. Sure, a lot of PHP developers know that if you wrap part of a pattern in '()' than you can pull that chunk out using preg_match and the optional $matches variable, but there's so much more you can do. Direct matching is just…
The trail along Mountain Lake faded in and out like a quicksilver snake. Downed branches and undergrowth masked sections, leftovers from the long winter, and other parts just slipped into the ground. I tried my best to follow it on my way from Turner Point to the mouth of Mink Run. There's a marsh…
Predawn light streamed over Cliff Lake, dim pinks and blues reflecting off the calm surface far below. I stood uneasily on the outcropping. It would be at least an hour before the sun would break over Mt Benison's bulk and throngs of mosquitoes already surrounded me with a steady whine. A full of…
During the summer of 2010 Katie planned an awesome birthday trip for us. It was a three-day camping trip to the west side of Wisconsin, complete with caves and exploring and circus museums. And then unexpected things derailed the plans. Instead of heading out west we just stayed in Appleton,…
There are few tasks that I cringe about more than putting together a presentation with a standard slideshow program. With my background in web development the drag-and-drop process, mixing of content with design, and maintaining consistency through an evolving forty-plus slideshow is clunky and…
Roads that lead east from Big Erick's tend to lose their name. Sure, there is Ford and the Northwestern, two roads that are difficult to define as they twist and fork over rocky and pitted ground. There's one road that I've always called Erick's, the one that leads past Bald Mountain and along the…