Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
The trees grew thick and undergrowth tangled along my confused route. I had come a long way from Wolf Lake Road - along clear and exposed rock bluffs, several two-tracks, and through managed hardwoods - and this last stretch on the ridge was the worst so far. There was supposed to be some open views…
Stretching west from the tiny town of Diorite is a jagged line of bluffs, swamps, and sandy flatlands. The bluffs are not terribly tall, rising less than two hundred feet up above the plains below, and promise few clear south-facing outcroppings. Pines cover the sandy sections of the plains near…
Comments are an important part of a blog. Too often blogs are used as a soapbox for one person to state their ideas and opinions out into the open air of the internet without any sort of inline interaction. Comments allow an audience to give feedback, debate the points, or provide their own views…
Tilden Mine, for all its positive contributions to the Upper Peninsula's economy and history, looks like an oozing orange-and-grey wound gouged deep in the green hills of Ishpeming and Negaunee. Summit Mountain, Tilden Lake, and Palmer Lake are remembered only on old topographic maps, completely…
Reading and writing EXIF headers into JPEGs is not something that PHP offers a lot of help with. Outside of one helper function for reading, exif_read_data, which returns a wide variety of meta data about the image (including non-EXIF basic properties of the file), there is no easy way to read or…
Of all the memory-intensive processes that you can do with PHP image resizing is one of the most abused. It may be tempting to have the power of requesting any image in any size, passing the parameters in to a script and boom, having a custom fitted image, but it's not a great idea. There are…
Dying sunlight filtered lazily through the tall bare trees. A recent heavy rain had soaked the area, leaving the earth soft and giving, the air thick and cool. I trudged up a slope between deep eroded channels and peered ahead in search of my destination. The day was slipping away and I didn't have…
Noah Robert Emerick was born in the afternoon of June 15th, 2013. A healthy, kicking, crying little boy, Noah showed up a few weeks early yet just fine (full-term) and Katie and I were able to hold him right away. There's been a few pushy reminders over the last nine months that we're actually going…
Snow plummeted from the sky. The large lake-formed flakes didn't swirl or drift like normal, like they were designed to do. They cut through the woods on a stiff breeze and tumbled onto the leaf-covered ground. At first the flakes melted quickly on the warm ground. Then, steadily, a thin white…
A two-track led east and I followed. There was a much more ambitious route to my right that climbed rocky hills and pushed through thick woods, one that promised sweeping views of Cliff Lake and the eastern swamp, but I stuck to the track. Snow had been falling for the last few hours, soaking the…