Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
There's not a whole lot to the town of Toivola these days. Sure, it has a cool name (how much more 'Yooper' can you get than Toivola?). The access roads to Misery Bay and Agate Beach are here too, leading northwest from M-26. Other than that, there is little left to the once-thriving logging town…
Once, on a very snowy spring afternoon, Faith and I followed the East Branch Huron River from Erick's Road all the way to Big Falls. The hike was a challenging one. Located in a deep gorge for most of the route, the river twists and turns suddenly and does not offer much in the way of a river bed to…
Migisy Bluff sits south of Marquette Mountain, a curving ridge that stretches from County Road 553 east to Harvey. There are several spurs of exposed rock that poke south along the length, the most prominent one sitting on the far east and promising excellent vistas of Lake Superior. Near the…
There's been a lot of kicking around of QR codes since they first cropped up, complaints about their usability or a specific implementation (see WTF QR Codes for plenty of examples). I recently bumped into them in a discussion with some coworkers regarding 'short URLs' vs longer keyword-stuffed URLs…
Big Pup and Little Pup Creek are two fairly typical creeks in the Huron Mountains. Little Pup, the smaller of the two, starts right above the hairpin curve on County Road 510 and is only a few miles in length. Big Pup Creek is much more ambitious, almost twice as long and stretching far west towards…
After reading and practicing a slew of different methodologies in development projects I've noticed an interesting trend emerge, especially when working mid- to large-scale. In an effort to get an initial working example I'll write code very quickly, only slowing on occasion to optimize or clean up…
A warm spell was a welcome change from the freezing cold temperatures of the Upper Peninsula's winter. I had gone on a few hikes through the winter, most in subzero temperatures, and today's mild temperature were a pleasant reminder that spring was around the corner. Driving most of the way in the…
A few nights back I was relaxing with my wife, watching the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and drinking a few beers. You know, a typical Friday night for two nerdy twenty-somethings. After watching the memorable scene when Gandalf showed up the forests of Fangorn, newly upgraded to White status,…
Finding the distance between different locations is a programming task that I've done a number of times. The idea seems simple - the user wants to know the closest branch, store, or distributor relative to them. Ignoring some possible use cases (commuting routes, varying convenient starting…
Sending plain emails with PHP can be pretty easy. On a basic level you can just call mail(), which triggers the server-side sendmail command. Pass in three parameters (a recipient email address, subject, and message) and you're done. When you start looking into file attachments and HTML messages,…