Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
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…
Dealing with normal events in a Google Calendar feed is not too tough. Looping through each event and pulling the basic chunks of information (title, description, times) is easy once you hook up the correct namespacing to the nodes. Once you get into recurring events, though, things get more…
Pulling and parsing a Google Calendar feed sounds like a fairly straightforward project. After all, you are provided with both an XML and iCal Address (even for private calendars) for each calendar on their settings page. It didn't take me long to realize that there are unique pieces of these feeds…
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…