Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
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,…
Over the last few months I've been having a lot of fun with the Twitters. It all started simply enough, just upgrading my lifestream to pull from an authenticated feed. Now I'm playing with a few Twitter bots, looking into the streaming API, and even working on a PHP library with David Kryzaniak.…
An unseasonable warm gripped the Marquette area. I stepped out of my car in short sleeves and looked around curiously at the snow drifts piled up against the woods. I was parked just north of Sugarloaf Mountain at an old gravel pit. There were no signs marking anything special here but I was one of…
For the past four years I've hiked the mountains east of Big Erick's bridge during the snowy months. This annual pilgrimage started with a hike up Bald Mountain with Cory back in 2009 that was shrouded in a thick February blizzard. Sometimes I stick close to this mountain while other hikes stretch…
The most recent redesign of my website(s), which I started by rolling out a new home page late last year, is focused on some responsive ideals. There are some other changes as well, like removing unnecessary Javascript and sprucing up my framework, but the main goal is to implement responsive…
I haven't been too many conferences. DealerFire only pushed vendor conferences, fancy get-togethers in cities like Miami and Las Vegas where we all rubbed elbows with industry leaders and vied for customer attention. When I found out that Blue Door Consulting, my current place of employment, wanted…
There's something to be said about a good ol' stumble-of-a-trudge, the type of hike when your legs begin to complain about bending properly and you refuse to stop for a break in the fear that your legs will rebel against you. When the weather and the terrain and the distance all conspire against…