We've been back in pdx for about 16 years and I had not yet made it out to the Witch's Castle in Forest Park.

So I decided to do that on Monday.

I can't really say that I recommend it on a road bike, but it was mostly fine. I couldn't ride about half the trail, due to the rocky/steep/slippery/muddy nature of a trail in a park...but it was quite ok early on a Monday morning. Only passed about two other people on the trail (one hiker, one jogger).

The trail dumps you out on Cornell, and then you get to take the lane and bomb maybe 2 miles downhill, including 2 tunnels. I didn't know the area that well, so I was fully clenched and expecting to fall/die.

My device said I hit 40MPH. It was insane and also fun as hell...

I made a DIY eurorack module using 3 arcade switches to trigger gates. Check it out:

Some interesting street art in Portland (not mine):

It's alive!

A new year, and a new incarnation of noisybox.net.

I've been wanting to do a rewrite for quite some time...probably over a year. The maintenance on the pyramid site was just crufty and I let it stagnate. I was also never happy with the custom css junk I hacked togehter, and the site was never very mobile friendly. Well, frankly, I think it looked terrible on mobile...and I wanted to change that.

After a couple of weeks of evaluating several popular static site generators, including jekyll, hexo, and hugo, I decided that none of them would work well for my needs. Granted, they are all fine projects and people have done and continue to do a stellar job of supporting and enhancing them...but in most cases they quickly began to feel limiting. In some cases, they feel frameworky and require the user to learn their internals in order to get nonstandard things accomplished. In other cases, the tools assume (or mandate) a specific way of working, likely based on assumptions.

In the case of jekyll, I think I added a paging blogs plugin and performance just absolutely cratered. Like by a factor of 10x or something. I dunno about you, but waiting 20+ seconds to verify a small content change sure isn't fun -- it's debilitating.

I had some high hopes for hugo. It was enjoyable to get started with and the performance definitely has that Go wow factor! I was a very bummed at how difficult it was to make small layout/theme changes...they have a ways to go there!

I really should have done a better job of documenting the pros and cons of each one, since I really did do a pretty in-depth evaluation of them...but alas, weeks have passed now and I didn't write things down and it's no longer fresh...and I no longer feel like revisiting them. So many other things to do.

As a result, I decided to write my own static site generator: prepply.

Maybe it's stupid to do such a thing, and perhaps nobody else will ever see value in it, since there are thriving communities around the existing tools. And I'm fine with that! But I also host it on github in case somebody else can learn from it or help to improve it or whatever.

Like so many personal projects, it's merely a first effort and is hacky and without tests. Shameful, I know. But I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out and remain excited about the idea of static site generation. You know...because everything old is new again. Or something. Maybe we didn't learn from the past. :)

The Radio Music by Music Thing Modular is a awesome eurorack module that uses a Teensy to play back sample files from an SD card with/out CV.  It's awesome.

I wanted to build out my own sample pack by extracting audio from a set of video files, and built a tool to help do that.  Maybe you're into this stuff and want to check it out too? Here's the source on github:

https://github.com/breedx2/mtm_radio_extractilizer

Subtle.

(latest issue of Outcast)

Ted McKeever -- Probably my all time favor comic illustrator.

If you're unaware, look him up.  He's a legend.

Still one of the greats.

(source)

I clicked on some Forbes clickbait about surprising jobs and their amazing salaries and came across this hilarious image for "Software Engineer Intern":

So many things wrong here, I can't even believe it.  Even if this image is outdated, it's still just wrong, wrong, wrong...and Forbes chose to use it.  Grade: F.  Just gaze in amazement at:

• Dusty/dirty monitor (looks like somebody maybe even tried to write something in the dust, though it's illegibile)
• Monitor viewing angle is wrong (tilted down so much that's it's probably not even viewable)
• Sweet VGA connector.
• Fake intern's left pinky finger is at least 2 but maybe 3 keys away from the 'A' key.
• Fake intern's wrist appears to be infected with 1-3 botfly larvae.  WTF!!  Maybe it's a HR corporate special intern-tracking implant device?
• Mario cosplayer is mashing his left hand down on the keyboard while fake intern is trying to hack the Gibson
• Mario cosplayer is scraping a screwdriver across the top of the monitor.  Not even using the tip, just the shank.
• Keyboard is at a 45° angle to the front of the desk.  Who works like that?
• Mario cosplayer (senior developer/mentor) is happily working on this challenging refactoring task, but still refuses to take off his uncomfortable shoulder satchel...
• Both eye gazes are on the spot where the screwdriver meets the monitor.  Yeah, fuck that code anyway.
• No mouse on the desk.  Maybe Yoshi ate it?
• Is this supposed to be pair programming?

At least they seem to be happy.

Software interns of the world:  If you show up at your internship to find a dusty VGA monitor with a tower case on the desk and no mouse, just so some Mario cosplayer can scrape his screwdriver back and forth across your monitor while mashing your keyboard with his other hand....please quit.  Trust me, there are better gigs.

Presidential blues got you down?  That ceremony today sure was something!  How about settling down and decompressing with a nice comic book?

(source)

https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/renato-jones-the-one-1

Renato Jones?  He's a 1%er that has the funds, access, skills, and motivation to undertake a killing spree to make the motherfuckers pay.  American revenge comic pulp doesn't get any better than this...absolutely cathartic.  Recommended!