The Garden's Coming Along

It's hard to see with a couple of them, but it looks like my seed potatoes have all officially sprouted.

This is a very ambitious garden. I have 10 garden boxes, 4 of which are 4'x5', and the others 4'x4'. With luck, I'll have far more produce in the fall than I know what to do with, and will be able to share my bounty with the neighbors.

I'll post more photos of the garden in a bit.

Speaking at YAPC::NA 2015

For those who are interested, I will be speaking at YAPC::NA (Yet Another Perl Conference, North America) next month. My talk is entitled A Series of Unfortunate Requests. If you know me, you know I'm a REST API junkie, so I'm pretty excited to talk about it at this conference.

Finland!

I just got back from Helsinki, Finland!

I am now convinced that Helsinki is one of the great cities of the world. It's a beautiful place, with friendly people, and bonus for me as an American: almost everybody speaks English! In fact, in my two weeks there, the only person I spoke with that did not seem to know any English was a bus driver.

I was working onsite with a customer there, including 4 of the nicest guys I've ever met. We did some work with SaltStack + OpenStack, and I for one had a thoroughly enjoyable time on the project.

Because I was there for two weeks, I got to spend a weekend there. Saturday I went wandering around my part of the city, visiting the Kamppi Center and the Forum Mall across the street. I also went to the Kiasma modern art museum, and saw thoroughly fascinating exhibits on Ismo Kajander, and "Elements".

I loved the bus system while I was there, though I admittedly only used one route, to get to and from work. My host was kind enough to set me up in the Kamppi Scandic, which was in a pretty central location. I should note though that, outside of one cab driver who seemed to have vision problems ("is this a 4 or a 6?"), all of the drivers that I observed tended to drive very conservatively, defensively, and safely. This is in stark contrast to driving in Utah, where it often feels like every driver is out for blood.

If you ever get a chance to visit Finland, I highly recommend it. It's a beautiful country with beautiful, friendly people.

5 Years

It's been over 5 years since I've posted here, and it's time for that to change. I have a lot to say, and I find myself in need of a place to say it. So I've resurrected this blog, and intend to start posting on a regular basis again.

A lot has happened in the past 5 years, and it will affect what I post here. I love cooking as much as ever, and a large chunk of the content will still be about food, albeit more from an engineering point of view. I have also worked for SaltStack for over 2 1/2 years, and you can expect to see some posts here about Salt.

My old layout was incredibly incompatible with the current version of Blogger, so I'm using one of the default templates for now. Hopefully I'll have time to get something up soon that's more me.