Posts

Fundraising: A Play in One Act

INT - NIGHT - a fundraiser from University of Rochester calls TOM who has the phone on speaker while holding JOSIE. We join the call in progress …

  • Caller: “Sir, no amount is too small.”
  • Tom: “Well, I make like ten cents…
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Portfolio

Those Clever Kids: Since You’ve Been Gone

What I’ve been up to since last I posted an entry

I’m coming to the end of another contract and realizing just how out-of-date this portfolio is. Rather than try to catch up with an endless series of posts …

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Posts

Checking on memcache’s health

From time to time a client on WebFaction will experience a hiccup in their memcache process. It’s not obvious at first unless the site is under heavy load (New Relic is a huge help in diagnosing the problem); this post is just a central …

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Posts

Lacey

I’ve put relatives in the ground with fewer tears.” — my mom

Last Sunday night we had to say goodbye to the gentlest soul I will probably ever meet. I’ve tried to figure out how to write this since then but it all comes out as a jumble …

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Posts

Installing New Relic Plugin Agent on Shared Hosting

New Relic’s basic agent (and the free 30 days of Pro we got up front) have been a huge help on one of my largest ongoing projects. Wanting more insight into our server after a mystery incident yesterday morning, I’ve …

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Posts

Setting Up Server SSH Access

Because I always forget and because I am getting into the good habit of connecting via SSH for everything, here’s a note to myself on how to get SSH deployment keys running in my typical process:

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Posts

The Next 25 Years

As befits what was an all-male school, the highlight of my 20th high school reunion occurred in the men’s room near the end of the night (with a conversation at the urinals).

Him: “What brings you here?”

Me [assuming he meant something other than the …

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Posts

Rich Get Richer”: A Play in One Act

EXT - DAY: An outdoor concert/ festival between acts. Our hero, TOM, just growing into his impossibly handsome looks in his late 30s strides purposefully toward Port-a-Potty Row. His path is interrupted by THE STRANGER, a younger man. Before T…

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Posts

Popular with Jerks 25-40

Washing my high-horsepower, low-milage car as a break from my computer-based job while wearing Local Sports Team’s baseball hat and streaming music made by white males (see below) from my Apple phone to a Bluetooth speaker, I thought to myself, “Boy, you need to step …

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Posts

Django Command to Back Up to Amazon S3 with Python

If it’s of use to anyone, I wrote this fairly thick-headed script to look for the most recent versions of files matching one or more patterns in a directory, zip them up and back them up to Amazon’s …

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