I was lucky to be able to visit the ASHRAE Winter conference in Chicago. ASHRAE is the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers. I went with my coworker and mentor, Norm, and met many people and learned a lot there. There was actually 2 parts to this conference - the main ASHRAE talks and technical committee meetings, and the AHR Expo, where many vendors come to show off their products.
Something that always irks me is when a website or app requires phone number verification, often called SMS authentication. Usually, that means whenever you want to log in to, let's call it BookFace, it will text you an automated code that you enter, or a link to click, to verify that the number is really yours and it is really you trying to log in. Many websites are now beginning to enforce this policy. In my opinion, this is a terrible system for several reasons.
(And how I almost contributed to my least favorite!)
I've made my first* contribution into a major open-source project!
* Well, actually, I did make a minor contribution into an open-source project called Psychrolib - which my Psychart application is dependent upon, but that could be its own story. Based on the number of watchers, forks, and stars, this next project dwarfs poor Psychrolib in comparison, despite how important Psychrolib is for my work.
Over the last week or so, I've been working on updating my website to make it look prettier, easier for a visitor to navigate, and easier for me to maintain. One major (but surprisingly simple!) project was to redirect my "permanent" domain to my "common" domain. Another major update was consolidating all my "main" websites as subdirectories under my common domain instead of using subdomains, which helps greatly for maintainability and uniformity. Lastly, the idea of setting up an Instagram account came about when encountering file size issues in my photography website.
A Family Holday Vacation to France, December 2023
My family and I visit our relatives in France every couple years. We had been planning to travel to France for some time, but to put it nicely, we are very bad at planning. I knew that if we were to go, I would at least need to help to plan our flight itinerary. After some frustration and finesse, I was able to find some good flights which my dad graciously booked for us all.
Let's get rid of pounds, kilograms, feet, meters, seconds, and degrees altogether and come up with a new, pure unit system based on limits of our universe, to describe our world. Believe it or not, this actually exists! It's called Planck Units, and it's a completely ideal system of measurement based on our universe's fundamental constants. For example, "speed of light"s describe quantities of velocity. Here's a really neat way to create Planck units using linear algebra and math. Since this is a blog post and not a scientific research paper, let's keep this simple, assuming there are only 4 (out of the seven) physical base units in our universe. Let's also assume our universe has 4 fundamental constants. See the tables below for the list of each and symbols.
I have a problem with... dates. But probably not the date you're thinking. Not going out, not the fruit, but the instance of time. Why? Good question.
Want to learn about my frustrating journey to building my second PC? Read on!
Hello, world! This is my first post on this website, although I may retroactively add some prior work. Today I had time to work on my own projects, and I finally knocked this one out of the way. Today marks the birth of my 3 'main' websites. Those being:
At work, I recently learned about a technique to generate beautiful documentation using a software package called mkdocs. I immediately started playing around with it and discovered it can be used for so much more than code documentation. As of this article, all 3 of my mentioned websites are using mkdocs to build the website.
Have you ever tried to sign up for something, and you get this frustrating message?
Username unavailable! Try again.
If you have an idea of how many accounts are signed up on that website, you can use some math tricks to find out how to find a good username without being forced to guess over and over.