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  • in Random
  • 2 min read

The US electoral college has its flaws, but forget about that. I'm curious what the minimum popular vote could possibly be in order for a candidate to win the US general election.

  • in Journal
  • 10 min read

ASHRAE Winter Conference, Chicago

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.

  • in Random
  • 6 min read

Phone Number Verification

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.

  • in Project
  • 4 min read

Contributing to my Favorite Open-Source Project

(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.

  • in Project
  • 8 min read

Website Updates

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.

  • in Journal
  • 13 min read

Full of Food and COVID in France

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.

  • in Random
  • 7 min read

Pure Unit System of Measurement

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.

  • in Project
  • 4 min read

The birth of my 3 'main' websites

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:

  1. This one: blog.nicfv.com - now nicfv.com/blog
  2. My photography website: photos.nicfv.com
  3. And, my homepage: portfolio.nicfv.com (or nicolasventura.com)

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.