Article archive
46 pieces, newest first.
Quantum Rocks
I ran into a friend today on my walk. He was running down the Blaine Street steps just as I approached to walk up them. We walked up together. He was carrying with him five small stones, pebbles really. Each one represented a trip down…
April 26, 2017
Morality Monday: M*A*S*H
"War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse." -- Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce How do I do what's right when I'm given every encouragement to do what feels wrong? That's how I felt…
April 17, 2017
Rebirth and Resurrection as Metaphor
There are bodies buried beneath the cherry trees. #sakura A post shared by Jonnie (Johanna) Wilder (@badselfiesinseattle) on Apr 8, 2017 at 1:19pm PDT This winter was the most difficult. There was the sickness, then the other sickness,…
April 14, 2017
Okay, Zuckerberg, You Win
I joined Facebook because I'm weak. Also because I'm trying to learn the lay of the social media land, which I once believed was hardscrabble badlands territory populated only by bandits and coyotes. I still believe that, but I've…
April 5, 2017
Not Doing It Right Should Never Stop You From Doing It At All
Perfectionism kills good ideas. It's a terrible tragedy to see the graveyard of perfectly wonderful ideas that were struck down in their infancy because they couldn't be done the way they should be. I'd never have gotten anything done…
April 4, 2017
A Few Simple Rules For Artificially Intelligent Companions
As we make advances in machine learning and robotics, the day of non-human companions comes closer. Whether they be cybernetic buddies, android companions, positronic au pairs, robotic service agents, or automatic nursemaids it seems…
March 28, 2017
Battling Back
I've resisted turning this into a personal blog, but resistance gives way to determination. Long story short: I got sick, I'm getting better. Today, I'm seeing if I'm brave enough to start doing what I used to do back when I didn't care…
March 27, 2017
Code: SpriteKit and CoreMotion
In my never ending quest to make life difficult for myself, I ran into a difficulty with iOS rotation animations. I could be entirely wrong about this -- it's been known to happen -- but there seems to be a default device-orientation…
January 26, 2017
About A Bot
The Timebot is finished. I make use of three different and important bits of code that are written by other people. First off, of course, is Botkit by Howdy.ai . Then, because I make a habit never to do work I don't have to, there are…
October 27, 2016
Subtle, But Important
The amount of work to get this, instead of this, is the difference between a two week vacation and two weeks of research. Now, I'm not the world's best computer scientist. I am not, in point of fact, an accredited computer scientist. I…
October 5, 2016
Helper function(s)
Writing the Slackbot, which communicates via text messages so there are plenty of places where there are numerals being referred to in text form, which means there are often cases where a word is either singular or plural, depending on…
September 15, 2016
SINAC logo
Seattle International Narcotics Anonymous Convention (SINAC) 2017 had an opening for a graphic designer. I'm volunteering to do the work and this is my introduction piece. It combines a variation on the Seattle Mariner's logo with the…
September 12, 2016
Botkit and Regular Expressions
Regex has never been my favorite part of writing code. I get that some people geek out on it and bless their hearts. For me, it's an annoyance that is best left abstracted out of my daily coding experience. Thankfully, I am not alone.…
September 8, 2016
Bot Engineering
Howdy makes a cool botkit that lets people write their own bots for Slack . Also Facebook, but meh. In JavaScript, of all things, using node.js which makes the whole thing pretty accessible. Node.js lets you write JavaScripts that you…
September 6, 2016
Resume Day
I worked on my resume this morning. Instead of having a bad attitude about it, I decided to have a little bit of fun with it. While searching for buzzwords to make sure to include on my resume, I found a cute little list of graphical…
August 19, 2016
Annoying JavaScript Functions
A quick little JavaScript to cycle through an array of hex colors. Installs an interval function to change the background color every second. // Variables // install an interval function update_colors() and run it every 1000…
August 1, 2016