This week saw Election Day in the US, however for me, the more impactful event was New Helmet Day on Monday. For those of you who aren't in the know, this isn't quite the joyous occasion which I make it out to be. Helmets are disposable and must be replaced after a crash. They will crush and crack and deform to prevent these occurrences from happening to your head.
As of Saturday, I'm exactly a month past my vaginoplasty surgery. In this post I'll write a bit about some of the things which I no longer have dysphoria over and which may now cause euphoria.
Fair warning that this post will discuss my genitals both before and after surgery, urine, women's clothing and perhaps other sensitive topics.
I recently had the experience of taking a RideShare with a driver who was deeply bought into, what I can only assume was, Russian propaganda. The trip was from UCLA to the LAX airport. It started out fairly normal. The driver asked if I was a student, returning home after term, to which I corrected, I was at the university on business, they were hosting a meeting. He was very friendly, talked about how he liked meeting folks from all walks of life: affluent, working class, professionals, even a few police officers and gangsters. It wasn't until we got to the freeway that he started talking about some odd conspiracy theories.
Back in April I saw a bike frame on craigslist which really caught my eye. It was a 1994 Bontrager road lite.
I, for one, didn't know until then that Bontrager ever manufactured bike frames. Certainly that they made wheels, tires, etc. but I'd never seen a bontrager frame and it really caught my eye. A few days later I borrowed my brother's subaru and drove out to meet the seller. The frame didn't look like it was in great condition, a chipped and fading paint, rust spots in a few places, and it had a quill stem stuck in it. But it was absolutely beautiful. every weld on it was gorgeous, and the extra gussets at some of the joints were absolutely intriguing.
(Fair warning, this post is download intensive)
Well, obviously I know what "the cloud" is. Upload more RAM (or compute or bandwidth or whatever it is you happen to need). You rent computing resources from Amazon or IBM or whomever, and instead of furnishing a brand new box to keep on your premises, you upload your data to it via the internet.
But there seems to be some magic to the cloud which I can't put my finger on. I know, I'm probably a decade late on figuring this out, but the cloud has never seemed that novel or meritorious to me. Today I'd like to take a look and figure out what it is that excites people about the cloud.
This past month was Pride Month for those of us in the LGBT+ community. For me, although I am both transgender and bisexual, I usually avoid overt displays of this identity in the workplace. I typically pass as if I were cis gender, so avoiding this in the workplace is easy for me. This year, I decided to take a different approach, because the LTBT+ community, and especially transgender community, have become somewhat of a punching bag for "right-wing frustrations".
In September I spent a lot of time with the grammar of PACSTCL. Both in developing the grammar further than I had coming out of the CSforALL Bootcamp, and in preparing the PACSTCL code to parse the grammar. This post is going to start out by defining computer grammar in understandable terms, then it will go into some of the decisions going into and the quirks coming out of PACSTCL's grammar.
This past summer, I've put a good deal of effort into updating my blog. Previously I had used Apache Roller, and I decided that I would replace it with a web-application of my own creation. The goals I had when I set out to create this were to build a good looking online space for me to share my thoughts and opinions, and to completely avoid the use of JavaScript while doing so.
This past June I got involved with a project to improve computer science teaching in Pennsylvania. As a teaching assistant at a CSforAllPA Boot Camp, a week long training for teachers to learn computer science, we found a need for an interpreter for the language defined by their certification exam. The creators of this exam defined a new programming language, specifically for displaying questions on their exam, but with little consideration for how teachers would be expected to familiarize themselves with the language or the test. Coming off the success of my senior project, started by a friend of mine to build a programming language pretty much from scratch, I suggested instead of attempting to substitute Java for the exam language, we not-so-simply build our own interpreter for it.
Hello to all of my zero readers, recently I've put together a quick tool to convert rows in a spreadsheet to text in a document. The main principal is that the spreadsheet forms a table which has named columns, and is broken down by row. The innovative portion of this is that each row is then inserted into a document template. A document translator matches "hash tags" in the template document and replaces each tag with the cell from the column which matches it.
