pmcoltrane

Recently I’ve been frustrated by a realization I’ve had. From my entire college career — spanning four years of my young adult life — I have only scattered, fragmentary memories. People, ...

https://pmcoltrane.wordpress.com/2023/10/23/the-unnaming-of-memory/

About a week and a half ago I finished doing something I’ve said I should do all my life. I finished reading the Bible. Old and New Testament, all 66 books and 800,000+ words, from “In the be...

https://pmcoltrane.wordpress.com/2023/07/04/reading-the-bible/

My trusty old Wolf Creek backpack has been through a lot. I got it sometime in middle school. It was my daily carry throughout high school and college. It’s gotten me through camping trips, hik...

https://pmcoltrane.wordpress.com/2022/04/14/new-backpack/

Today marks 20 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It was a pivotal event in history: like the JFK assassination or the Apollo 11 moon landing, everyone who lived through it seems to remember...

https://pmcoltrane.wordpress.com/2021/09/11/9-11/

Back in November my wife mailed a birthday card to a friend in Canada. It disappeared for five months, before showing up in our mailbox yesterday, stamped “Return to Sender” for insufficient ...

https://pmcoltrane.wordpress.com/2021/04/11/where-in-the-world/

How long can a coder hold a grudge? Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to, oh, about twenty years ago. The year was 2001, and Microsoft was cooking up something called the .NET Framework. I was in ...

https://pmcoltrane.wordpress.com/2021/04/04/vb6-to-vb-net-the-most-useless-change/

A friend of mine reposted this image on his social media. A summary: “What technology are you shocked has not advanced yet?” “The legal code… Why not put the laws into a git repository…...

https://pmcoltrane.wordpress.com/2021/01/02/gov-git-for-government/

Long ago, when I was a child too young even to type, Christmas meant presents under the tree, snickerdoodles baking in the oven… and my Dad programming his Commodore 64 to play a Christmas caro...

https://pmcoltrane.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/christmas-in-basic/

Will carrots, a taproot vegetable, grow well in a flower box planter? That’s the question I asked myself back in April, when our planting season started. Tonight is our first potential frost of...

https://pmcoltrane.wordpress.com/2020/11/01/will-carrots-grow-in-a-flower-box-planter/

As Betteridge’s Law of Headlines suggests, the answer is no. But this was excuse enough for me to lug my old telescope into the yard for a gander at the Moon and Mars. The Moon appears nearly f...

https://pmcoltrane.wordpress.com/2020/10/02/are-smartphone-cameras-good-for-astrophotography/