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Brian Enigma

My personal devolution in shaving

Shaving Cylinders March 14, 2010

Back in ye olden days, when peo­ple still used the word “ye” in a non-ironic fash­ion, folks shaved with knives.  That is, when they shaved at all.  Arche­ol­o­gists have found shav­ing blades dat­ing back to at least 3000 BC.  In the late 1700s a French­man was look­ing at a car­pen­ters’ plane — that thing used […]

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The Mantis plugins keep coming: Tag Column

March 8, 2010

Over the week­end, I intro­duced a plu­gin for the Man­tis bug track­ing sys­tem that enforeced a “fixed-in” ver­sion when resolv­ing an issue as fixed.  If you missed it, you can visit the Force­FixedIn project page or the related blog post.
Today, I would like to add another Mantis-related plu­gin to my list of projects.  This one, […]

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The Hipster PDA Scrabble cheat sheet (v2.0)

March 6, 2010

A while back, I made a Scrab­ble “cheat sheet” that fit in the stan­dard Hip­ster PDA 3x5 index card for­mat.  I used it for a few weeks, both in play­ing the Scrab­ble board game and Words With Friends.  Unfor­tu­nately, it never quite worked the way I wanted it to.
A cou­ple of weeks ago, I updated it to […]

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Forcing a fixed-in version with the Mantis bug tracker

March 6, 2010

At the office, we use Man­tis, a pow­er­ful PHP-based bug track­ing sys­tem.  It offers some great con­trol over process and work­flow, but not quite the gran­u­lar­ity that I need.  Specif­i­cally, I work in an envi­ron­ment where it is vital that the “fixed-in” ver­sion is filled in when resolv­ing an issue as “fixed.”  With­out this, there […]

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The simplicity of WordPress upgrades

March 5, 2010

One of the com­plaints I have heard about not run­ning your own Word­Press instal­la­tion ver­sus going with a man­aged ser­vice like Blog­ger or Live­Jour­nal is that it is dif­fi­cult to main­tain.  Specif­i­cally, that it is dif­fi­cult to upgrade.  This is why, about six months ago, a worm went around and took down a bunch of […]

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The things I have taken past airport security

Thumbnail image for The things I have taken past airport security March 4, 2010

There are a small hand­ful of sur­pris­ing things I have taken past air­port secu­rity in recent years.  Some of them were know­ingly, some of them were for­get­ful­ness.  This is a pic­to­r­ial chron­i­cle of those items.
One of the first ques­tion­able items I man­aged to get past secu­rity was “The Bill of Rights — Secu­rity Edi­tion.”  I got this back in […]

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The fractal martinis

Thumbnail image for The fractal martinis March 2, 2010

The fol­low­ing pic­tures are of frac­tal mar­ti­nis.  They are extremely poor excuses for frac­tal mar­ti­nis, being recur­sive only two gen­er­a­tions, but tech­ni­cally they are still frac­tal.  They are frac­tal in the same way as “yo dawg, I heard you like mar­ti­nis, so we put a mar­tini in yo mar­tini…” but I still find them enter­tain­ing.
Dirty, […]

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Yes, I can has cheezburger

Thumbnail image for Yes, I can has cheezburger March 1, 2010

I like to poke fun at Etsy.  It seems that for every one rea­son­able prod­uct, there are thou­sands of crafty prod­ucts that are a lit­tle too “craft.”  These include items made with pop­si­cle sticks, puffy paint, shrinky-dinks, rhine­stones, and assorted garbage.  I am also a big fan of Regretsy for this rea­son.  Until recently, I […]

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The Neo-Victorian Cubicle

Thumbnail image for The Neo-Victorian Cubicle February 28, 2010

If you’re going to do some­thing, do it big.  Make it spec­tac­u­lar.  Whether it’s a fan­tas­tic suc­cess, an amaz­ing effort, or an astound­ing fail­ure, make it some­thing peo­ple will talk about for a long time.
A cou­ple of weeks ago the office in which I work did a bit of a reshuf­fle.  We ran out of cubicle […]

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Questions for the wearers of glasses

February 5, 2010
Question

Back in Sep­tem­ber, I started wear­ing glasses occa­sion­ally for com­put­ing.  Since then, I have been get­ting used to the idea of wear­ing glasses while read­ing and work­ing at the com­puter.  The main prob­lem I have faced has been keep­ing them clean.  I think this would not be as big of a deal if I wore […]

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The Crazy Neighbor

February 4, 2010

A cou­ple of months ago, @geekygirldawn started up a web­site called The Crazy Neigh­bor.  I guess she has a few crazy neigh­bors.  The for­mat of the site is like many oth­ers out there — I Can Has Cheezburger, Pic­ture Is Unre­lated, Graph­Jam, and so on.  Users sub­mit pho­tos and those pic­tures get posted.
While I cannot […]

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How to locate historic photos of Portland

January 31, 2010

A few years ago I made a blog post, The Neigh­bor­hood Then and Now com­par­ing his­toric images of Port­land street scenes with sim­i­lar modern-day images.  In that post, I linked to my source, Efiles.  Efiles is a City of Port­land web­site with a data­base of his­toric records — pho­tos, doc­u­ments, record­ings, maps, and other things […]

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