• Camping trip at Lake Bryan

    I went on a camping trip last weekend with some family and Troop 599. This was followed by the Texas A&M vs Auburn baseball game on Sunday for driving back home. On the second day of camping, the troop attended the Living History Weekend at Santa’s Wonderland, where we even saw a flamethrower in action.

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  • My first meetup in 2 years! Pura Vida

    A few weeks ago, I traveled to Costa Rica for a meetup with our Backup, Scan, and Security Research teams. This was the first time that I had traveled for work in 2 years! Over the past couple of years, I’d gotten comfortable with the idea of not traveling. It was relaxing to not be…

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  • White Sands National Park Trip

    As part of our Spring Break trip to New Mexico this week, my family stopped by White Sands National Park for some sand sledding. We bought sleds from the visitors center for $24.99. Note that I said buy, not rent. You can gift the sleds back to the visitors center when you’re done and they’ll…

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  • Sandia Peak Trip

    This week was Spring Break for our family. So, after I got back from Costa Rica, we packed up the truck and headed to New Mexico. On the first day we were in New Mexico, we took the Sandia Peak Tramway up to Sandia Peak and spent a couple of hours exploring. The Sandia Peak…

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  • On comparing large lists

    In the past, I’ve often had to generate email lists of users that fit specific conditions. This usually isn’t too difficult with some of our in-house data tools at Automattic. But, when I hit a case where I have to work across systems, it usually results in me dumping the data from each system and…

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    Graphic about lists being the same
  • How to expand tilde in bash script

    When I was working on a recent bash script, I was irritated when I wasn’t getting output to my desktop. After a while, I figured out that quoted tildes are not automatically expanded. From that link: If a word begins with an unquoted tilde character (‘~’), all of the characters up to the first unquoted…

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  • Wheel of Life in Google Sheets

    I’ve been working with a career coach since last April. One of the very first things that my coach asked me to do was a wheel of life. Except, when she assigned the task to me, she asked me to fill it out by modifying an image. This worked fine, but felt a bit weird…

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  • Speed Up WooCommerce Square in WP-Admin

    I was recently working on a WooCommerce store that had a very slow wp-admin. There were likely several factors involved, Query Monitor made it easy to see several API calls being made with every page load. If I could get rid of those API calls, then I could significantly increase the performance of wp-admin. With…

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  • Canton McKinley Regional 2021

    After having several people tell me that, if they had to choose between either Canton McKinley’s regional or the National Matches at Camp Perry, they’d pick the Canton McKinley regional, I was intrigued. So, when the time, came I was sure to sign up. Community In talking to people that recommended the Canton McKinley regional…

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  • Notes from Camp Perry Advanced SAFS 2021

    At the CMP National Matches this past month, I had the chance to attend the Advanced SAFS class that was put on the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit (AMU). At the end of the class there was a panel that included Jim Henderson, Jon Shue, Sally Talbott, and a few others whose names I unfortunately do…

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