Zork is one of the very first interactive fiction games and was released in 1977 for the PDP-10. Interactive fiction is a gameplay style now (sadly) mostly lost to the sands of time where on-screen text describes your environment to you and you interact via basic text commands (e.g. go north, take sword, hit troll with sword).

Zork (or Zork I, to differentiate it from the subsequent releases), is a timeless classic with a rich and challenging story. Zork has been open sourced by its creator Infocom, so I set out to learn a bit about it and make some unique ways to interact with it.

If you’re like me (and, in this regard, if you’re not then you should be), you use Google Authenticator or a similar application to generate Multiple Factor Authentication tokens — six digit codes that add an extra step of identity verification to sites you log into. These codes rotate every thirty seconds and must match the one the server is expecting (kinda like nuclear launch codes, but to log into Twitter/Google/banking/etc.).

Well, after four and a half wonderful years with my magnet, I bid it farewell.

After a particularly firm snag and a subsequent major loss of sensitivity, I was concerned the magnet was fractured or the coating had failed so I did an emergency removal which went very smoothly and I’m now all healed up.

I’ll miss it dearly; after that long, it became an instinct — just the other day I was doing PC maintenance and confidently reached for a screw with my finger that disappointingly didn’t jump onto it for safekeeping… This will take some getting used to :(

I’ve been diving quite a bit (just finished my 26th dive today)!

Here are some videos from last weekend, when two buddies and I camped in Monterey and dove (literally) sunup to sundown, and from this weekend when I dove a marine preserve called Point Lobos with another friend of mine.

A couple weekends ago, I install PiHole, a software package that provides DNS blackholing for your local network, and I was shocked.

Some background: DNS (domain name server) is essentially the internet’s phone book. When you type google.com,  your computer first asks a DNS server (run by your internet service provider, Google, Cloudflare, or any other of hundreds of DNS providers) for the website’s IP address. The IP address is how the infrastructure of the web actually knows how to route your request — if google.com is like saying “Dave Smith’s House”, the IP address 216.58.192.14 that corresponds to it is like knowing “123 Main Street, Greenville, South Carolina.

…I’m becoming one of those blogs with 6 month intervals between posts.

Life’s been great lately! I’m chugging along at work, taking on more responsibility for IT needs. Outside of work, I’ve jumped feet first into scuba diving! I’ve got my certification and am shooting for 20-25 dives under my belt before I hit Hawaii in September. I’m getting plugged in with some local clubs as well as wildlife teams that do volunteer fish/kelp/urchin/etc. survey dives for reports to the Dept. of Fish and Wildlife.

Hai world.

It’s been a while since I posted; life is changing — updates lie within. I’m really liking my full-time gig doing software dev in SF.

My parents are moving to South Carolina and I’ve just signed the lease on a cute little apartment in Redwood City.

I’m currently struggling to sort through (and dispose of most of) my accumulated junk from the last 22 years of life, including much that was acquired before I realized I have a great distaste for physical objects I don’t use regularly (read: I have a monumental amount of crap to throw away).

My latest hobby/focus/obsession has been mead, and man, I’ve been having so much fun sinking my teeth into the art and science — already made 3 gallons and just started a 5.5 gallon batch.

To track what’s at what step, what my recipes are, and to do some helpful conversions, I made Mead.Kiwi, a site to track all of my work. On each bottle is a QR code that will take you to the recipe page for your bottle, contain records of mixing/pitching/aging, data from intermediate density readings, etc. I’m pretty happy with it, and seeing as how I haven’t been doing much coding lately, I thought I’d at least put it here.

TL;DR: I’ve learned things, built things, got employed at a thing, was sad about and thought about things, and am happy about things.

Ohai there. I said I’d post with what I’m up to over my break, so here are things:

• I got a job with an awesome data viz company which cares about the people they join on data (heh, get it?) as much as cool code
• I’ve been enjoying my last summer vacation with plenty of kalsarikännit before moving to (hopefully) consistent adulthood employment
• I’ve been re-discovering and admiring OG hackers of yore and their phone phreaking exploits
• I’ve been pondering mortality and how to effectively convert the data about it into a motivating and humbling visual
• I celebrated one year with my incredible SO
• I’ve begun a homebrew project to make my own batches of one of the world’s oldest libations (yes, Dad, it’s legal)
• I built a tracking and recipe management system so I have detailed and sharable records of said beverage (and, if you ask nicely, I might send you a bottle)
• I’ve been adjusting to my new MBP as a daily driver (my jumbo PC is mostly a game- and compiler-box now, but I’m appreciating the consistency of Bash full-time instead of my usual ebb/summer-flow of CLI speed)
• I’ve been watching the cryptocurrency market frolick aimlessly as my fun-money (shockingly) fails to spontaneously spawn a complete retirement plan
• I’ve been mourning for and with friends for their losses in the sudden and nightmarish NorCal wildfires (please donate money, time, or things to people who are helping; mark yourselves as safe so I don’t come bugging you — I’m fine; help those who aren’t)
• I’ve been learning Solidity, consulting, and contributing to a project to immortalize important texts on the blockchain (here’s to contributing to a blockchain project that ISN’T A NEW TOKEN OR CURRENCY YAYYYY)
• I’ve been serving as Sysadmin-In-Residence for the family business (unsurprisingly, when you teach people to Google well, most of the problems you come home to actually require your attention! Seriously! It’s un-ironically nice to have some puzzles and problems to solve when you come home instead of just rebooting a router and teaching how to use the printer. Fellow geek-children, take note — your parents are, in fact, smart; just show them the tools).
• I finally got around to enabling (and slowly instinct-ivizing) vi-style keybindings in Bash (when I can remember to use and practice them, they’re a Godsend… actually, they’re a pain in my behind, but I’m getting faster and better every time I use them… kinda like Vim… hm….)
• I’ve been admiring and enjoying life as I transition from an epoch marked by quarters, semesters, and midterms into one marked by new jobs, marriages, and children.

I still have a few weeks to go before day one at the new job (first full time job after a decade in the industry — a weird, exciting, and terrifying prospect), so expect a few more frivolous side projects and (hopefully) some alpha releases from projects I’m helping out with!

Today marks the end of two summers of interning with Facebook; I’ll be going away for a week and then the job hunt begins with a mess of interviews.

I’m so proud of my time at FB — the friends I’ve made, personal challenges faced, and skills developed. To tell the truth, I’m not really sure what I’m feeling right now; it’s part excitement, part sadness, and many parts perspective looking forward and back.