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18 Years of Blogging
This blog has been alive in some form since 2002. As you can imagine a lot has changed in 18 years. The blog has moved physically from servers under desks, servers in closets, to finally virtual machines in the cloud. Even those VMs have changed AWS instance sizes and Ubuntu LTS versions over time. The…
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Brenneka’s Wedding
Our amazing friends Brendan and Anneka (henceforth known as Brenneka) got married in Colorado on New Years Eve 2019/2020. It was an awesome time and we used the trip to see old friends, get outdoors, and just have a great time. Side note: This trip in December was also what partially inspired my “Dry January”.…
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Home Improvement Porch Project
Kat bought our house around the same time that I bought my condo in 2014, before we even met! It’s an amazing property on a large wooded lot with nice privacy and set back a bit from the street in a quiet neighborhood. The house had a great back deck with room for an outdoor…
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Peru Trip Overview
It’s been a dream of Kat’s to explore Peru and hike Machu Picchu for years now. Thanks to her influence it also became a dream of mine. Before we get started on the details, here’s a link to the curated photos of our trip. I took thousands of photos, and these are the ones that…
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Wedding Photos
Kat and I had our wedding reception last year in August and we’ve finally sorted through the photos and picked a few of our favorites. Check out the link to the photographer page for Burns Wedding Photos.
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Mom’s Christmas Cookies
Here is a Christmas cookie recipe that’s been passed down for a few generations. I’m assuming my mom got this one from my great grandmother. These cookies wind up being soft and delicious. They’re rolled out and easily cut into all sorts of fun shapes to fit the holidays. Cookie Ingredients 1 cup – Lard…
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Radiolab – Single Transferrable Vote
This morning I’ve had my mind blown, listening to Podcasts on the drive in to work. You should listen to Radiolab’s Tweak the Vote podcast on ranked choice voting, or “Single Transferrable Vote”. I heard about California’s idea for ranked choice voting a few years back and it caught into my brain, but I never…
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Ditching No-IP for DuckDNS
I’ve been using dynamic IP address services from no-ip.com for a long time to give a DNS name to my dynamic home IP. I remember having a no-ip.com address in college around the early 2000s for my dorm, then apartment, computer. I went through a hiatus after college where I managed my domain name to…
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Hiking: New Hope Creek North
The adventure on tap for today was to find a hiking trail that was close to home that we haven’t hiked before. We’re lucky in the Durham area to be so close to Duke Forest and the Eno river. After a bit of online searching with coffee and couch time, we settled on New Hope…
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All Things Open 2018
Last week I attended the All Things Open conference in Raleigh. This is a conference dedicated to Open Source Software, which is very different from the usual vendor led conferences I attend. It was also unusual to commute to a conference in the morning and then back home at night. Usually conference season means at least…