I Made a Photo Page with Gridsome, GraphQL, and the Flickr API

N.B.: You may also view this page on the new blog site. My adventures in front-end web development continue. I’m a WebDev rookie, and am progressing in the absolute wrong way, starting at the top with Gridsome and Vue, before having a good grasp of any of the three sisters (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) they’re built on. But I’m more motivated when I can directly see the results of what I’m […]

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Enough Already

It just keeps coming. With the boys back at home, the amount of laundry has more than doubled. Sunday, the dryer quit working. It left us with a full load of wet sheets and no place to dry them. We’re not sure whether dryer repair is an "essential service" or not. It seems it us, but we haven’t heard back from the repair guy. So now we’re making due with […]

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These Strange Times

We are in our fifth week of living under the stay-at-home order issued in the Bay Area on March 16. Here are some observations about these strange times. Kensington is a Pretty Place to be Trapped Suzie in our Backyard For being stuck in one place, our new house isn’t bad. The neighborhood has lots of places to walk the dog, on quiet tree-lined streets through nice residential neighborhoods. There […]

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It’s a New (JAMstack) World Baby

[tl;dr – I created a new faster website for the SSS Blog more-or-less on my own. This post talks about why and how. Those not interested in a 10,000-foot overview of the web development world should skip this and wait for the next post.] Welcome to the new svelte SSS Blog. Why a new blog, when the existing one works fine? For the past six or seven years, I’ve been […]

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It’s a Wrap!

In the end, I just could’t vote for Bloomberg Super Tuesday’s here. Suzie and I are going to vote this morning at the Kensington Community Center. After the (somewhat embarrassing I’ll admit) post yesterday, watching and reading news coverage and posts from people I respect, an email from Pete, and a good night’s sleep, I realized I just can’t vote for Bloomberg. He’d make a perfectly adequate President, but I […]

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How to Vote Post-Pete

With my preferred candidate making a pragmatic, mature, take-one-for-the party decision to drop out of the race, Suzie and I have less than two days to decide who we’ll vote for in the California primary. It’s a tough nut to crack; we need a flow chart to follow all the possible permutations. I’m a moderate, pragmatic, center-left guy. I think Trump and his ilk are reprehensible and dangerous. Four more […]

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Search is Making Us Narrower

I am a techno-person. I love computers. I code as a hobby. I’m a far cry from being a Luddite. But there are many ways that digital technology is making us less than we used to be. Many have been widely discussed. But not this one. Search is making us narrower, less well-rounded, and less wise. “Search” encompasses lots of things, and some aspects of it are unobjectionable. The ability […]

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Accidentally Revealing a Truth

A late-model SUV was parked this afternoon in the driveway of our neighbor two houses up the hill. On its rear end was a bumper sticker that said: Bernie Sanders 2020Because F**k this S**t And there you have it, a truth accidentally revealed. Supporting Sanders not because of any expectation that his campaign promises will come to pass if he’s elected (there being a near-zero chance they’d ever get through […]

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Dems Should Remain Open to Going to the Bench

If Bernie Sanders (or my preferred candidate, Pete Buttigieg) doesn’t win more than 50% of the Democratic Party’s delegates, it opens the door to an open convention, where delegates would be free to select a candidate other than the one to whom they were committed before. I read an opinion piece this morning claiming that an “open” convention would as a practical matter have to nominate one of the candidates […]

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Far From Over

In response to my first quick reaction to the Nevada caucus results, this post was to be a screed about how, if the Democratic Party were the Titanic, its response to seeing an imminent iceberg would be to head straight for it with increasing speed. Maybe that will be the case eventually. But for now, despite the media’s always-present tendency to oversimplify (New York Times: “Sanders Takes Control” “Bernie Sanders […]

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