Davin's blog

Category: Davin

  • Will St Charles MI flood in Spring 2014?

    I’ve lived in St Charles, MI since 2008. It’s a nice little town, I think. One of the features is the confluence of the North and South branches of the Bad River, pretty much right in the middle of town. So, it has been a pretty cold winter with what seems like a higher than…

  • Five Whys, Socratic Method, and Dependent Arising

    Root cause analysis—jargon for managers in lean startups and Agile dev shops. In plain language, isn’t it “Well, I hear what you’re saying, but what’s really going on?” I feel a rambling, messy first draft coming on. Why in the world do we need jargon for such a common line of reasoning? This is every…

  • 2nd try at the LCP Challenge

  • Assange, Snowden, and Stallman as, um, heros?

    (Photo of Richard Stallman and Julian Assange holding a propaganda photo of Edward Snowden) Bruce Sterling wrote up a long-winded editorial “The Ecuadorian Library” that covers a lot of ground and ends up posing Richard Stallman, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden as moral heroes against the State Department and NSA as antithetical to democracy. Here’s…

  • This blog is 10 years old

    Hey, I just realized that I’ve been blogging for ten years now. That’s some kind of milestone. From hand-crafted to Blogger to MovableType to WordPress Back when I started in 2003, it was really a learning experiment on my part. I was a consultant at the time, and felt that I needed to get first…

  • 1st try at the LCP challenge

  • My new .22 target pistol, Marvel and Springfield Range Officer

    Over the past couple months I’ve worked out the kinks on a new .22 target pistol, and I figured I’d share the details. The new gun: Marvel Unit 1 conversion on a Springfield Armory Range Officer frame After much consideration, I decided to go with a Marvel Precision Unit 1. That is a conversion unit…

  • Excluding a site in a Google search

    Want to get search results from Google that aren’t from a specific site? Put a minus sign to the left of “site,” as in this search query: “reliability of wikipedia -site:wikipedia.org”

  • Downsizing my mattress

    My current mattress is a little too soft for my bad back’s liking. And it’s just too big. I’m decidedly single at this point, have never been too tied to possessions in general, and so for me my queen mattress is just a nervous tick on the side of crazy. It’s time to downsize. So,…

  • Make an alternate form to register for nanny taxes and increase state tax revenue

    Ah, the nanny tax. Some quick Google searches show a range of 80 to 95% of people who are obligated to pay the nanny tax, simply don’t. (NYTimes, ParentDish.com) That’s a pretty whopping statistic. As I’ve been finding out, it would certainly be easier to just skip it. This past summer I hired a nanny…