09: Memories #2

My best friend in elementary school was my next door neighbor. His name was Alejandro and his family and ours got together all the time. There was a honeysuckle bush standing at the boundary of our two backyards. The border was otherwise open (no fences). In the spring when the flowers would bloom there would [...]

08: Cat Tree #2

The box is a two-wall cube with ceiling and floor. The two 18″x18″ pinewood squares will be the top and bottom pieces of your box and the two 17″x18″ pieces will be your sidewalls. The following can be somewhat difficult to get right because the boards may warp and twist during the assembly process so [...]

07: Project Euler

Project Euler is an international site that is dedicated to producing difficult mathematical problems that require a degree of programming ability to solve. Their problems are varying in difficulty but for the most part they are quite hard. The problems require some ingenuity to solve in under a minute, so the scalability of your solution [...]

06: Personal Finance

Dad knows best. All the basic rules about managing my money I learned from him. Of course, fancy little details like stock-picking I learned on my own, but I never would have even had the chance to learn those details without the foundation he had given me. The lessons he gave me are absurdly simple, [...]

05: Cat Tree #1

It’s time to put the build in buildfirst.

Late last year Dariya and I decided to build a cat tree for our two cats to spar in and scratch up. I’m going to use three posts to explain everything we did as a record of how we performed the project. Think of it as me following [...]

04: Memories #1

During Christmas 1988 my parents bought our first Christmas tree. I was a few months shy of my third birthday. It was a huge Christmas tree, and it had big bright lights and those colored balls and the glittery garlands. Pretty awesome, if you ask me. My parents say it was [...]

03: Of Snails

I currently live in Northridge, just a few blocks away from my employer. I enjoy the brief walk to work in the mornings. It is cool weather, which is perfect active time for the snails that make their homes in the bushes near work. This June has been unusually cloudy and cool, [...]

02: Memories #0

Upon one of my unplanned trips to Houston, I spent some time chatting with my parents’ neighbor and friend. Upon regaling him with tales of my latest exploits, he commented that I should write an autobiography. While I don’t find my life so exciting such that it could be a well-read book, the thought [...]

01: Mission

A man cannot preserve his life forever, but he will always try.