I've been practicing solving Rubik's cube for a while now. I can generally get it done in under 4 minutes now, with my record being 2 minutes 25 seconds. I saw a big boost in speed when I switched from the small key-chain cube that I had been using (and that subsequently broke from overuse) to a regular, full-sized cube. N...

I've been biking to work on my "new" bike for a while now, and I've been intending to post about it for some time. Building a bike from scratch was a great learning experience, and I'd encourage anyone with a remote interest to check it out. I spent less than $400 total, a sum that I expect to make back in gas savings alon...

Jordan, Mark and I went backpacking in the north cascades this weekend. Our hike started just off of Highway 20, leading us near to Lake Ann (which was rather beautiful, as can be seen below). We then departed from the normal trail and went across Heather Pass. The pass is quite easy to get over, but it leads to a rather l...

The recent Jobster release contains some really interesting features. One of them— The Jobster Robot —uses the automated tagging software that I developed to suggest skills based on a user's Facebook work experience and college major. Here's a sample of the output it gives based on my Facebook profile: Pretty g...

Facebook has been down for nearly an hour; instead of allowing a dramatic increase in my productivity, I've opted to blog about it. Pictured below: the danger faced by any business whose profit model is inextricably tangled with a third party platform or application (Facebook, S3 , etc). What happens when your application...

I'm making a concerted effort to eliminate the need for having PHP and MySQL installed on this server (which is running again, if you hadn't noticed). As soon as I can figure out how to hack the Wordpress import script to import from one database (MySQL) and export to a different one (PostgreSQL), I'll issue the final "eme...

It's been a while since I've posted, and I'm not going to say much in this post. "Brendan, what's this strange title you've chosen?", you may ask. This is the original (there's another one coming out soon) HD-DVD encryption key. It's used by the MAFIAA to protect their intellectual property. The video and audio on all DVDs...