View of NYC, Empire State building, looking North

2019 NYC Pack List

Going into Labor Day weekend, Abby and I traveled to New York City to attend my buddy’s wedding as well as celebrate our 10-year wedding anniversary. All in all, with travel to/from, we spent 5 nights, went carry-on only and had a wide range of events dictating dress code. Weather sunny in the high 80s. Urban sightseeing, broadway theatre, casual to fancy dining, a formal wedding and Ultimate Frisbee in Central Park. ...

October 30, 2019 · 2 min · Joe Whitsitt

So I Became a Vegetarian

My wife heard it from the mayor. Two weeks ago, I jumped right into it. I became a vegetarian, but kept it to myself. For breakfast and lunch I didn’t share a meal with anyone and I didn’t tell my wife about it. In the same day my family and I walked to our town’s fall festival in the nearby park. The mayor was grilling up hotdogs and was offering them out to anyone nearby. My son walked over and got one so I followed after him to make sure he didn’t get ketchup everywhere. The mayor started to hand out another hotdog to me and without thinking I responded, “no thank you, I am a vegetarian.” I could have just said, “no thanks,” I thought, but I didn’t think much more about it. The mayor shrugging my comment off, walked back to the grill and I turned my attention to my son which had ketchup all over his face and hands. Later on, I caught up with my wife. She seemed a bit upset and she pulled me aside. “I just talked to the mayor, you are a vegetarian now?” ...

October 19, 2019 · 4 min · Joe Whitsitt

Hello Gatsby

Jekyll has served me well for several years, but I am interested in trying something new. GastbyJS has caught my attention because it uses Node instead of Ruby which is what I have been using for work and Gastby has plugins that integrate with Drupal, something I might look into later. The first step has been to migrate and familarize myself with Gatsby. To aid in this, I am using a starter kit that works with Netlify and Forestry. ...

October 7, 2019 · 1 min · Joe Whitsitt

We have a budget

This is a re-write of a post I authored back in 2017. Our situation has changed enough since I first wrote about budgeting that I didn’t feel like it was useful anymore as-is. The job, house, wife, kids, dog, car and beer drinking all caught up with me a couple years ago. We were spending more than we were making, forcing us to budget for the first time. Previously, we were lucky to have enough for our lifestyle, but overtime, we were having troubles paying down the debt and money started to become an uncomfortable part of life. ...

October 5, 2019 · 2 min · Joe Whitsitt

Optimizing GeoJSON

I have been working with some GeoJSON files lately for work and at first I was having issues with the large size of the files. For the web (displaying it on a map), this is not good so I went in search of some ways to reduce the file size. Trim (Truncate) Coordinates I read that, “for most web maps, decimals after the 5th decimal point are essentially meaningless,” so using the find and replace functionality in Sublime Text: ...

June 22, 2018 · 2 min · Joe Whitsitt