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?” ...

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. ...

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. ...

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: ...

Here is a follow-up to my previous post, 2017-ragbrai-packlist. Based on this year, I made some last minute decisions on what to pack. Here are some factors that changed what ended up on the ride: Supported by my team bus. Riding/camping with my wife. Riding my single speed. Only camping four nights (22nd-25th) and only riding three days (23rd-25th) In addition, the weather is looking pretty decent for July in Iowa. For the portion that I will be riding the highest is 88 and the lowest is 58. ...