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This time of year has always been one of memories. The start of the school year, thoughts back to grade school and high school in Chicago and the start of every year of college. But especially for the last few years it brings back thoughts of my serious start of my wine education. [...]

For the record (in case anyone was still in suspense about this)… Apparently if you send an email to the USPS’s web tools customer support box saying that nothing you try on their test server is working as documented, you’ll get a lovely form letter about a day later congratulating you on successfully completing all [...]

I spent the better part of today cooking up a nice little interface to the US Postal Service’s rate calculation APIs, and like a good little dev I’ve even been writing little py.test cases to poke at it. But once it came time to stop stubbing out the live IO and see if their [...]

Zomg!! Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.
Two and a half weeks to go. Roughly. Ticking time bomb, really. Could go any time. Yessir… Any time at all.
I had a nice little panic attack this afternoon, hyperventilated until I couldn’t feel my hands. Then went upstairs [...]

Nessie, Is That You? Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.
It all started so innocently… A whole bunch of rain, some company-wide emails about which cars were most in jeopardy from the flood waters in our parking lot… And then a guy sent out a photo of the situation. Minutes later, [...]

History Lesson (1997) Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.
At tonight’s (now yesterday’s) ClePy meeting, special guest presenter Brian Fitzpatrick, Engineer Manager for Google’s Chicago office, gave a talk entitled “Google, Bigtable, and Scalable Version Control.” I’d heard a bit about how GFS and Bigtable work before at a previous [...]