Pirnat.com

Phew! It’s been crazy busy the past couple of weeks. I can’t believe I haven’t had time to come up for (blog) air since before Halloween.
First of all, I’m happy to announce that after a lot of extra work on the weekends and evenings to get things wrapped up, AG’s new custom photo [...]

Hackers Only Originally uploaded by aaronoliver3000.
Once upon a time, some Python developers here at AG Interactive said, “Gosh, we should totally do one of those fancy Hack Day things.” And they went unto their manager, who said, “What excellent timing, I think we should totally do one [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Dang, it’s suddenly turning out to be a great week! In brief:

After a couple miserable days of near-100-degree temperatures, the weather has cooled off and is now downright awesome.
Got my monitor back from Apple (no thanks to DHL, who apparently don’t even believe in leaving slips at the door when they ignore the “no [...]

Today I discovered that I’ve been nominated for Chairman’s Awards in two categories: “Innovation” and “Team Leadership.”
Huh. Cool.

Mood:surprised
Music:VNV Nation – “Chrome”

The office sprung for a bunch of us to attend Jonathan Lewis’s “Writing Optimal SQL” seminar, put on by the nice folks at NEOOUG (that’d be the Northeast Ohio Oracle Users Group, for those playing acronym bingo at home), so I had a nice and brain-meltingly interesting Friday away from the office. Lewis really [...]

IMG_2914.JPG Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.
Julia has a stupid new trick way to eat (see photo).
On the weather front, it took me about two hours to get home last night; I had two-inch thick chunks of ice that developed on my wiper blades, which made the last half hour [...]

One of these days, when I’m not always working until 8 or 9 at night, I really should:

Either start digging into some of the techy books that I’ve got in progress, or find something really fun to read. I miss reading something really satisfying (still coming down from the Neal Stephenson high of 2006). [...]