Author Archives: Robert Barron

40,000 Acres

Penny and I have had a running joke about owning 40,000 acres of land for years.  It started due to a misunderstanding about the amount of land we were discussing as being acceptably large to qualify for a fine home … Continue reading

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Klondike Challenge Conquered

After months of adding up walking and hiking mileage, I surpassed the 500 mile mark to complete the Klondike Challenge. The challenge is sponsored by Jack London State Historic Park to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of author … Continue reading

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Pomodoro One

Since November 2015 I’ve been working from home.  Though working from home has been a theoretical option for years, this is the first time I’ve taken the plunge and done it exclusively. So far, things have turned out well, despite … Continue reading

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The Klondike Challenge

I’m a bit of a sucker when it comes to checklists and challenges.  One of my favorite things about hiking (other than the hike itself) is logging my hikes on one of my websites and seeing yet another trail marked … Continue reading

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Mount Robert Barron

Penny and I play a little game whenever we go on vacation.  At any souvenir shop we come across that features the typical display of personalized trinkets, such as keychains with names on them, we look to see if we … Continue reading

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Locking files for testing

Getting errors when trying to access locked files is a common situation that must be addressed by programs.  On Windows machines it’s fairly easy to replicate the scenario of a locked file using a simple technique that I picked up … Continue reading

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HTML escape characters in Azure app settings

Windows applications can make use of XML nodes in appSettings to pass configuration information into a program.  Because the app.config (or web.config) file is XML some characters need to be escaped so that they are not improperly parsed as part … Continue reading

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Blank lines in Jinja2 Templates

When working with the Jinja2 templating engine on Python I’ve been bugged by blank lines that got inserted into the resultant XML when an optional node was excluded from the output.  Though Jinja2 sports some support for controlling whitespace I … Continue reading

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TP-Link Wifi Extender Light Woes

My new TP-Link wifi extender works great at extending the range of our home wifi setup. The home office downstairs unfortunately resides in a wifi dead spot given where our AT&T wifi access point had to be located. It’s inexpensive … Continue reading

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DateTime Intervals Versus DateTimes

I had wondered why some websites displayed date intervals (i.e. “5 days ago”, “4 hours ago”) for user posts instead of printing actual dates and times. Doing some new website work recently caused a revelation about that choice and how … Continue reading

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