Matt & Jen Simerson

After 50 hours of walking at my desk, a few shortcomings compelled me to action. Most of the treadmill surface was under the desk and not available for walking, forcing a shortened stride. It was also unsuitable for jogging or running. We left the treadmill on sliders, so it could be slid out for running. [...]

Dear Panasonic,
Thank you for your consumer friendly web site. I was all ready to pull out my credit card and buy that camera. At the last minute, you intervened and saved me.
PS: Consider hiring someone to finish setting up your shopping cart. Making it work properly in standards compliant browsers would be welcome too. [...]

A year or two ago, I found GroceryIQ, a nifty shopping list application for the iPhone. It has an enormous built in catalog of grocery items, as well as being able to add custom items and custom stores. So, I can walk into REI, and it’ll show just the items I’m looking for.
The only [...]

Background
In July of 2008, I was tasked with building a system to back up thousands of Linux based servers. Previous systems using Amanda and Bacula had failed, principally because they required a full time backup administrator to maintain. My job was to build a backup system that required very little maintenance, scaled well, and made [...]

Sleeping Pad

R-value

weight
(ounces)

M.H. Highmountain 72

6.75

29

B.A. Insulated Air Core

4.1

24

Big Agnes Air Core

22

C.D. Thermarest NeoAir

2.1

14

Z-Rest 3/4 / full

2.2

11 / 15

C.D. Thermarest Trail 1″

3.4

24

SSH scans and bruteforce attacks that have have been common since my first SSH enabled server was attacked in 1996. Back then, attacks were so rare that monitoring logins and manually adding attackers IPs to /etc/hosts.allow (TCP Wrapper) was sufficient to keep systems secure.
In the mid 2000’s, the rise of botnets resulted in distributed bruteforce [...]