My Life and Code

Pictured: Part of the Penn State Abington campus during a Philly.NET code camp I attended a number of years back. This is my favorite time of the year, but where does the time go? I couldn't believe, when I looked at the date a few days ago, that we were already in mid-September. I feel like I look forward to fall every year, but never really stop to enjoy  it, usually due to whatever else is going on at the time. It also seems like it doesn't start getting cooler as earlier as it used to. The cooler weather is part of what I appreciate about fall. That, and the leaves changing color. I remember both from being a little kid, rolling around in piles of leaves in the brisk weather. It was later, when I was in high school, that I gained an even greater appreciation for it, when my 10th grade biology teacher gave us all an assignment to collect 10 different kinds of leaves and use clear contact paper to collect them into a book of sorts. As I just typed that sentence, it sounded bo...

I've had this blog post in draft form for a few years now, and am finally publishing it. At the time I originally wrote it, I was 100% behind Bodylastics, with a small caveat concerning the anti-snap technology. Now, I'm looking for an alternative due to the discrepancy in their explained max resistance amounts. Bodylastics is a system of stackable resistance bands used for exercise. I asked for a set as a Christmas present back in 2013 and have been using it ever since. At the time I received it, Bodylastics was a unique product, but since then many imitators have sprung forth. It's a product I use regularly and am quite happy with. But it's not without it's caveats, and the changes they've made in the past few years have not been for the better. The Product and Its Advantages Bodylastics produces multiple products these days, but the one I'll be discussing is the one they're known best for: stackable resistance bands. These are tube resistance bands wi...

Nine months after I graduated high school, I got a new job…working at a high school. Whereas most of my classmates had post-graduation plans, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, so I spent some time taking a few classes at the local community college and continuing to work. I worked as a janitor. Definitely not my long term goal. At the end of each school day, I’d go up to the teacher’s lounge on the fourth floor and wait for classes to let out. Then I’d begin my rounds of emptying trash and sweeping floors. One of the teachers at the school was a lady named Peggy Blanco. One day, while waiting for classes to let out, I was in that teacher’s lounge with Peggy and the topic of what I wanted to do with my life came up. I told her that I was considering becoming and auto mechanic. “Oh Alan!”, she said. “You’re smarter than that!” I have to stop right now to explain that, because being an auto mechanic requires  intelligence, both in understanding how things work and ...

“Some days I’m scared I’m gonna die. Or even worse: I might survive. I try to keep these words in mind: Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight. Gotta kick at the darkness ‘til it bleeds daylight.” — Chris Hannah

Ran into this problem today and fought with it until finding a solution. Even Claude was stumped. I ran the installer for the official Angular AI skills via  npx skills add https://github.com/angular/skills , and selected Claude Code and Symlink as options, but no dice. Only the default .agents implementation was created. Here's the fix. First, make sure you're running your command prompt in admin mode. Second, create the .claude/skills/angular-developer  and/or  .claude/skills/angular-new-app  folders, depending on which skills you're installing. Then  run the npx command. That does the trick.

A gift to the U.S. from Great Britain during the Bicentennial. At some point in recent years, someone made the decision to move it outside without any protection from the elements. And it shows. Here’s a picture I took of it last year.