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Peggy Blanco

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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 ...
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At Peace

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“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
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How to Resolve the Angular AI Skills Install Not Creating a Symlink for Claude Code on Windows

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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.
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The Bicentennial Bell

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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.
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10 VR Games and Experiences I Like

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My earliest preconception of VR was that it was  Doom  while wearing a headset. That's what I thought it was. I was way off. A few years ago at Christmas, my brother-in-law said "Try this", put his PlayStation VR headset on my head, and I was blown away. He had me a try a game where you ride a mine cart through a haunted carnival of sorts (I forget the name), and I was surprised that I could lean forward and peer around a corner. I couldn't believe it.  But I was hooked. Days later, I had acquired my own PlayStation VR, and given more time with it, could more easily notice the downsides: being tethered to the game console with the headset's wire, the need for an external camera, and a mild "screen door effect" due to the somewhat low resolution of the headset. From there, I progressed to the original Oculus Quest. Wireless, fully-contained, inside out camera tracking, with higher resolution than PlayStation VR. The downside here  was the mobile processor...
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How to Fix Angular Control Flow Formatting in VS Code

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If you’ve used VS Code’s “Format Document” right-click option to format an Angular HTML template, you may have noticed that it doesn’t indent things the way you’d expect. Example:   In the code above, the option tag should be indented within the @for loop. There’s been a fix for this. 😊 If you edit the settings.json file in the .vscode folder, and add this, it will work:   After adding this to settings.json and using the “Format Document” option, it formats correctly.
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What Songs Would Be On The Soundtrack To Your Life?

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One of the things I was writing about here a few weeks ago was music, and how certain songs can trigger memories. And I've had this project for the past few years to assemble a playlist of songs which are, in essence, the soundtrack to my life.  Currently, it exists as a Google Doc, with a list of songs broken down by the period of my life which I associate them with. I'll eventually compile it into a playlist and listen to it, but for now, it's a document I update whenever an additional song or two comes to mind. For this project, I have a couple of ground rules. The songs included should all evoke mild to strong time and/or place associative memories when I hear them. The songs should evoke good memories, or bittersweet memories, but not bad  memories. It hasn't been something I could just sit down and complete all at once. There were songs that immediately came to mind when I started, and then others which have come to mind later. I also don't own  all of the son...
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