Author: David Faden
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Putting Foothill College’s “Native Hill” on the map
I walked to Foothill College earlier today seeking the “Native Hill” described on this California Native Plant Society page (Archive). (I actually first heard about there being a native plant garden at Foothill College via a reference in this presentation from a Girl Scout describing her planned work at the Los Altos Woodland Library garden.)…
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Weeding at the school
I got to do some weeding at the school’s Living Classroom garden Saturday morning, only getting rained on a little. I’d noticed some of the weeds going to seed and so hoped to avoid some of the spread. I think I pulled out around 12 species of plants, working over around 2.5 hours. In the…
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Poppies in Los Altos
I’m intrigued by references to poppies in early Los Altos. For example, in a 1909 brochure from Paul Shoup, et al, marketing the area, there’s a photo of poppies with the caption: “Los Altos is famed for its fields of poppies.” And in Joe Salameda’s book “Memories of Los Altos“, J. Gilbert Smith is quoted…
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Static photo album creator
I’ve published a utility for creating a static photo album (no server-side stuff, just HTML + photos) given a folder of photos: https://github.com/fadend/go-photos. I was inspired to do this because in looking for costs to cut, I decided to stop paying for Photobucket. Whatever you used to find under https://s114.photobucket.com/user/dfaden (broken link), you can now…
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Another walk, another weed
I swung by the library to return some books, then picked up a few more: The game design book was waiting there for me. I searched for “startup” in the catalog on a whim, which led me to the others. (Per this Reddit thread, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design is also worth a look. The…
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Peer bonuses
One thing I really liked about Google is its peer bonus system. What other companies have something similar? Laszlo Bock describes Google’s system in his book Work Rules: The other feature of gThanks is the peer bonus… Giving employees the freedom to recognize one another is important. Many companies allow employees to nominate an employee…
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Mandelbrot Set in Autoplot
My older brother Jeremy was the first person to help me with programming. (And I’ve never stopped asking him for programming advice since then!) My first computer was a Commodore 128 that my mom picked up at a garage sale (it turns out from one of Jeremy’s high school friends); it was quite ancient even…
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Another weed and buttercup blooming
Yesterday I learned the name for another weed, again thanks to Seek: One interesting thing about petty spurge: it’s being used as a cancer treatment: “The sap from Euphorbia peplus is effective against human nonmelanoma skin cancers” (2011). I haven’t been able to find out yet why it’s called “petty”. This particular specimen I saw…
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Leaving Google after 15.5+ years
Yesterday (March 4, 2024) was my last day at Google (for now at least) after more than 15.5+ years at the company. There’s still a lot of work I would’ve like to get done, many people I’ll miss working with (everyone I met, pretty much), including many who are dear to me, including especially my…
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Walking along North San Antonio to El Camino Real
I had a nice walk this morning, my first time walking from our new place to El Camino Real. Strava tells me the roundtrip was around 4.6 miles, the furthest I’ve gotten to walk for a while. (But I’ll hope to go much further soon.) One treat was seeing rooreh (miner’s lettuce, Claytonia perfoliata) in…