Well, it's been slightly too long since I posted anything, but we were in Minnesota over Memorial Day weekend, and... I have to say, I think that's the best time to visit. Nice weather, flowers blooming, not too many bugs.

Speaking of flowers, there were lots blooming, but I only grabbed pictures of a few. Bleeding heart, apple tree blossoms, and columbine:

This is a short post, but it's June, and the irises are blooming.

Rocky Mountain Iris from Centennial Trail (near Sheridan Lake):

A much larger iris from our front garden.

We got a roof top tent earlier this spring for camping this year. One of the challenges we've had camping with smaller children is that setup and teardown takes a long time - getting a site figured out, getting the tent up, getting sleeping mats and bags in, inflated, and rolled out isn't terribly hard, but we usually end up with one parent doing most of the work. It's certainly not impossible, but I'd rather spend that time relaxing at camp or doing things with the kids. Roof top tents are supposed to have much faster setup and teardown times, so we looked into it.

I recently found out that there is a built-in JWT decoder in Visual Studio's Text Visualizer. This made my life just a bit easier when debugging token issues this past week - instead of copying out the string and dropping it onto a third party site like jwt.io, I could see the token's values right in Visual Studio.

I'm working on updating packages on multiple projects to eliminate vulnerable nuget packages. We have been doing this on a recurring basis for some time, but I recently got a script built to do better searches across transitive dependencies in all projects under a given path. And... it's exposed quite a few more packages that need to be updated. The basic command I'm using to identify vulnerable packages is dotnet list package --vulnerable --include-transitive.

Several years ago, I experimented with building SVG files based on a repeating pattern. The basic idea was to take a drawn line pattern and repeat it, creating closed shapes. Each shape's color was varied - tint, shade, or color difference. I ended up building a tool to do this, and used it to create the background image on the Resumation login page:

I took a few minutes today to get an atom feed set up on the blog. It was fairly straightforward, though I had a bit of work to do to properly configure the feed filters. I figured I would document what I did here in case it's helpful.

Since I'm using VuePress, I grabbed the VuePress feed plugin. Installation was straightforward.

I've updated the site with new colors, updated some styling, and introduced custom colors on the tags and categories. I ended up cribbing pretty heavily off of Material Design chips for the tags and categories - don't break what works, I suppose.

It's nice working in a Vue environment, so I can focus on making what I want happen instead of learning how XYZ framework should be hooked together.

I recently found Anders Hoff's site and read through his posts on generative art. I particularly like the cursive-like line art he generated (he calls them Sand Creatures) - something about the randomness of the objects is very enticing.

Well, I've finally gone and gotten a blog stood up. I've been thinking about doing this for some time, but it's never been enough of a priority. I did see that David Jarman got his up as a learning exercise, and that was really the impeteus I needed to get going.