srand.info is my personal knowledge base: a collection of projects, technical notes, lessons learned, experiments, and occasional detours. My career and interests have crossed software, infrastructure, photography, automotive work, and independent media.
The categories will evolve, but the purpose is simple: document what I build, preserve what I learn, and share anything that might be useful or interesting to someone else.
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Project note, August 2026: The WordPress plugin began under the working name Food Toolkit and launched publicly as Seasoned Pan. A working title can survive much longer than expected. By the time my nutrition plugin had public calculators, a private diary, recipes, goals, trends, and barcode lookup, the generic name “Food Toolkit” had spread through … Read more
Project note, August 2026: This post comes from the first browser-level verification of the Seasoned Pan calculators. The nutrition engine was correct. Its tests produced the expected calorie and macronutrient results. The REST endpoints returned the right values. The conditional fields had the correct JavaScript state. One of those fields still refused to disappear in … Read more
Project note, August 2026: This post records a capture decision made while building Seasoned Pan. Food logging fails at intake. The calculations can be perfect and the charts can be polished, but none of that matters if recording a familiar jar, package, or snack requires transcribing a nutrition label field by field. The obvious fashionable … Read more
Project note, August 2026: This post documents the design of Seasoned Pan, a small WordPress nutrition toolkit built around a real family need. The first user for Seasoned Pan was never an abstract persona. It was my mother. She wanted a practical way to keep an eye on calories and protein without adopting another subscription, … Read more
Project note, June 2026: This post records an operational failure in the SoCalNomad NewsDesk pipeline and the monitoring added afterward. The automation kept running. Scheduled jobs started on time. Processes exited. Logs continued to accumulate. Nothing obvious announced that the newsroom had stopped publishing. The external AI model it depended on was no longer available. … Read more
Project note, July 2026: This post describes an identity boundary in the SoCalNomad NewsDesk pipeline. An integer primary key is unique inside its table. That last phrase is easy to forget. NewsDesk consumed articles from two source tables created by different stages of the editorial pipeline. Both tables assigned ordinary incremental IDs. Record 42 could … Read more
Project note, July 2026: This post documents a NewsDesk editorial deduplication failure discovered in production behavior. Automated publishers need a way to avoid repeating themselves. SoCalNomad’s NewsDesk already checked whether a recently published story covered the same artist. It also had a title-similarity backstop intended to catch near-duplicate headlines that slipped through the first check. … Read more
Archive note, July 2026: This post replaces the earlier proposal-summary article. The full National Geographic proposal now lives on the Invisible Infrastructure project page as the base document for the Data Center category. Invisible Infrastructure should not be treated as a single grant application. The National Geographic proposal gives the project a useful first shape: … Read more
Archive note, June 2026: This post is based on the Markit project brief and early implementation notes. Markit started with a tempting automation idea: take item photos and turn them into marketplace listings. That sounds straightforward until the object is old, unlabeled, damaged, unusual, collectible, or valuable. Then the risk moves from formatting a listing … Read more
Archive note, June 2026: This post is based on Markit image-pipeline and user-manual notes. The glamorous part of Markit is the AI appraisal idea. Take photos of an object, identify what it might be, gather evidence, estimate value, and generate listing drafts for marketplaces. That is the part people notice. The less glamorous part is … Read more