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.
Recently added
Project note, August 2026: This post draws on several production calendar reconciliation runs across Ticketmaster and SeatGeek data. Two event records share a venue and start time. Are they duplicates? At a single-stage club, probably. At a casino with several rooms or a festival with several stages, perhaps not. If one provider lists the headliner … Read more
Project note, August 2026: This post describes the image hierarchy used by SoCalNomad’s automated event roundups. An automated event card needs a background. The calendar does not have original photography for every venue, and repeatedly generating fake concert photographs would blur an important line in the project. SoCalNomad is partly a photography platform. Synthetic imagery … Read more
Project note, August 2026: This post documents the measurement layer added alongside SoCalNomad’s new social roundup format. A new social format can look successful for the wrong reasons. The first carousel may receive more likes because it featured a famous artist. A post may satisfy existing followers without reaching anyone new. A format can grow … Read more
Project note, August 2026: This post documents the first automated distribution product built on top of the SoCalNomad calendar. The calendar contained thousands of upcoming events. That did not automatically give anyone a reason to browse it. “This Week in SoCal” turns the database into a short editorial slate for Instagram: one cover, a limited … Read more
Project note, August 2026: This post explains a conditional evidence gate in the SoCalNomad publishing pipeline. Three independent sources sounds like a responsible publication threshold. For a major tour announcement, it is easy to satisfy. National outlets, trade publications, label publicity, and entertainment sites all repeat the same announcement. For a legitimate club show or … Read more
Project note, August 2026: This post documents a structural editorial bias found in the SoCalNomad NewsDesk pipeline. The automated newsroom was publishing mainstream arena acts while repeatedly overlooking punk, metal, hardcore, indie, and festival stories. The feeds were not the problem. Articles about those scenes were being ingested and passing the Southern California relevance filter. … Read more
Project note, August 2026: This post records the retirement of SoCalNomad’s automated X publisher. The X publisher was not broken. It had posted 99 times. The schedule worked, content moved through the API, and the account accumulated an orderly history of links. It generated effectively no traffic for SoCalNomad. When the API credits ran out, … Read more
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 SoCalNomad’s media alt-text remediation and carousel cleanup. The alt-text audit began with a straightforward accessibility problem. Only about six percent of the WordPress media library had useful alternative text. The plan was to derive conservative descriptions from the parent article and date, preserve anything already written by … 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