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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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 and another lists the full co-bill, title equality may be less useful than artist relationships. I stopped thinking … Read more
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 should fill a production gap without pretending to document a place I have not photographed. I … Read more
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 reach while sending no one to the site. Without stored measurements, every explanation remains a story told … Read more
I had thousands of upcoming events in the calendar and no reason to expect anyone to browse all of them. “This Week in SoCal” turns the database into a short editorial slate for Instagram: one cover, a limited set of event cards, and a branded closing card. It runs for the coming weekend on Thursday … Read more
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 scene festival, three outlets may never cover it. A rigid source minimum can therefore measure publicity … Read more
I noticed the automated newsroom 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. They were dying later because the system had accidentally defined local relevance as popularity inside its … Read more
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, buying more would have meant paying to preserve an automation whose only demonstrated output … Read more
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 the codebase. It appeared in class namespaces, function prefixes, database tables, shortcodes, styles, and documentation. Then the project acquired its … Read more
I started the alt-text audit 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 hand, and improve coverage without inventing visual detail. Then I found 281 images that … Read more
I knew 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 the browser. The Application Was More Than Its Engine The form included controls that should … Read more