• Mallarmé's 'Album Leaf'

      Suddenly, and as if in play
  Mademoiselle who wished to hear
  some of the wood of my array
  of varied flutes appear

  I feel this trial which took place
  in a pictorial vista tended
  to have some value when I ended
  and looked upon your face

  yes this vain breath limited as
  it was even in its final state
  by my poor crippled fingers has
  no power to imitate

  your crystalline utterly care-
  less childlike laugh that charms the air

    From Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, trans. E.H. and A.M. Blackmore.

  • A San Pedro bloom from 2007

    These cacti used to bloom only every 5-10 years, lately though I have been seeing many blooms almost every year. I think because I have so many more of them now.

  • ScaleFT

    ScaleFT is a company some friends and I started in 2015 (it took a lot of work before 2015 to make that happen). We became part of Okta in 2018. This illustration is from one of our engineering blog posts, drawn by angelblue05. It reminds me of the fun we all had along the way.

  • Confirmed. https://t.co/JLiD0FKlut

    — robert (@robert_chiniquy) May 15, 2021
  • Reading for a sense of self

    If you're looking for something to read… These are some books I like.

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    A post shared by Robert Chiniquy (@doteatop)

  • 18-piece Burr puzzle
    An animation of an 18-piece Burr puzzle with a 77-step solution

    In early 2003, a friend and I wrote some code to design 18 piece Burr puzzles. This puzzle was one of our favorites due to certain properties of the design which made them good physical puzzles to build. For example, to remove the first piece takes 17 steps, which means the puzzle is not going to fall apart in your hands or even if you just move pieces randomly.

    We built about 5 or 6 of them with a table saw and router in the backyard of my apartment, along with dozens of 6 piece Burrs. It took a lot of tries, measuring, cutting jigs, and thinking, to make the pieces precisely enough. I miss that kind of leisure, the freedom to just chase ideas.