Ben Dunkle

Blog

  • Breakfast

    Eli wanted eggs. He asked “Is the yoke a duck?”

  • Quick and Easy Recipe #2-get the kids back in school

    I borrowed heavily from a link my Brother sent me for this one:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/dining/25mini.html?ref=dining

    but when I tried it on the kids recently they gagged. Soon after they all got sick, really sick, and have stayed home from school most of this week.  So I tried it again with different ingredients:

    3 bullion cubes (Beef, Veg, Chicken, whatever)

    Bag of noodles (not Italian pasta–using that for anything non-Italian kinda grosses me out)

    2 Scallions, sliced up super thin

    Boil a big pot (fill halfway w/water) and a small pot (3-4 cups) of water. Add the noodles to the big pot and the builion to the small pot. Drain the noodles when they’re soft, throw them back in the big pot, pour the builion over the noodles, and dump in the scallions.

    You can add more stuff if you want, but remember–gag-risk increases exponentially with number of both ingredients and kids.

  • French Fries

    In Fort Erie, Canada, where I go once a month to deposit a check, there’s a little french fry truck that I always hit up for a medium w/ketchup salt and vinegar. Eli and Nan came this time and got their fry on. Next time I have to remember to get a small, not a medium, for each of them as they left half uneaten. Faces covered in ketchup, had to strip Nan down and wash her off as she got it all over her clothes.

  • Hard to get into new music

    There’s so much great music out there, but I can’t really find any. Problem is, the times in my life when I really discovered music were when I had a little peer pressure –  high school, college, working in an office – and the people around me would play stuff, make me listen to stuff, that at first sounded like dirt but after a few listens and seeing how enthusiastic the proponents were, I’d get into it and start listening on my own. Nowadays, there’s no impetus to listen to a new song more than once, even if someone suggests it on Facebook or Spotify. I need a music pusher.

  • TV Shows

    Vikings is one of my favorite shows. Great characters.

    I’ve especially liked scenes with Harbard lately. He’s an amazing, intriguing character that embodies the mythology and superstition that were rampant in that time.

    My favorite line of his came during the last show, “Possession is the opposite of love”. Can’t stop thinking about how true that is. Harbard loves all the women in the village, who are lonely as their husbands are off raiding. Alyssa, one of these women, gets irate, and that’s when Harbard tells her the quote.

    I also watch the entertaining “Girls” on HBO. It’s basically an NC-17 version of “Friends”. All they do is try to possess everything–the city, their lifestyles, eachother. The show portrays a sense of this amazing friendship they share, and these idyllic lives they lead, but I can’t relate. First of all, no one lives like that. Shows like “Girls” and “Friends” celebrate possession. Characters that live like that are never happy in real life. They embrace the opposite of love, as Harbard says.

  • Schemarama

    Schemarama

    I finally finished a working version of a Figma plugin I’ve been tweaking for years.

    Figma is one of the coolest pieces of software I’ve ever used, and makes up the majority of my coursework these days.

    When COVID hit, my students were forced to work from home on whatever computers they had access to. I hoped at the time that Adobe – until then the primary tool used in my classes – would release a free license for students. The monthly subscription fee was more than I felt was fair for students, especially for those who were barely able to afford the costs of higher education.

    Figma was a godsend; I was able to transfer my assignments’ requirements easily enough, and students could work anywhere. And it was free.

    What really attracted me to the platform, however, was the presence of a community of developers who could easily contribute plugins and other resources to be shared among all Figma users. This is something that WordPress does so well, and as someone who has contributed for as long as I have, I set out to publish on Figma’s community.

    Easier said than done. While Figma plugins are based on languages I’m familiar with – HTML, CSS, and Javascript – the process was vexing. I had written a basic color picker app that worked in the browser (see https://codepen.io/empireoflight/pen/eYYgGjL) I just could not get it working in Figma’s plugin development environment. I gave up after a while, and used the project as a basic learning tool in my color theory lectures.

    Enter AI. From the minute I saw the capabilities the LLEs had for generating code, I’ve been flying through old projects like Schemarama and bringing them back to life. This morning I cracked open my old Schemarama repo and rebuilt it using Cursor, and just finished submitting it to the Figma plugin review team.

    Fingers are crossed that it gets through, but the learning experience is worth it no matter what the outcome.

    Here’s a sneak preview:

  • Speakers

    The speakers are good, but it is hard to sit still for hours at a time. I like workshops much better.