Articles

Brian · July 19th, 2023

Brian · June 4th, 2023

Brian · February 28th, 2023

Brian · January 31st, 2023

Brian · December 31st, 2022

Brian · December 13th, 2022

Brian · November 30th, 2022

Brian · October 31st, 2022

Brian · September 30th, 2022

Brian · August 31st, 2022

Brian · July 30th, 2022

Brian · June 30th, 2022

Brian · May 31st, 2022

Brian · May 1st, 2022

Brian · April 30th, 2022

Brian · April 1st, 2022

Brian · March 18th, 2022

Brian · March 1st, 2022

Brian · February 8th, 2022

Brian · February 1st, 2022

Lydia · January 8th, 2022

Brian · December 31st, 2021

First time do­ing one of these Years in Review! I’m sub­ti­tling 2021, “Restart”.

Melissa · October 11th, 2021

I wake up feel­ing ex­hausted, sore, and old (I’m only 32).

Brian · August 19th, 2021

This month is my 8-year an­niver­sary of work­ing with sta­tic site gen­er­a­tors.

Melissa · April 16th, 2021

Lydia · March 9th, 2021

Lydia · February 3rd, 2021

Brian, Melissa, Lydia, Amber, Penny · January 1st, 2021

Lydia · October 31st, 2020

Brian, Melissa, Lydia, Amber, Penny · June 6th, 2020

Known to some as St. Kosers’ Day, Koserstag is a hol­i­day rich with mean­ing and tra­di­tion.

Brian · March 18th, 2020

Friday, March 13, 2020 is when I re­al­ized that COVID-19 was se­ri­ous. (Of course it was Friday the 13th.)

Brian, Melissa, Lydia, Amber, Penny · January 1st, 2020

Lydia · November 20th, 2019

Brian · October 30th, 2019

The International Tables Tennis Federation (ITFF) sets the of­fi­cial rule­set for ping pong, “The Laws of Table Tennis”.

Melissa · October 14th, 2019

Rain poured down out­side the car, and the lit­tle boy squirmed un­hap­pily.

Brian · October 14th, 2019

Are you fa­mil­iar with the the­ory of six de­grees of sep­a­ra­tion? It seems that every­one on Earth is within six so­cial con­nec­tions of every­one else on Earth.

Melissa · October 14th, 2019

Bulky and droopy, slimy and gloopy, frogs are a blight to the eye.

Melissa · September 28th, 2019

The bold, brave war­rior bel­lowed his chal­lenge as he charged to­wards the dragon, cloak stream­ing be­hind him and sword held high aloft.

Melissa · September 28th, 2019

“I’m tired of be­ing preg­nant,” I thought as I watched my hus­band eat all the sushi he wanted.

Brian · June 22nd, 2019

Chik-fil-A has an­nounced a new pi­lot study, ti­tled “One More Day”, at three Mobile, Alabama lo­ca­tions.

Brian · June 21st, 2019

Have you heard of The 5 Whys? It’s a Six Sigma tech­nique for dis­cov­er­ing the root of a prob­lem.

Melissa · June 19th, 2019

We’ve trav­eled quite a bit over the seven years of our mar­riage.

Brian · June 19th, 2019

this is low­er­case

Melissa · April 1st, 2019

Melissa · March 23rd, 2019

Brian, Melissa, Lydia, Amber · January 1st, 2019

Hello again, friends! It’s been a great year in the Koser house, full of ac­tiv­i­ties that have brought us closer to­gether as a fam­ily.

Brian, Melissa, Lydia, Amber · December 25th, 2017

Merry Christ­mas 2017!

Brian · February 15th, 2017

I’m in the mid­dle of set­ting up a Home The­atre PC for my liv­ing room.

Brian · January 5th, 2017

Melissa and I have been into mod­ern board games for a few years now. We’re hov­er­ing at around 100 games in our col­lec­tion, keep­ing about 95% of our pur­chases. The main rea­son for this great suc­cess rate is The Dice Tower.

Brian, Melissa, Lydia · December 25th, 2016

Merry Christ­mas 2016!

Brian · December 17th, 2016

Too of­ten, peo­ple want what they want (or what they think they want, which is usu­ally “hap­pi­ness” in one form or an­other) right now.

Brian · November 28th, 2016

Win­SCP is the best Win­dows FTP client. That’s all.

Brian · November 28th, 2016

I’ve had a per­sonal web­site for years. Back in col­lege I snagged bri­ankoser.com, put up some short pro­gram­ming ar­ti­cles, and ex­per­i­mented with HTML and CSS.

Brian · October 31st, 2016

Inkscape is vec­tor-draw­ing soft­ware. Vec­tor graph­ics are dif­fer­ent than the more com­mon raster graph­ics.

Brian · October 2nd, 2016

Did you know on Win­dows 8 and 10 you can hit the Win­dows key then start typ­ing to search for apps, set­tings, and files? I’ve been us­ing Launchy to do just that since Win­dows XP.

Brian · September 28th, 2016

Hi, my name is Brian Koser, and I have a prob­lem. I can’t re­sist used book stores, used book sales, flea mar­kets…to be com­pletely hon­est I even browse through the used books at Good­will.

Brian · September 26th, 2016

You prob­a­bly don’t need Pho­to­shop. I cer­tainly don’t. For the ba­sic work I do Paint.NET is more than enough.

Brian · August 16th, 2016

A mixer (also called a “mix­ing con­sole” or “mix­ing board”) is nec­es­sary if you record with more than one in­put, like two mi­cro­phones or a mi­cro­phone and an in­stru­ment. It can be in­tim­i­dat­ing to start, so let’s just look at the ba­sics.

Melissa · August 15th, 2016

She smiled as the sounds of girl­ish gig­gles and laugh­ter fil­tered through the house. Her daugh­ters were hav­ing friends over for a sleep­over and were thor­oughly en­joy­ing them­selves. She was glad every­thing was go­ing so beau­ti­fully.

Brian · August 14th, 2016

You should never reuse a pass­word. That means a dif­fer­ent pass­word for every com­puter and web­site ac­count you have. If you’re like me, that means over 100 dif­fer­ent pass­words to keep track of.

Brian · July 30th, 2016

Af­ter re­cently start­ing our pod­cast (Ten to One, where we make top ten lists about every­thing), one of our first ques­tions was: is any­one lis­ten­ing?

Brian · July 29th, 2016

I like books, blogs, pod­casts, and soft­ware. I’ve cre­ated some my­self (no books, prob­a­bly never a book). And I like to sup­port peo­ple who cre­ate things that I like.

Brian · July 23rd, 2016

Re­cently we started a pod­cast: Ten to One, where we make top ten lists about every­thing (check it out!).

Brian · July 7th, 2016

If you use Microsoft Word or build web­sites and have never learned the ba­sics of ty­pog­ra­phy, I’d like you to check out Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography.

Brian · June 25th, 2016

If a value con­tains only nu­meric dig­its, when should you store it as a num­ber in the data­base, and when as a string?

Brian · June 11th, 2016

Brian · May 22nd, 2016

* + *

Brian · May 21st, 2016

I’ve started book­mark­ing the in­ter­est­ing Wikipedia ar­ti­cles I stum­ble on. You’ll see them pop up here with the pre­fix “SILO”: “Stuff I Learned On­line”. En­joy the tid­bits.

Brian · April 30th, 2016

This is why I use an ad-blocker:

Brian · April 18th, 2016

Now that I have a su­per­com­puter in my pocket (cur­rently a Google Nexus 5), life is less clut­tered.

Brian · March 15th, 2016

In 2005, Peter-Paul Koch launched a small JavaScript con­test.

Brian, Melissa · March 4th, 2016

In honor of Valen­tine’s Day, Melissa chose to do this list of things we love about each other. Melissa ranked her list; Brian just al­pha­bet­ized his.

Brian, Melissa · February 15th, 2016

I like mak­ing top ten lists of every­thing. Melissa is­n’t as big on lists (she did­n’t have a fa­vorite color or an­i­mal un­til I made her choose), but I think she’s com­ing around.

Brian · February 6th, 2016

It’s in­ter­est­ing to read Paul Graham’s Web 2.0 ten years later.

Brian · January 15th, 2016

Last month I gave a pre­sen­ta­tion at work about ES6 (view the slides). Giving your­self two weeks to pre­pare a talk on a sub­ject you don’t know is a great way to learn. 😀

Brian · January 15th, 2016

Squishy goals are bad. When you set a goal, like a New Year’s res­o­lu­tion, it should be con­crete. In­stead of “I’m go­ing to eat health­ier” your goal should be some­thing like “I’m go­ing to eat un­der 2000 calo­ries six days per week.”

Brian · January 2nd, 2016

I’ve been on some­what of a punc­tu­a­tion kick lately, and I re­mem­bered a poem:

Brian · December 28th, 2015

I just watched an Inversion of Control course on Pluralsight. I get it now, but I’m writ­ing this down to make sure I get it to­mor­row.

Brian, Melissa, Lydia · December 25th, 2015

Merry Christmas 2015!

Brian · October 24th, 2015

I like punc­tu­a­tion marks. Why? Well…maybe be­cause they shape lan­guage so much while go­ing mostly un­no­ticed. Maybe be­cause they’re never spo­ken* and their names are un­known to lay­men, giv­ing them a mys­te­ri­ous air.

Brian · September 30th, 2015

Here are all the in­ter­est­ing links that I found in September 2015 that I deem wor­thy of be­ing pre­served for the fu­ture.

Brian · August 24th, 2015

Firefox 1.5 is the first browser I specif­i­cally re­mem­ber us­ing (discounting AOL, which was a lit­tle more than a browser). Back then Firefox users were hip, the cut­ting edge. We’ve got tabs, man, so you can visit mul­ti­ple web pages in one win­dow!

Brian · July 25th, 2015

Quick back­ground on Stack Overflow and Jon Skeet: Stack Overflow is a web­site where you can ask and an­swer com­puter pro­gram­ming-re­lated ques­tions. Everyone votes on the ques­tions and an­swers, and you get points when some­one votes for you.

Brian · May 30th, 2015

If you’re into de­signer board games (you should be!) and you’re on­line (…you are!), then you’re prob­a­bly aware of BoardGameGeek, which is the board game web­site, where afi­ciona­dos dis­cuss, trade, and cel­e­brate all things board gam­ing.

Brian, Melissa · December 25th, 2014

Merry Christmas 2014!

Brian · July 17th, 2014

I’ve writ­ten a lot of SQL, but most of it tends to be pretty sim­ple. Even most of the large queries that I’ve writ­ten aren’t com­plex, they just have a lot of ta­bles and columns to deal with. Probably the most com­pli­cated and in­ter­est­ing query I’ve writ­ten.

Brian · March 11th, 2014

Chil­dren are al­ways watch­ing their par­ents.

Brian · January 2nd, 2014

I don’t like Oracle’s SQL Developer. It’s hard to like a GUI with so many us­abil­ity prob­lems.

Brian · October 16th, 2013

Oracle has built-in meth­ods for a lot of things.

Brian · September 5th, 2013

A few days ago, while work­ing on a web page, I got to write my fa­vorite type of code: val­i­da­tion. Ha ha. Actually I’d rather floss with a brick than write val­i­da­tion.

Brian · August 22nd, 2013

When I first started writ­ing Oracle PL/SQL, I tried to de­fine func­tion and pro­ce­dure pa­ra­me­ters in the same way I de­fined SQL table columns.

Brian · June 25th, 2013

Last time I wrote about how much I like the be­gin­ning of a pro­ject. Opening up all the cans of tech and get­ting a big whiff of that new tech­nol­ogy smell…sniff Aaaah. Well, I liked choos­ing the tech­nolo­gies for my new pro­ject so much, that I de­cided to do it again.

Brian · March 9th, 2013

I don’t know about you, but the be­gin­ning of a pro­gram­ming pro­ject is one of my fa­vorite times. And one of my fa­vorite parts of the be­gin­ning is choos­ing the tools.

Brian · August 23rd, 2012

Today I was adding an “Export to Excel” op­tion to a Gridview. I wanted to mark each ex­ported record in the data­base, but it was­n’t im­me­di­ately ap­par­ent how I would do so.