Rick Umali's Home Page

Born in the Philippines in 1968. Moved to the United States with my family when I was three years old. Raised in Jersey City, New Jersey. Went to Catholic schools (St. Aedan's, St. Peter's Prep). Graduated college from Rensselaer in December 1990. Moved to Boston. Married Jenn in 1995.

I have two brothers, Ron and Renato. My parents live in New Jersey.

Jenn and I live in Burlington (outside Boston). We have a daughter named Mia.

Yes, I write a blog. I've been writing Rick's Ramblings since 2001.

Dwayne Wade's Statue

October 31, 2024

Like so much of the Internet, I reacted with some glee at the pictures from Dwayne Wade's statue ceremony in front of the Kaseya Center in Miami, FL this past week....

Music from Foreign Lands

September 30, 2024

One of my favorite albums is "Julio" (1983) by Julio Iglesias. On a long family vacation, this was one of the albums we played, and we played it constantly. It was...

My Pill Box

August 31, 2024

I now use a pill box (aka pill organizer). You may have seen these devices in drugstores: a long thin plastic box with seven small compartments. Each compartment...

My Quiet Phone

July 31, 2024

I run my iPhone with nearly all sound and lock screen notifications turned off.�

My Favorite Boston Championships

June 30, 2024

Since moving to Boston in 1991, I've experienced championships in the four major professional sports leagues. Boston is a modern Title Town, a Championship City....

Gordon Street

May 31, 2024

From March to September 1991, I lived at 80 Gordon Street, in Brighton, Massachusetts. This was my first time paying rent for my own place. (I moved to Boston in...

Song: Starless (King Crimson)

April 30, 2024

Earlier in the month, I went to see "Children of Men" at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square. I love this movie and in preparation for the rewatch, I listened...

COVID-19: Paxlovid

March 31, 2024

COVID-19 finally caught up with me last weekend. I woke up feeling sore and weak and achy. I had a mild fever. I was going to start a juice and rest routine when...

Unlit Stall Thoughts

February 29, 2024

A few weeks ago I was in a bathroom stall at work, playing some Freecell, passing a little time and a little gas. Not much else though. Suddenly, the lights went...

I work in computers. At least that's how I put it when people ask me what I do. Below are some posts from my technical BLOG.

I'm the author of Learn Git in a Month of Lunches (Manning Publications).

Falling Text (in JavaScript)

July 14, 2020

Sometime in May, about two months into my forced "work from home" stint due to the novel coronavirus, I caught a bit of inspiration.I had been playing Cataclysm:...

Relearning JavaScript

February 3, 2016

For the past few weeks, I've been participating in Boston PHP's jQuery jAM. This virtual learning group is scheduled to run through the book Eloquent JavaScript,...

Learn Git in a Month of Lunches

May 28, 2014

I'm writing a book for Manning Publications called Learn Git in a Month of Lunches. It should be out early next year, but you can purchase a copy of the book via...

Praising "Code" by Charles Petzold

February 14, 2014

Last year (2013), I finished a most remarkable computer book titled Code. It's by Charles Petzold, who wrote the venerable Programming Windows 95, among many others....

Creating Top-Level Variables With CoffeeScript

June 23, 2013

I've been working on a small "Word Finder" game, mostly as exercise to learn CoffeeScript, a language that compiles down to JavaScript. CoffeeScript hides the tricky...

A View from a MOOC

November 22, 2012

I just recently finished taking an online course titled "Functional Programming Principles in Scala". The course was offered by Coursera, and it is an example of...

Indie Game: The Movie

June 24, 2012

Indie Game: The Movie (IGTM) is a documentary about independent game developers. When I saw the trailer in July 2011, I saw a shot of a real computer screen filled...

Making Wireless Work on a Dell D600 with Ubuntu

February 5, 2012

I recently inherited an old Dell Latitude D600 laptop, but the wireless wasn't working on it. After some investigation, I learned that it somehow didn't have a wireless...

Getting Twitter User IDs with PHP

November 26, 2011

When using the Twitter API's "Streaming API", you often have to pass in Twitter User IDs as arguments, rather than Twitter usernames (aka "screen name"). I wrote...

Getting PHP Debugging with XDebug Working (on Windows)

November 14, 2011

I've been learning about Drupal Module Development the past few weeks. I'm using the venerable "Definitive Guide to Drupal 7" and a few times in the module development...

For a long time I didn't follow sports. But now I do. The links below will take you to posts from my sports blog.

I have plenty of pictures at a bunch of places [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11], [12], but I primarily update Flickr and, more recently, Instagram.