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.

Remembering World Cup 1994

May 31, 2026

As I write this, we're about two weeks away from the first game of the 2026 World Cup. I'm slowly getting excited. It's like the Olympics, except they're playing...

Battling Drowsy Driving

April 30, 2026

On my long solo drives from NJ to MA, I sometimes get tired and drowsy. This can be very dangerous! Between 2011 and 2015, some 2.5% of driving fatalities are due...

Decades of Work

March 31, 2026

I started a new job recently. This is my eighth job since finishing college in 1990. And if I count my computer-related jobs from when I was still in school, that...

Go-Around

February 28, 2026

I consider myself an experienced airline traveler. Years of flying around the country for work back in the early 2000s made air travel routine and commonplace. On...

My 2025 Books and Movies

January 31, 2026

In 2025, I read 21 books (LibraryThing) and watched 83 movies (Letterboxd) (15 were rewatches).

New York City (1987)

December 31, 2025

In the Summer of 1987, I worked in New York City, doing data entry for a printing company (Automatech Graphics Corporation). This was the Summer after my freshman...

My Left Hand

November 30, 2025

I am a right-handed person. My wife is a left-handed person.

Thunder Road

October 31, 2025

The Bruce Springsteen movie is in theaters and it prompted me to listen to my favorite Bruce Springsteen song: "Thunder Road", from his majestic 1975 "Born to Run"...

My Book's Anniversary

September 30, 2025

Earlier in the year, I experienced a remarkable moment. I was in the library, browsing computer books when to my great delight I saw the book I wrote on the shelf!...

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).

Adding SSL to Blogger with Custom Domain

February 4, 2025

For the longest time, my BLOG at https://blog.rickumali.com/ did not have HTTPS/SSL. With the emergence of LetsEncrypt in 2016, and the general awareness that SSL...

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...

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