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.

WJIB AM 740 (RIP Bob Bittner)

May 31, 2023

On the Facebook group "Friends and Lovers of WJIB", there was a post requesting songs people had learned by listening to oldies radio station WJIB. The poster wanted...

Jersey City

April 30, 2023

I was in Jersey City, New Jersey a few weeks ago, the city where I grew up. The GPS put me on Rt 440 near Lincoln Park, and though I know these landmarks from my...

A Fox in Space

March 31, 2023

Last year, my old college friend Paul pointed me to "A Fox in Space". It's a cartoon in the style of Watership Down (1978), The Plague Dogs (1982), or Iron Giant...

Doing the Dishes

February 28, 2023

Over the last several years, doing the dishes after dinner has become a welcome part of my day. It wasn't always this way. This task is called a chore for a reason:...

My 2022 Books and Movies

January 31, 2023

In 2022, I read 28 books (Goodreads) and watched 91 movies (Letterboxd).

Wordle

December 31, 2022

Wordle is my favorite new thing from 2022. It's a part of my morning routine to sip coffee and eat cereal while solving this puzzle. I like comparing my solves with...

Started Invisalign

November 30, 2022

A few weeks ago I started Invisalign.

My (Almost) Self-Driving Car

October 31, 2022

Earlier in the year, I bought a new car, a Honda CR-V. It has two remarkable features that make me think the self-driving car is perhaps a bit closer than I thought...

Procrastination

September 30, 2022

In a little over three weeks I have to give a presentation. It's about eBooks and how to make them. I haven't started preparing for it however. Since I made the...

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.