Las Vegas A’s?
My mother and her boyfriend moved my siblings and me from Brooklyn, NY to Green Island, IA in 1972, Iowa being my home from second grade through college graduation. When…
Amsterdam By Ferry
After I spoke at a tech conference in London, my wife and I took Eurostar to Amsterdam for vacation: Keukenhof, the Vermeer exhibit at the Rijksmuseum, an open-boat canal tour,…
Non-Traditional Project Planning
Most methodology discussions today start and end with how Agile is superior to Waterfall in software engineering; in reality, many other methodologies exist, each with its own pros and cons.…
Random Learnings #4
I first saw a reference to Sütterlinschrift while reading Fatherhood: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets by Burkhard Bilger. The author was researching his grandfather's military service in…
Pre-Internet Foreign Travel
In the mid-1990s, I went on a personal Austrian-Hungarian Empire Tour: fly into Munich, pick up a rental car, and drive south towards Austria. In those embryonic days of the…
Meandering Thoughts #4
I recently heard this announcement at the airport: Ms. Whomever, please return to security to pick up your left-behind item. Might it have been a right-behind item?
Games vs. Losses Behind
Most US-based sports show their standings as Games Behind (GB) which purports to show how far behind the leader your favorite team. The formula to calculate is: ((leading-team-win-count - your-team-win-count)…
Dependent Feature Flags
Recently I was given the task refactoring and reimplementing the service which determines the users' authorizations within our SaaS application. The major challenge was to do the work without anyone…
Minnesota Landscape Arboretum
On a surprisingly-comfortable June Sunday - 68°F/20°C, sunny, slight breeze, not a cloud in sight - my wife and I visited the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum to spend the afternoon walking…
Random Learnings #3
From the 1933 Pears' Cyclopaedia, Regensburg is the alternative name for Ratisbon. Wikipedia disambiguates Ratisbone as Regensburg and says ...it is still known in the Romance languages as a cognate of its…