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…
Random Learnings #2
A co-worker and his family recently purchased their first home in a new community of new construction, every neighbor is new to everyone else. So far it appears like young…
Meandering Thoughts #3
If The Truman Show was remade in 2023, Christof would need a North Korean-styled version or deny modern technology altogether. A TrumanOS to ensure real-world references are removed? The Great…
Software Shops and Name Recognition
Many engineers envision working for major technology companies: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Amazon, Atlassian, EBay, JetBrains, Meta (Facebook), Redhat, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce. Sure, you'll be a small fish in a…
Borrow A Booger?
File:Man undergoes a COVID-19 swab test A.jpg" by Navy Medicine is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Last year, my daughter believed her family had COVID - likely from me - and…