I used to work at a company that did distributed QA. Other people’s tests would run on your desktop. It worked surprisingly well. But occasionally a test of some audio resource would play on your speakers “The discrete cosine is a real, discrete version of the fast Fourier transform.”

It can have many other deleterious effects as well. I also smoked marijuana once. Now I’m old, and a boomer.

I used to work on a debugger. It was called TotalView, and it was a really stellar multiprocess, multithread debugger. You could debug programs with thousands of cores and threads. You could type real C++ code to inspect values, inject code into a running process, force the CPU to run at a given line, like a magic goto. But we had a saying “printf wins again”. Sometimes you just can’t get the debugger to tell you what you need.

The first podcast was Christopher Lydon’s Radio Open Source. The term podcast was created to describe it. It’s still going strong. If you like ideas, books, music, vaguely leftish politics you might like it.

It has nothing to do with open source software.

No. Not even close. It’s more like a sequence of assignment and conditional statements.

Russians used to go to the sea through Latvia, during the Czarist times. They often got sea sick. A case of any kind of gastric distress became a “trip to Riga.” (I learned this in a Russian language class. It may not be true, but I intend to believe it, regardless if it’s actual truth. Please correct me if I’m wrong. I’d like to know if I’m being unreasonable. It’s a sign of strength of character )

I watched it for several seasons. It’s set in Miami, so there were a lot of girls in bikinis, so that was good. The writing is pretty good, the acting also, but the plots became quite repetitive. So I switched to The Glades, also in Florida. Much worse writing and acting, but more bikinis.

I started when I had a Smart Car, which made backing in really easy. The front wheels are almost in the same place as the back wheels, so the car almost rotates. It’s a shame they weren’t more popular.

This is why I started. There is a conspiracy of children living in my condo complex, and they ride their bikes in the parking lot. (What’s the collective adjective for children?) I figure I’m more likely to flatten one backing than driving forward, and I’m less likely to have a child behind me when backing in than when backing out. I know it’s a mistake for children to ride in parking lots, but it’s not my choice. They are not my children. My children made their mistakes thirty years ago, and I’m no longer responsible for them.

Apparently the British say “Just enough blue to patch a Dutchman’s trousers.” Tom Lewis wrote a song with that title.