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Good for kids, good for adults
https://characterlab.org/tips-of-the-week/sample-then-specialize/ The above article is about kids. Have them sample lots of activities and *IF* one of them grabs their interest, then specialize. Adults and jobs is the same concept. It is ok to bounce around in different jobs. Only if one of them grabs your interest should you focus there. Don’t worry about a […]
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St. Paul By Bike: Kid’s View of Williams Hill
Back when kids would roam free…
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Peeing in Space: An tweet overview by Mary Robinette Kowal
For those of you willing to learn more about getting to space, read on. These are some of the many details that need to be figured out for space travel to become a normal thing. Glad to see there has been progress, but clearly more is needed. Twenty years from now, we will likely look […]
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Procrastination: A short explanation
In case you haven’t seen it, this is an excellent and hilarious (they are not mutually exclusive) explanation on how procrastination works and why some tasks are more prone to it.
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Propinquity: 2021 Word of the Year
The winner of the Bredesen 2021 Word of the Year contest* is: Propinquity The Propinquity Effect refers to the seemingly obvious fact that you make connections with people you are physically, mentally, or emotionally in close proximity. I chose this word because of the work from home (WFH) situation many have found themselves in due […]
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First day of retirement
This is the view from our campsite at Itasca State Park. This was a spontaneous decision as we passed by. Looking forward to doing a lot of this in the coming years….
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Quantum Typos
Fact: if you have n readers check you work for typos, the n+1 reader will find a previously undiscovered typo with 42/n seconds of looking at the work. Fact: If you open your book and successfully fix a typo, you will introduce (6.5x-y)/3 new typos, where x is the number of keystrokes used to fix […]
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Installing a Touchstone Sideline 28″ Fireplace into a Winnebago Adventurer 30T
I’m putting all this here in case others find it useful. We recently purchased a 30T motorhome. It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows my wife to learn that she wanted a fireplace in the motorhome. We have added a fireplace to each of the two homes we have owned. Why not […]
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My book is on sale!
Folks, I did a thing and it is now available for sale from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine bookstores. The I.T. Leader’s Handbook is a book for current and aspiring IT leaders. From the back cover: Is your IT department working harder than ever and still falling behind? Does the organization have unreasonable […]
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The Unsinkable Maddie Stone, Google’s Bug-Hunting Badass | WIRED
“There was such a clear, direct impact,” Stone says of her Android-focused work. “I find these potentially harmful apps, I flag the malware, and the defense we develop propagates to 2.8 billion devices. It was just such a massive, tangible impact that most people don’t get in their jobs.” The Unsinkable Maddie Stone, Google’s Bug-Hunting […]
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Academic Silos
First, Sharks & Deep Sea Squid! How cool is that? Second, why was the academic response to pull it off the internet? The attitude behind that seems like an unintended, and unfortunate, consequence of the publish or perish academic system currently in place. Yannis Papastamatiou, a shark ecologist at Florida International University, in Miami, saw […]
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IT: Application Logging
If your IT shop does software development, Application Logging is useful for several things:
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Stock market was up/down on news of [insert nonsense]
I believe that TV and radio news use this stock market headline generator today.
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One Person’s Experience
Folks, the below email was forwarded to me from a friend of mine. It is an email sent by her son to their family. It is posted here with permission. I know the writer. One of the (several) sentences that is a gut punch for me is: “…fails to capture the everyday indignities that are […]
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A Comic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pandemic Modeling | FiveThirtyEight
So much is still unknown about this pandemic. Both the website (https://fivethirtyeight.com/) and the artist (https://www.smbc-comics.com/) are worth following. This comic talks about why it is very hard to have an accurate model. And why all models should be distrusted to some degree. Click image or here to see the full comic.