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.”

Who would have thought it. A brothel in Watertown. Cambridge I can see. What’s next, strip clubs in Belmont, Mitt Romney’s home town?

The Puritans were a small sect, just looking for the religious freedom to punish the best majority of people who didn’t believe the Puritans’ theology. Their notion of “religious freedom” is similar to the U.S. Catholic bishops’ notion. It’s a violation of religious freedom when people can make their own choices, and don’t have to obey a hierarchy.

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.

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 exclusively use openscad. I can treat a project like software, with git and make.

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.