All Purls. No Swine.
It’s Easter 1979. Mr. Right and I are living in a tiny house we bought for the princely sum of $7,200 (all we could afford), somewhere in Pittsburgh’s low-rent district, amongst the druggies and the motorcycle gangs. Monthly mortgage payment: $71.97. Rather abrupt investment in learning necessary self-defense techniques and maneuvers on the part of… Continue reading Confessions of an Accidental IT Professional, Chapter One
A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy--Elon Musk To be perfectly clear, I'm not a diehard Elon Musk fan. He's an interesting fellow who doesn’t fit into any convenient box that we’d like to put him into. We in the UK used to… Continue reading Quote of the Day: May I Live To See It
Dearest Readers, A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the images I carefully select and attach to my posts to provide what is (in my own mind) a "great page experience" (together with the indefinite article) for those of you who are kind enough to read them, weren't appearing properly, if at all. Life… Continue reading “An Easier Path to great Page Experience [sic] For Everyone”–NOT! Describing a WordPress Fail
“The internet is not where you hide – it’s where you are found.“–Emily Aston Perrin I’ve been giving the advice found in the title of this post to student writers and friends for decades. It’s advice I follow myself, as anyone who’s read more than a few of my posts (thank you) must know. And… Continue reading Write What You Know
"Can you hear me now?" was the tag line in a series of Verizon commercials from the early 2000s, touting its nationwide coverage, and the fact that folks from all parts of the country were more likely to be able to "hear" each other via cellphone if they were Verizon subscribers, because of the company's… Continue reading Can You Hear Me Now Yet?
Shameless self-promotion alert: Several months ago, I was asked by a couple of Ricochet members if I'd like to appear on their weekly Land of Confusion show, in which they interview one or more other members via a Zoom chat, and then post the results on Ricochet. Things have been a bit hectic for me… Continue reading She Speaks!
One shortcoming of current machine-learning programs is that they fail in surprising and decidedly non-human ways. A team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students recently demonstrated, for instance, how one of Google’s advanced image classifiers could be easily duped into mistaking an obvious image of a turtle for a rifle, and a cat for some… Continue reading I Know a Hawk From a Handsaw. And a Cat From Some Guacamole
Those words were famously spoken by Raymond Donovan, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Labor, after his 1987 acquittal on fraud and grand larceny charges in the State of New York. Perhaps thirty-nine British sub-postmasters posed that question yesterday. (Well not quite thirty-nine, because before some of them got the chance to inquire, they died–their families and themselves… Continue reading “Which office do I go to, to get my reputation back?”
From the Wikipedia entry on the World Wide Web (emphasis added): While working at CERN, [Tim] Berners-Lee became frustrated with the inefficiencies and difficulties posed by finding information stored on different computers. On March 12, 1989, he submitted a memorandum, titled “Information Management: A Proposal“, to the management at CERN for a system called “Mesh” that referenced ENQUIRE, a database… Continue reading Happy Birthday, Dub Dub Dub!
Thanks to you, I feel no need to go back to "pointless, incessant barking." Whether that means I'm engaged in "pointful, incessant barking," or "pointless intermittent barking," I'll leave it to you to decide. Have at it. This blog exists for two reasons; first because I think, on rare occasions, I have something worthwhile to… Continue reading A Huge “Thank You” to Readers of my Blog