I was listening to Terry Gross interview some broadband experts about broadband legislation the other day and they mentioned that the White House added a Starlink connection to “boost the WiFi signal.” The White House. Probably the single most well connected building on the planet, added a shitty Starlink connection. It was not lost on Terry or the panelists that the whole charade was nothing more than the President of the United States abusing his position to effectively advertise one of his cronies’ products.

I, too, am extraordinarily humble.

2008 General Election. Voted for McCain. I would change that if I could go back but I didn’t know any better at the time. And yet today, I would gladly take John McCain over our current President.

I only recently discovered that not everyone can do this. I was telling my teenager to “just pop your ears” when she was swimming under water and neither her nor her mom had any idea what I was talking about.

…aaaannnndddd I’ve just stumbled into a rabbit hole that’s going to eat up half my day.

CRT TV’s emit a high frequency noise while in operation. Apparently there must be a significant number of people who can’t hear frequencies that high. My wife can’t hear it and had no idea those TV’s made any noise at all.

19 year old me was dirt poor and thought everything was expensive. Now I spend more on my mortgage than he made in a month. 🥲

The short version is that my father was both a victim and perpetrator of the cycle of abuse. When I was a kid, he was an angry man who would often explode in a violent rage. I ran away from home when I graduated from high school because I hated him and didn’t want to be around him anymore.

Eventually I learned that he wasn’t a bad person at his core. He genuinely wanted to do the right thing. He never had much of a chance. His own father destroyed him. Some of the stories he told me about his dad, when I was a kid, are horrible and sad. I think realizing that he was just a very broken man made it easier to forgive him.

We’ve talked about it a lot over the years. He is genuinely sorry for the way he treated me and my siblings and has lots of regrets. He’s not perfect but he is a good “Papa” to my kids and we get along pretty well nowadays.

I am more like my dad than my 19 year old self probably thought I would ever be. But I managed to mostly hang on to the good parts and get rid of the bad ones. My kids will never learn to fear me the way I feared my dad.

P.S. The time I called him a dick to his face.

I was in my mid 20’s. I called him on the phone to confront him about something he had done. All of a sudden, he blurts out, “why don’t any of my kids want anything to do with me?” At this point, I was very angry with him and didn’t care what his response was. I said, “Dad, we want to have a relationship with you but you make it really hard when you’re being a dick all the time.”

When I was a kid I would have paid dearly for saying something like that to him. The beating would have been fierce and merciless. When I said that he kind of just stopped and I could tell he was considering what I had said. I don’t know why but I think he actually took it to heart.

“Whoa. You actually talk to and get along with Dad? I can’t stand him. He’s such a huge dick.”

Yeah. Your going to call him that to his face at some point in a few years. It goes over better than you’d expect.

They were going for “super intelligence” and instead they got Cliff Clavin from Cheers.

“It’s a little-known fact that the tan became popular in what is known as the Bronze Age.”

Tried using Copilot on a few C# projects. I didn’t find it to be any better than Resharper. If anything it was worse because it would give me auto complete samples that were not even close to what I wanted. Not all the time but not infrequently either.

“Gambling is illegal at Bushwood sir, and I never slice.”

Bad form and swinging at it like it’s a baseball instead of making a chip shot.

First golfer in history to finish 18 holes in 15 strokes.

No. I did one once. It felt incredibly degrading. I decided then that I would never do one again. I am a person. Not fucking cattle at the county fair. If a company feels my time is worth less than theirs and I’m just supposed to trot on out and look pretty so they can gawk at me and decide if they think I’m worth a chance at the “grand prize”, without including me in the conversation, then we are NOT going to be a good fit.

[Not] fun fact: US dropped 7.6 million tons of bombs on Vietnam. So damned close.

Purgatory.

If I die and find myself at the pearly gates soup counter, only to be told, “No soup for you! You come back one year five hundred years!” I’m going to be pissed that the Catholics were right the whole damn time.

Why are they spending billions on this?

Greed.

I would focus on having a solid backup strategy. Segmenting applications on different VM’s makes more sense in a data center when one application can serve an entire organization. For your personal workstation, it’s just going to add a lot of unnecessary overhead.