The Littlest Miss woke up in a good mood this morning, which makes everyone’s morning significantly easier. It is a Wednesday and that means I get out for my morning walk a little earlier. I was looking forward to it, it being a mild spring morning. The forecast, however, suggested I might need to wait…
A friend of mine is retiring on Friday. He is about 10 years ahead of me in the career life cycle. He started at the company about 2 years after I did, and he is now retiring after 25 years. It has been a long time coming for him. His wife retired about a year…
Over the weekend we rolled out a software system that my and my team have been working on for 14 months. Today, it is running, and being used (successfully, so far) and I am just basking in the good feelings I have about the whole process and the system we’ve put together. For the first…
The situation with the blueberry muffins has become alarming. For six months now, when I wake up each morning, I feel compelled to eat a blueberry muffin. I trace the origins of this compulsion back to an innocent vacation we took with my sister’s family to an isolated part of coastal Maine where we’d rented…
I have been reading a lot about information theory these last two months. In the course of this reading, the same people keep showing up again and again. Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, J. C. R. Lichlider, Marvin Minsky, Norbert Wiener, and John McCarthy to name just a few. It is the last few…
Two weeks ago today, I received my second Pfizer shot, and that means that I am now fully vaccinated from COVID, based on the official CDC definition. (Kelly was fully vaccinated as of yesterday.) It seems remarkable to me that 427 days after the first mention of “Coronavirus” in my diary, multiple vaccines were engineered,…
Working scientists use logbooks to record their work so that they can (a) reproduce results, and (b) establish priority in discoveries. As a working developer, I use a logbook, too, which also serves two primary purposes: (a) capture what I did during the day (sometimes in order to reproduce things), and (b) as an index…
I am in crunch time for the project my team is rolling out this weekend so my time is limited today. Crunch time is always a mixture of eagerness, excitement, and exhaustion. For example, I put in 11 hours on Monday, and 13 hours yesterday, yet the days flew by. My to-do list has not…
On Monday we will roll out a software system that my team has been building for the last thirteen months. In nearly 27 years with the company, this is the software that I am most proud of. It is a system that coordinates new hires, people who are changing jobs or transferring locations, and people…
Spring is the best time of year for morning walks. Winters are cold. Summers are hot. Fall has a chill in the air and you know it is getting colder. Spring mornings sometimes have a chill in the air, too, but you know the days are warming up and that makes all the difference. Of…