Back when my kids were still young and innocent enough to want to go trick-or-treating, for a few years we went to some suburban friends cul-de-sac-filled neighborhood.

Bought some nail clippers from Amazon. The package had a SHIPPING SRAL

I ran across an engineering aphorism or principle called “Gall’s Law”:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

What an unbelievably stupid tie-in.

GPP is the General Purpose Preprocessor, a macro preprocessor for various forms of structured and unstructured text.

A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. There’s usually a few conditions on what the program can do, like not reading it’s source code during execution.

I wrote what I believe to be the first non-vacuous quine ever in the GPP language.

The summer I was 17, 1978, I was the staff cook at Camp Thunderbird, a Boy Scout camp.

That’s a Verifone credit card terminal at the King Soopers #1 (13th and Speer in Denver, a.k.a. “Scary Soopers”) pharmacy, November 12, 2020.

What are all the packages?

What can we learn from this display?

I found a bunch of new and new-ish work on the end-Ordovician extinction

I’ve written before about how much I despise baby talk descriptions of operating system abstractions as promoted by Microsoft.

The use of “folder” is particularly pernicious.