On Saturday, October 17, a fast moving brush fire overcame a group of 84 soldiers from C Company 3rd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry who were training at the Wainwright Canadian Forces base. Four soldiers were killed and at least 19 others suffered critical injuries. Thirty nine were hospitalized.
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I wrote about my failure to become one with the mobile internet back in 2008. My focus was on my disagreement with Rich Miner‘s thesis at the time that the reason people weren’t using mobile devices for internet access at the expected levels was because of problems with the user interface (UI). I still disagree with that point he was making back then. The link in my 2008 post no longer works, but you can get the gist of it from how what I say. You can also try this article link on Technology Review, but it is behind a paywall so I can’t say whether it matches my recollections.
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I read a post back during Blaugust on JCProbably’s site on the topic of friendship. It was a touching bit of thinking on the topic of habits we persist in to perhaps keep a friendship alive. It struck me with particular force as I am terrible at all the things that one is supposed to do to maintain friendship.
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Irene and I watch a fair amount of TV. But I believe we do so rather inefficiently: we have several streaming services that only get occasional use and yet I am still paying full fees for access. I started thinking about this after reading Wilhelm’s post about his own state of household streaming, and I think it is worth at least a bit of self evaluation.
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I wrote about the impacts of AI development a while back. One of the factors I mentioned was technology waste which touches on the concept of AI being a massively wasteful consumer of things like high-performance GPUs, disk storage, and RAM. This consumption is driving up prices for basic technology infrastructure at an alarming rate.
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I was saddened today to read of the death of Margaret Hamilton. She was one of the key programmers on the Apollo program having been responsible for much of the internal flight control system for Apollo 11. She is credited with inventing the term “Software Engineering”, and pictures of her standing next to towering stacks of printout paper from her work on Apollo are stuck in my memory banks.
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Superconductors are kind of bizarre even in their ‘normal’ state. Normally all materials have at least a little bit of resistance to electrical current: pass a signal through a wire and at some point it will lose all of its energy. Over small distances of hundreds or even thousands of kilometers the loss might be negligable, but it is still there.
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I have a lot of days, possibly the majority of my days, when I feel more negative than positive. Lyteforce has a post wherein they talk about their own experiences with these kinds of days. Their premise is that it is important to open up about these feelings and to have a receptive audience such as close friends, family, or a therapist who can be good listeners.
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I take a fair number of random photos around the house, several a week on average I’d guess. A common subject for my pictures are our animals: Irene isn’t fond of me taking pictures of her, and pictures of myself aren’t fit for human consumption, so that leaves our furry companions. And they are more photogenic than most of the subjects around here anyway.
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Fasten your seat belts as today my own personal “Wayback machine” is taking us all the way back to March of 2003. At the time the Iraq war was still only two weeks old, and Republican law makers in the U.S. had their sights set on critically important decisions.
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