I hope most of you read my last post “My Association with the Gambino Crime Family”.[1] When I grew up in Brooklyn, my brother’s best friend until they were ten years old was Dominick Montiglio whom we recently found grew up to be a hitman for the Gambino crime family. We were shocked that such an apparently normal child became so corrupted. The post tried to briefly explain the reasons why. In this post I wish to expound on one of those reasons that I didn’t have time to elaborately discuss…
We watch websites for a living at Oh Dear , so I figured I knew roughly how often things break. The data set me straight on which outages are worth worrying about.
Last night was the first one since the surgery that I slept through the night. I didn't wake up until 0750. It felt wonderful waking up refreshed and not tired and wanting to roll over and go back to sleep. Posted the blog a little after 0800 which is a wee bit late for me. I think the blog posting may be erratic until I am mended and feeling 100%.I am feeling better. The cough is up and down - some days I cough a lot and others I don't. The burning sensation from coughing is almost all gone.…
Book Review – June 2026 To paraphrase Rod Stewart, Wrexham is in my heart, it’s in my soul, it’s my best friend. It shaped me and continues to be a dominant influence in my life – despite the fact that my current house is actually on the border of Flintshire and Cheshire. Wrexham is where I live, if we take ‘living’, as the council did during the City of Culture bid, to mean wherever you ‘work, rest and play’. The ‘Real’ series is a collection of books by the Welsh independent publisher, Seren.…
A week ago, I was thinking about how I might be feeling in one week, when I was back from travel, back from my first time at a TEEM intensive. I am feeling the way I hoped I would be feeling. I am feeling relieved and hopeful--and not too exhausted.A week ago, I was getting ready to pack. One of the benefits of driving is that I can overpack. I ended up with three extra tops and sweaters/overshirts, which was fine with me. I decided not to bring long pants or skirts; I assumed we'd be in a…
Let’s just say, I’ve been quite productive as of late … as I’ve been reviewing yet another keyboard. Since my last review of the Epomaker TH99 Pro, Epomaker have been generous enough to offer me another review opportunity, this time addressing one of my qualms about the TH99 Pro – its weight. For productive people that travel about, we often compromise on keyboard comfort when we’re not at home. Mushy membranes seem to be the only thing on offer normally, as a mechanical keyboard is physically…
A Downtown McKinney, Texas, water tower in the process of being repainted. The post Tiara appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.
Do you remember what a "normal" software team looked like?A product manager, an engineering manager, a designer, and six or seven engineers. Weekly planning meetings, a backlog to groom, a sprint to run. For most of the last decade, that was just... how teams worked. It was the water we all swam in.That was my daily life as an software engineer and then an engineering manager for most of my career. That shape was so familiar it felt like a law of nature rather than a design choice.I recently…
For almost ten years now, we’ve sworn by Mariage Frères when it comes to shopping for high quality loose tea leaves. The nearest shop, however, is in Lille, which is almost three hours away. Their webshop is crude and doesn’t allow for a taste session before buying hence we did buy our fair amount of misses. Yet we remained faithful: the few times that we diverged from the brand ended up in a disappointment. And then I saw someone claiming that London-based Postcard Teas is “even better than…
Today’s TDC is to design a pencil: Design and draw your own pencil. It doesn’t have to be a standard No. 2 or anything like that. Give it a unique exterior design or give it 3 contact points. You decide! Here’s mine – a six pointed pencil so I can draw from 6 directions at once. Hexapencil flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
[1992]Back to the good ole days when I was twenty. Me and my mate Tony would stay up late, drink and smoke, listening to all the new and groovy sounds on cd. I'd totally forgotten the epic grunge-gaze and kaleidoscopic ambient sax haze of Never That Feeling/Never Learn. What a jam. Glorious.[1993]Unbelievably this tune, one of their greatest, was exclusively tucked away on the import only US version of The Last Train To Satansville cd EP.Cars Converge On Paris might be Swervedriver's most…
🗓️ 22 to 28 juneThe weeknotes are back! I was sitting down to edit my now page, looked for my notes for it, and found some old weeknotes instead. I realised I missed some parts of it, so here we go again :Dfavourite thing this weekSuch a great talk with my ergo therapist. She was so kind and showed me a great new tool to make my life even better!writingNot much writing due to the heatwave. I did write some blog posts I'm really happy with!blogging on the 22nd I wrote about taking the blogging…
TOFI not Tofu (the food). Read first about it in The Diabetes Code BMI is not a good predictor of T2 diabetes. A waist circumference is a better indicator. Visceral fat accumulates inside and around the intra-abdominal organs - like kidney, liver, etc. In contrast subcutaneous fat is fat deposited under the skin. Waist to heigh ratio should be less than half. So, for me waist should be under 89cms or 35 inches.
Have you ever walked out of a 1:1 and realised you can't quite remember what you agreed on last time? Or spent five minutes before a catch-up scrolling through Slack threads, trying to piece together a conversation from three weeks ago?I've been there more times than I'd like to admit. That's exactly why I built Meeting Notes - a lightweight, local-first desktop app for keeping organised notes with the people you work with.Why I built itMost of us are using the wrong tool for this. Notion is…
In my RSS reader, I stumbled upon this code-golfed (i.e. minimised to death) snippet that's fairly clever, but from the code, utterly opaque. I couldn't immediately see how it worked, and since Copilot autocompletes most of my code for me - whether I want to or not, I figured it was a good bit of practice to decompress and understand. First things first: snooze the little copilot bastard for an hour! Side note: because I got this post through my reader, I didn't happen to clock the link right…
a5.5 (last updated: 29 Jun 2026) 1) [ 19 Mar 2021 ] ✓ 4 minutes ago ago
From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 213-214: THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL anthem begins with the words “Ukraine has not yet perished,” hardly an optimistic beginning for any kind of song. But this is not the only anthem whose words do not inspire optimism. The Polish national anthem starts with the familiar line “Poland has not yet perished.” The words of the Polish anthem were written in 1797 and those of the Ukrainian one were penned in…
This was always one of the most baffling changes to macOS. The bespoke, highly detailed icons were distinguished and gave the OS a premium feel compared to the tiny pixelated icons of Windows.
The reality of human sexuality is a whole world; describing it requires at least four dimensions plus time. – “Two-Dimensional” One who thinks a dog must be forced to lick humans has never met a dog. Prohibition turns people into “crime scenes”, to be violated by cops at will. It’s good to see “sex trafficking” lies being attacked from many directions. Even USA Today rags are reporting debunkings of “sex trafficking” myths. I hope “sex trafficking” doesn’t become an all-purpose excuse for…
I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table. I’m supposed to be shopping for a present for a kid whose birthday party my kid has been invited to, but instead I am sitting on the grass watching the…
Credits: Guest: Ian Mond Title: Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman Host: Jake Casella Brookins Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia Artwork by Rob Patterson Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough References: The Writer and The Critic Tayari Jones’ Kin Boyhood by David Keenan Centreouropa by Vicente Luis Mora, translated by Rahul Bery Edward Royston’s Transgressing Time Christopher Priest’s The Recollections Priest & Allan’s The Illuminated Man Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is…
Connie Francis & Harve Presnell.When the Boys Meet the Girls (1965). What possessed a Hollywood producer to pitch a 1960s update of the George and Ira Gershwin stage musical Girl Crazy starring Connie Francis, Liberace, Louis Armstrong, Herman's Hermits, and Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs? We may never know. But shockingly, the movie was made and now we can experience When the Boys Meet the Girls.The "plot" sends a wealthy college student named Danny Churchill (Harve Presnell) to Nevada to avoid…
Few recent technological innovations were better poised to become a productivity slam dunk than the personal computer. Spreadsheets, word processors, databases, presentation software, email – the list of programs that could vastly simplify common tasks seemed endless. As I reported in a 2021 op-ed for WIRED, however, reality proved more complicated. For example: A 1991 article in the New York Times quoted an economist who said that despite heavy spending on computers, “white-collar…
Apologies for the lack of posts. Not dead, just busy.
A few sites and articles of interest I came across this month. Maybe blogging is falling out of favour because Gen Z think it’s too “cringe”? The Bank of England is asking people to vote on which animals should be ont the next series of bank notes. Poor frog Bot traffic has officially passed human traffic on the Internet. Great. Spotify founder Daniel Ek is now running Neko Health, full body health checks for £299. To reclaim our personal tastes (and cultural standards) we must abandon…
The month June I can describe best as hot, hot, hot and slowing down. We had 2 weeks of uninterrupted rain and 2 weeks of heatwave. Talk about contrast! Maybe the longest heatwave the Netherlands ever had in consecutive days? The contrast was huge and it took some time getting used to. Because of these high temperatures, exercising was almost not existent this month. That also took some getting used to ;) And I started with some new / old things again! I decided it was time to do something with…
Few arcade shoot-em-ups made as much of an impact in the early 1990s as Seibu Kaihatsu's Raiden. First released into arcades in 1990, the vertically scrolling shooter quickly became a huge hit thanks to its fast action, varied weaponry and relentless challenge. Players took control of the Raiden Supersonic Attack Fighter in a desperate battle against an invading alien force, blasting through waves of enemies whilst collecting weapon upgrades and avoiding an overwhelming barrage of bullets. The…
8612/21531I hate the car park at the Lister hospital more than I hate anything on this earth. As you may have noticed, I resent that whoever runs this facility is making money off of ill people (and I presume hospital staff) and also that they profit from any (inevitable) delays in the hospital. On the day that I ended up having to stay overnight they hit the bonanza, partly cos Catie had to go home and come back again. I don't know what percentage goes back to the NHS but I am going to hazard…
I've found this just now, among other things I wrote years and years ago for a memoir class. I loved to read it again and thought I'd share it :)---I'm going to write about someone I don’t really remember a lot about, but I am so proud to have someone like her in the family tree, that I have to write about her.I would like to introduce you to a formidable woman, my great aunt.She was one of twelve children, sister of my grandfather, aunt to my father.I remember her as very tall, taller than…
Moments, a beautiful photo sharing, quiet community, site has revealed their pricing. As an early member —sorry Founding Supporter— I get the opportunity to pay $89/year for some additional features. Is free still worth it? Is their paid for tier good enough to stump up the cash? I’ll admit when I first signed up for Moments I thought it was far far too polished to be a free service and, I was right, it is of course being monetised. I knew it was coming, it was literally too good to be true…
