I have a simple rule - if I meet someone at a party and they say they've written a book, then I will immediately buy that book. It's a strategy which has worked out well; leading me to some truly interesting and delightful prose. Rosalind Brown (a fellow UEA graduate) has written a stunning little book. Practice is an almost Proustian meander through a day-in-the-life of a young woman going through an essay crisis. Much like R. F. Kuang's "Katabasis", I'm rather glad the author found university…

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start inviting 1,500 for dinner, crunching frozen olive brine, and knitting lace cups in a panHi there! Last week life update: no newsletter, yes impossible workload. Last hours in Nate Silver's words: «Election Days are like going to the nice restaurant you've been looking forward to but all they serve for the first several hours is bean sprouts. There's just not a lot of actual knowledge or nourishment to be gained until they start counting…

Nick Bevers argues that AI is pushing developers toward shallow, uncritical building, and that many teams are trusting generated code far too blindly. It's a thoughtful take on keeping a mental model of your codebase and using AI as a tool instead of handing over the craft. Read more

*Not financial advice. Sherrod Brown is Back, BabyWe’ve got another flip on our hands! Brown has defeated the bodacious Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH), per the Associated Press.This is in keeping with a trend we’ve seen for a few cycles now: Appointed incumbents just do not have the same juice as elected incumbents. Brown will now serve out the rest of Vance’s term and have to run again in 2028.Silicon Valley haaaaates Brown and spent heavily against him. Alas, ’twas not enough.- Kate Riga There are a…

link here thank you to Northern Spy for having Karen and Jim Shepard read

This is my 330th post on this website. I can't even fathom how much time I've spent on it over the past six years, not only writing but also tweaking its design and migrating from one platform to another. I've always thought of this website as part of my lifelong effort to become a better writer and a better person. I rarely receive donations, so there isn't much financial incentive to keep publishing here. And yet, here I am, writing another post. I've been wondering lately why I continue to…

Before explaining what the trick is and how it works, I'll take a general example: let's say in a Rust codebase or library you find a better way of doing something, but you still want to keep compatibility with the rest of the codebase or ecosystem. Say you have a new trait Awesome that does what Debug does, but better (for some definition of better). You may want to express code that can consume a value that it either Awesome or Debug like this: fn do_it(value: impl Awesome or Debug) { if…

> LINK · 'Colors of the day in Thailand' on Wikipedia According to ancient customs in Thailand, there is an astrological rule (which has influence from Hindu mythology) that assigns a color to each day of the week based on the color of the God who protects the day or Navagraha. Following this rule in my current work notebook. Looking forward to pink-on-Tuesdays.

Via Newspapers.comThis is for all of us who tend to think most small children are a bit demonic. The “New York Herald,” December 2, 1888:To the north and west of this city, about fifteen miles away, dividing this county from Cumberland and Franklin counties, is a ridge of mountains. In some of the mountain valleys the people are in a state of deep ignorance, seeing little of the outer world and scarcely touched by the civilization that is all around them. In one of these little corners of the…

Sunrise on 4 November 2026 (photo by Kate St. John) 4 November 2026 We have been through a terrible time and much damage has been done. We will find our way forward. Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down. –– Eleanor Roosevelt Today is the Dawn of a New Day.

By John Keefe and Laurel NicholsonSelf PublishedOSRLevels 7-9 The Isle of Argilla has been beset by plague and quarantined, stranding fortune hunters for so long that there are no longer opportunities for profitable exploration. Adventurers spend their days in taverns rehashing and embellishing stories of past glories hoping for a whispered tip about an unexplored dungeon but, until now, upon the arrival of an elderly gnome, nothing has even been rumored. The gnome is the envoy of unknown…

In February 1966 the 15-year-old Little Stevie Wonder astounded a packed crowd of 200 or so kids at the Dungeon Club in Nottingham, a gig which retains its place in local legend. Many of my friends were there, although I wasn’t. Probably I was working an evening shift on the local paper. But when I was told about it afterwards, I promised myself never to miss him whenever the opportunity arose. Luckily for me, there have been several such occasions, including a fabulous mini-concert at a…

I can see the light of a clear blue morning.

Back in November 2008, just after President Obama was elected, I wrote a blog post about how Christians may be focusing on the wrong things when it comes to political leadership. I revised it and re-published it in 2021. I'm coming back around for a third time in light of the results of the 2026 mid-term election.We all know the old saying, right?!"Optimists see the glass as half full; pessimists see the glass as half empty."Some of you have spent the last two years celebrating evangelical…

13:07 - I think I will participate in the talent show for queer*space this month. I started practicing this song by Magnolian called "Banquet." I love it. I would also love to memorize more songs but for now one is enough.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read and re-read passages of William Bartram’s Travels. William Bartram was a botanist who traveled through Southeastern North America, especially Georgia and Florida during 1775 and 1776. He traveled there with his father 10 years earlier, but he wrote his book about his later journey without his father. He was from Pennsylvania. His detailed descriptions of the landscapes, people, plants, animals, and geology fascinate many naturalists. Most other…

The RCA Building, AKA the GE Building, AKA 30 Rockefeller Plaza, as seen by the Wurts Brothers between 1933 and 1935: By the Wurts Brothers sometimes probably in the 1960s: By Angelo Rizzuto in 1952: And by Carol Highsmith in the late 1980s or early 1990s: The thing about a slab skyscraper is that it looks really different depending on how you view it. Personally, I like this building at night, when the cascading setbacks on the long sides are lit.

(click to enlarge)Sunny days, cool nights, low humidity, sunshine, color and a gentle breeze. What’s not to like?Join me over at my website, www.dennismook.com . Thanks for looking. Enjoy! Dennis A. Mook All content on this blog is © 2013-2026 Dennis A. Mook. All Rights Reserved. Feel free to point to this blog from your website with full attribution. Permission may be granted for commercial use. Please contact Mr. Mook to discuss permission to reproduce the blog posts and/or images.

In my last post on the topic, I talked about ImmutableDictionary and why it was too costly for us to use. At the same time, it is basically the data structure that we need for the task at hand. That task is keeping track of the current set of modified pages, with multiple concurrent versions running at the same time.ImmutableDictionary is perfect for the task, because it gives us the right immutable behavior, but its performance makes it unacceptable. So the solution is to design a data…

Lighthouse 13.6 changes simulated FCP and LCP, so PageSpeed Insights scores can improve even when the page itself has not changed.

After HOW TO BUILD A NEW WORLD, by W Heath Robinson Strophe Who will hold the plumbline, while we build downfrom this finial, our highest reach?Then we can consolidate. And if wedismantle steeples, minarets, we will bethe tallest, newest, most up-to-dategreat achievement. All solid materials.The design a variation on enclosure,isolates the future from what we leave behind. The multitudes will earn admittanceby thrift; the virtues of living in limited space,for broadband’s dependable band-width…

Vegetable smile flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Make a vegetable smile Yes, you can just draw a smiley face on a potato, but we bet you can do something more creatively challenging than that! Craft that veggie… I made my smiley face out of potatoes …

Managing external dependencies for a software project has become an integral part of the software supply chain. Whether it’s application dependencies with tools like npm, Yarn, Composer, and so on. Or dependencies used by CI/CD workflows with tools like GitHub Actions, we’ve made considerable progress in managing dependencies across these layers. Now that AI agents are an indispensable part of how we build our software, it’s important that we manage dependencies around them as well. You might…

TRANSMISSION is an online larp designed and run by Chloe Mashiter. I think there's two tickets left for the current run, both in the late night run on Thursday. It's set during the Great Storm of 1987. You're a group of 30-somethings, all old university friends, all getting back together for a reunion in a country house in Norfolk. Then the power goes out. You're isolated, in the dark, no way to contact anyone else. And then the TV turns itself on. And there's Teletext on the screen. And then…

Boo! Happy Halloween. See you next year for another scare. In the meantime, live slogs, and sometimes rushes, on. We’ve had the pleasure to experience the grand opening of the flu season resulting in more sleep deprivation whilst trying to take care of the sick kids. As you can imagine, dodging sickness itself became an impossible task. It looks like every month comes with something to complain about. Did you know that nonstick pans only last two to five years, according to the shop assistant…

Daily Drawing 1039

I have been playing woodworker for almost 60 years now. I like the build process and hate the final step which is applying a finish. I understand the importance of it with the prep and careful application of whatever the finish is. To me it still sucks pond scum and I don't like doing it. And I've tried a bazillion different types. Initially my go to was Minwax Poly before I discovered shellac. It is now my default, go to finish. It is easy to apply and even easier to reapply to fix a boo boo.…

It is the morning after a historic election day with not much time to write. Here's the Facebook post I made just after midnight: I fell asleep early-ish for an election night (by 9 p.m.), early-ish for most grown ups on any night, and scrolling through results at midnight, I'm struck by how many of the winners are women, particularly in races for governor. It's going to be a record breaking election day for all sorts of reasons, but women winners give me so much hope!

Hi, welcome to this write-up for the 4. The Rider's View challenge from Bellingcat. Here you can see my thought processes and what steps I took to get to the answer, but of course there are many different ways of reaching the same results. First lookWe've received a picture made by Giancarlo of two people on a motorcycle on a busy street. It's our task to find an answer to the following question: What nearby monument can the rider see from their vantage point, and what is the name of the person…

Saturday night, I started to get sick. Not ideal, as on Sunday we had to drive down south to visit the kid and her partner. I was probably not good company for two days, as I got sicker and sicker on the drive down, and talking became very difficult. But it was, as ever, a joy to hang out with them, and we got to take them out for dinner one day and lunch the next. I am still extremely fucked up, and the chances of my producing work this week are slim to none. ACCESSIONS: A care package from…