Nelson Minar

When I was a young boy I played cards with my friend and his Sicilian father. Dad would cheat. He’d palm cards, fudge the score, take extra turns. When I got to age 9 I realized he was cheating and I was so mad. Cheating was wrong! I realized much later that he was teaching us a lesson. That while it might be wrong, sometimes people will cheat you. He taught us to recognize being cheated. When I was 15 I applied for a job at the local grocery store. Part of the hiring process was a test for…

A small update to my linkblog that you probably won’t notice: I’m now using self-hosted linkding as the backend instead of Pinboard. I switched to pinboard back in 2011 and have appreciated having a hosted service all these years. But development on the product stagnated long ago and the last few years service quality has been erratic. Right now the service is down because the domain registration expired. It’s galling that I had to log in to Nazi Twitter to even see what’s going on with the…

For the first time in about 25 years I’m running a Linux desktop. It’s great! I used to use Linux all the time. But even back in the early ’00s all I was running for work was ssh terminals and a web browser and Windows did that just fine. And for gaming you had to have Windows. I had a few years of using a Mac, then switched back to Windows once WSL got good enough to have a local Unix. But I liked to try Linux out every couple of years. Last month I installed Bazzite on an external drive to…