chasingthewind

I had to work with a funeral home this year and what I found was that private equity has taken over the funeral industry. Don’t assume that a funeral home that seems local actually is.

I was a REST purist for a while and the purer I got the more unhappy I was. Hypermedia standards like Siren and HAL just made things miserable no matter how hard I tried to make them work.

I think the REST Architectural Pattern is great but I don't use it anymore. Instead I create ROUSED services.

  Resource
  Oriented
  Unconstrained
  Sensible
  Enterprise
  Services

Resource Oriented because the very best thing about REST is the tendency to focus on resources and collections of resources and how you can interact with them sensibly.

Unconstrained because I don't let some specification control how I work.

Sensible because things still need to be internaly consistent and well thought out.

Enterprise because the fact is I'm always making these services for some 'boring' business use case.

Services that provide some specific set of bounded capabilities within the usual messy ecosystem present at a SaaS software company.

I think we owe a lot to Roy Fielding for the potent ideas but as others have argued eloquently, reality sets in and you have to adapt to circumstances.

This is basically a fluff piece about Lego with a side helping of climate and sustainability topics. It’s not a particularly good article in my opinion. I think the most fundamental question facing Lego is that clone brick makers are now able to deliver excellent sets at significantly lower cost. The article doesn’t mention that at all.

This is a video by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder for anyone who might want help deciding on whether to succumb to the clickbait title.

My dental practice has only one significant improvement that I’ve noticed in the last 30 years, which is to use a sonic scaler to remove plaque instead of manual scraping with an implement. Somebody in the field would certainly be able to provide a better and more informative answer.

I find it curious that the Lockheed Vega is chosen as “Amelia Earhart’s plane” since most people would probably associate her with the Lockheed Electra, the plane she was flying when she disappeared. It’s analogous to saying that Ernest Shackleton’s ship was the Nimrod…not wrong, just odd.

I am also bad at mini Metro but the thing that makes me crazy is that when the game ends it says something like “your city shut down.” That makes absolutely no sense and the endgame message should’ve been “you were fired!” Such a missed opportunity!

I was never a very big fan of Edward Gorey but I always loved his contemporary Ogdred Weary. :)

My condolences on your loss. I used QModem in the early 90s downloading shareware and the like. I just looked through my floppy disk holder and found a 3 1/2 inch floppy from 1992 with QModem on it :) Your dad’s contribution to the BBS scene was huge and it was an important part of my own journey into computing.

Meta discussion: The article is brilliant (my fridge hassles me too!) but makes two small word usage “errors” by using the phrase “dawn it’s Freon cap”

The first “error” (I’m mostly a descriptivist) is incredibly common: using “it’s” when “its” is “correct”. The second “error” is much less common: using “dawn” when “don” is “correct”.

Is this just a case of autocorrect being “helpful”? :D

I seem to recall that some drawbridges could be counter weighted and have supports that could be removed quickly that would then free the counterweight and close the bridge immediately.

If you search YouTube for the channel Extreme Deer Habitat and the video How to Never Get Poison Ivy again the presenter asserts that hard scrubbing with a cloth will remove the urushiol oil after contact and that it will prevent a rash.

I'm hesitant to comment because while I'm an aviation fan I really know very little. I subscribe to VAS Aviation and Blancolirio where a lot of these incidents are reported and analyzed and one thing that continually strikes me is that the architecture of airport runways seems like an incredible arsenal of footguns.

The way the runways intersect each other and parallel each other creating the need for complex and sometimes dangerous intersections seems like such an unfortunate and possibly unsolvable problem. Airports are forced by economic and logistical necessity into spaces that are really too small to solve these issues with better layout and that means the solutions "have" to be found in process or technology.

I've encountered constraints like this so often in software but mercifully I've never worked on anything with life or death consequences.