jdeisenberg

Possibly waiting for a reasonable replacement for US tech. For example, if the US should decide to shut off MasterCard and VISA services to Europe, it would create non-trivial difficulties for the European banking system.

The restaurant was one of those “all you can eat” salad bars. It closed during the early part of the pandemic and had been vacant for several months with no buyers, if I recall correctly.

I think this is a reference to when Dropbox was first introduced. I recall posts dismissing it as “just something that could be done as well with a bash script”.

I’m looking at the currency block. Each box has a colored “drop shadow”. I spent a minute or so trying to figure out what the significance of the color is. Finally, I noticed that the color appears to cycle between cyan, magenta, and yellow. Is this a design element only, or do the colors actually have some meaning with respect to the symbol?

Here in Graz, Austria, if nobody wants to get off at a bus stop and nobody is there waiting for the bus, it continues right on to the next stop. It all seems to work, somehow.

This is perfectly wonderful!!!

Having looked at some of the links in the article, I just realized that one extra feature of roundabouts is that they allow U-turns (which is not always the case at an intersection).

I am learning German, and I will read something that I don’t quite understand, make my best guess at what it means, and run it through Google translate. Then I compare the results and it helps me see where I went astray. Similarly, I write something that I think is proper German, and again compare the results to what Google translate says it should be. It’s sort of like having a native speaker sitting next to you and correcting you (except you have to come up with the explanation of the correct answer on your own, which is where knowledge of gender, conjugation, and declension comes in handy).

Plain old JavaScript (without frameworks) holds up rather well. My simplified blackjack game from 1998 (modified in 2003) and a calendar program from 2001 (probably written before then) still work in a modern browser.

The calendar program uses document.write(), which is very embarrassing nowadays, but then again, that was what people did back in 2001.

Wondering how this sort would perform with Unicode input (given 256 buckets); specifically what the results would look like.

I think the ending of Anathem is possibly one of his best; it’s an acknowledgment that it is the ending, it’s rather tender and sweet, and it fits the mood perfectly.