Archive: January 1, 2020

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Wednesday,  01/01/20  02:39 PM

... of the new decade.  Yay.

Did you watch the Rose Parade this morning?  Of course you did.  And did you like the floats?  Amazing, huh, seems like they get bigger, better, and cooler every year.  And so which was your favorite?  Well probably - like us - you liked the Northwestern Mutual float featuring relaxing llamas, entitled "spend your life living":

Note only a great float (any float with llamas is automatically better, plus bonus points for the sunglasses and hats), but a great message on New Year's Day.  Great as it is, I don't think it is on the same plane as 2017's surfing dogs; that was a high bar and hasn't been threatened since.

So far I have spent my post-parade pre-bowl morning debugging software*.  Not sure if that counts as living, but if I don't debug it then tomorrow 400 people in my company are going to get an invalid email, and that will count as dying.  A big part of living is avoiding dying, when you think about it.

Are you a "resolutions" person?  I am, although I must admit I'm better at making them than sticking to them.  I won't reveal them all (yes there are more than one) but one I will share: try to stay high-level and not disappear into details.

Okay, so back to debugging then :)

(Oh and my pick?  Heart says Oregon, head says Wisconson.  Quack!)

* the root cause of the bug: 2020 is a leap year.  Sigh.

 

Wednesday,  01/01/20  11:56 PM

Rewatched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood tonight (on Amazon, after having seen it in a theater when it came out).  What a great movie.  Did you ever think you'd laugh watching someone use a flamethower to kill someone in a pool?  But you did, didn't you...

Did a bit of blogcleaning today ... got rid of the Facebook "like" links, which I never liked (and which nobody ever clicks).  And anyway I'm not sure I ever cared.  I've been doing it for ten years, and all it did was add complexity and load time.  I also fixed the archive - yay, my 18th year of blogging, if you don't subtract 2007, 2018, and 2019, in which I hardly posted.  In fact the last two years I only posted on 9/11 ("never forget", and I didn't).  So this year is already better! 

Jason Kottke: the best of the best-of-the-decade lists.  YMMV. 

Paul Graham: the Lesson to Unlearn.  I love this.  "No, I would explain, that is not how to get lots of users. The way you get lots of users is to make the product really great."  The lesson to unlearn is that there is no shortcut, and finding one is not the answer.  The way to be good is to be good. 

Mark Suster: Startup Advice.  "Everything I learned about being an entrepreneur I learned by F’ing up at my first company."  I definitely learned more by F'ing up my first company than by being part of six other great companies... 

Here's the Programming Game you never asked for.  I have to say programming in assembler is completely passe and mostly useless, but such good background for coding in anything else.  Kind of like the way a Jedi master must build their own light saber :) 

Matt Zimbel: What the digital age means for my music — and my paycheque.  "So the digital age has given us two ‘gifts.’ The technology used for playback sounds terrible and our recorded music no longer has any monetary value."  Do you remember laughter? 

xkcd: Happy New Decade!

 

 
 

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