Officially disguised as a Canadian
This past weekend, M treated us to a show or two in Las Vegas. We saw RuPaul’s Drag Race Live, including a very welcome appearance by Lawrence Chaney (there were others as well, including Pangina). It was a good show, and was very well staged. All queens had a scene where they appear from theContinue reading Rolling in the weed
Recently, a friend (Janie Larson, A.K.A. the Red Queen Coder) asked me to take over hosting of her website. Unfortunately, because of boring technical reasons, she wasn’t able to back up the WordPress database, and so I used a tool called SiteSucker Pro to download it as-is as a static HTML entity. We would comeContinue reading Reverse engineering WordPress, kinda
The Twitter account known as SwiftOnSecurity deleted a short thread of tweets today stating that the vast majority of 4K resolution laptop screens could be scaled down to 1080p. This would improve performance owing to the reduction in pixels being refreshed, and those users would scarcely notice the difference. Swift was referring to a display’sContinue reading Enhance
Did you know that computer memory used to be stored in cores linked by hand-woven nets of copper wire? The core was a small ferrite ring (iron because magnetic), and wires were woven between them to read or set the electrical current in that magnetic ring (which ran clockwise or anti-clockwise depending on the value).Continue reading Core memory in IBM mainframes from 55 years ago
(I’m blaming Jason for this.) 1. Kondo Living There’s a Netflix show I haven’t yet seen about a certain Marie Kondo, who cleans your house by saying if something doesn’t spark joy, you should get rid of it. Folks were happy with her getting rid of shoes, but apparently there was a stink when sheContinue reading Five things
It has been said that I am the luckiest person I know, not least because I keep avoiding death by misadventure. At times I feel like Devon Sawa in Final Destination. One evening in November 2017, my lovely husband made dinner as usual, before going off to work at the hospital. It was chicken, andContinue reading In which Randolph almost dies by misadventure with a microwave
Gritty is the recently unveiled mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers, an ice hockey team in the National Hockey League. Researching that sentence just now, I learned more about Gritty than I knew before. Despite not being au fait with Gritty’s origin story, I’ve been enamoured with his image and without realising it, I have contributedContinue reading Now I’m envisioning him talking like a wookiee
I deactivated my main Twitter account today, after renaming it, downloading my data, and taking one of my existing spare accounts and setting it to the old name in order to preserve my “brand” (ugh). In early 2017 I did something similar with another Twitter account. That time though I didn’t ignore the siren song,Continue reading Goodbye Twitter
Last year, my friend Sarah Gibbs was telling us a funny story about something that happened to her when she worked in a bookstore. That and two other embarrassing anecdotes made me want to make them into a trio of short films. As luck would have it, Sarah decided to leave Canada in September toContinue reading SUBURBAN TRAUMA is a go
Did you see me on Fargo last night? Here’s the long path I took to get there. My first serious acting gig was when I was eight or nine years old. I was to play the absent-minded professor, a major character in one of those end-of-year school productions where every grade had to put onContinue reading My absent-minded journey to Fargo