rant

Is (New Technology) is Killing (My Hobby)?

<tl;dr> Betteridge’s law of headlines applies, “No.” </tl;dr> In the ham radio communities, a rash of posts are going around about how FT8 / the Internet / Millenials / Nobel-prize physicists are destroying amateur radio: K0NR’s Is the Internet destroying amateur radio? N0SSC’s Millennials are killing ham radio PE4BAS’ Is FT-8 damaging amateur radio? NZ0T’s Did Joe Taylor K1JT Destroy […]

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The Mintern

In retrospect, there were signs that The Intern might not work out: The child of a friend of the family of a Senior Executive … touted as an upperclassman from a well-known engineering school, but was just starting a search for an internship in mid-June … hasn’t been vetted or spoken with the hiring manager, but was slated to

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Overpackaging

I purchased a Sandisk 16Gb USB stick drive (~$10 on Amazon.com) to transfer large files between machines rather than having to burn multiple DVDs.  (Also because I ditched my optical drive to install a second hard disk in my ancient MacBook.)  While shuttling files, the USB stick went into some kind of lock-out mode. The consensus from the

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More Reflections on MOOCs

I was forwarded Owen Youngman’s article in The Atlantic by a friend who wanted me to reflect further on my over-zealous consumption of  Massively Open Online Courses (or MOOCs).  It seems about right: When I took my first in 2011, the concept was very new.  I’d planned to take one, but opted for all three courses, intending

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What Is Your OTT Strategy?

As I was walking through the exhibits of O’Reilly’s “Making Data Work” Conference a few weeks ago, a vendor stepped in my path: Vendor: “What is your organization’s Hadoop strategy?” Having done a metric crap-ton of events as a vendor, I was sympathetic to what he was trying to do.  However, his premise of a tool being the

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Windows Update

Another, big batch (27) of security patches landed on my Windows 7 desktop. Since I’m likely to be running long, data-intensive jobs, I have it not apply them right away. Sensing this large group would necessitate a reboot, I avoided installation until lunch time today. The philosophy is simple: computing should not be about constantly

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Cretaceous Diet

Though it is definitely not something I’d ever want to have lunge out of someone’s yard and start chasing me when I’m on a bike ride, the T.Rex at the Chicago Field Museum was a lot smaller than I had imagined.

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