Author: doug

This post is a little long-winded, so please bear with me.

The book you see here is the text from the first hard-core programming course I took in college. The class was taught by Prof. Alva Couch, a great teacher who got me started in the right direction toward my career.

One of my office’s summer interns from last year is a Tufts student, and has continued working on the intern project part-time for us during the school year. He’s taking a course with Couch this semester that is highly relevant to the intern project.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that I had a video conference with Prof. Couch today. I was hugely flattered that he remembered me, 28 years after that first course.

Lines 2 & 3.

Today I made homemade sugar cubes. Because reasons. Mostly cocktail reasons.

I got my hair cut this morning, which is an activity I dislike. As a reward, I treated myself to a George Howell mocha made with Taza chocolate.

Here is one of those giant ice cubes I mentioned last week, in use in a Boulevardier.

This is the connector that broke on my mother in law’s tablet. This is a MicroUSB socket, with the metal shield folded back. The metal part is 7mm wide.  Do you see the piece of black plastic bent across the right-most metal finger? No? Look again; I’ll wait. This tiny sliver of plastic was insulating this one contact, preventing the charging cable from doing its job. Think about this next time you jam the charger into your smartphone for the night: be a little careful, make sure it’s lined up right. Or a 100-micrometer piece of plastic may mean you have a bad day tomorrow.

Kitties are helping me read my book.

The sun came out below the overcast at the end of today’s storm, illuminating the trees down the street in rich evening light.

This is the guts of my mother in law’s tablet. She killed the charging port, rendering it useless. Fortunately, the little flex circuit you see on the right is easily replaceable and still available (Thanks Internet!). This repair is not entirely altruistic, because I’m promised I can borrow this tablet for Galapagos should I fix it.

Facebook folks, click through to see the result.

I needed to spend a few dollars to fill out an order for free shipping recently, so I bought myself ice molds that make huge sphere and cube ice cubes.  Glass for scale.