In a world where our lives are increasingly digitized, the recent announcement by Google to delete accounts inactive for over two years, starting December 1st of 2023 might cause a moment of stress. Photos, documents, videos that you just stashed back in college when your username was ‘EmoSceneKid2002’ suddenly might vanish and while we might not care about our first vlogging attempt on that old YouTube account,  that last video of Christmas with Grandma is something pretty precious, so log in and save those special things.  But there is the other side of this, what happens when we aren’t there to log in anymore?  We humans are fantastic at putting off any task that makes us confront the reality of our inescapable demise, but this should serve as a wake-up call to address a freque...

A year and some odd months ago when we first started hearing about Covid I was following the data super closely - because it was data and new and interesting and slightly frightening, but after a year or so I started to get bored and stopped paying much attention. I would see friends on Facebook sharing anti-mask or anti-vax stuff, some funny, some rationally questioning, but most of it either very conspiratorial or just wrong and I would ignore it. A few weeks ago my uncle passed away from Covid. Since then I have found my tolerance for bad science reporting and misleading memes has gone downhill. I don't want to get into the political aspect of public health policy. But I do want to rant a little about how misrepresenting or misunderstanding the information that is avail...

I ran into this funny from Twitter on Reddit a day or two ago. A quick Code Review. (found on Reddit - yeah, I may be spending too much time on Reddit lately. Here is the code we are looking at. The request is to simplify it while maintaining the original functionality. function user_is_premium() { // if premium is false, we immediately return false if ($_GET['premium'] === 'false') return false; // param 1, cookie 1 -> true if ($_GET['premium'] === 'true' && $_COOKIE['premium'] !== 'true') return true; // param 1, cookie 0 -> true if ($_GET['premium'] === 'true' && $_COOKIE['premium'] === 'true') return true; // param 0, cookie 1 -> true if ($_GET['premium'] !== 'true' && $_COOKIE['premium'] === 'true') ...

A few weeks ago I was at a camp with my 10 year old daughter and she was shooting with BB-guns. It wasn't her very first time with them, but it has been so long since the last time it might as well have been the first time. I noticed how the range instructor (a young adult, volunteer) was trying to help the children by giving them instructions that mostly consisted of advice on how to shift their aim to be closer to the bull's eye. Somewhere in my brain my less pleasant self was yelling "Holy crap that is not how you teach marksmanship." but I kept that voice firmly on the inside and let the volunteer do her job even if it wasn't how I would do it. After all, it is just BB-guns.The way I would teach marksmanship is the way I was taught - consistency first. Learn to position yours...

It has been pretty quiet around here. Mostly due to the fact that I have taken a really amazing new job. Now that the dust has settled a little bit I should be able to post more soon.