My grandparents had a summer home on a river that I don’t a lot of summers at when growing up, until I was about 20 or so. (I’m now knocking on the door of 60). The place was sold in my mid 20’s when my grandparents both passed away. I check it out on Google from time to time, and I’ve seen moderate changes over the years, but it still looks mostly the same. I’m a bit sentimental about it since I spent so many fun summers there.

Not true of their next door neighbors. The neighbors house no longer exists. It was apparently completely torn down and replaced. The biggest giveaway from the perspective of Google is that there is now a swimming pool between the house and the river that wasn’t there a few years ago, and the driveway is a completely new layout as well.

My employer uses Akamai as a CDN (and security) provider for their websites. Akamai has an optional tool called Image and Video Manager that, in a nutshell, optimizes images for better site performance.

Basically you put a high quality image on your website, and when Akamai retrieves it the first time it optimizes its color palette, compression, size, and format for multiple devices. Each derivative image is cached by Akamai for 30 days at a minimum.

So while you may put a 1000x1000 JPG with a quality of 95%, an Android user may be served a 200x200 image with 80% quality, and it may be a WEBP or PNG format instead of JPG. Exactly which derivative image is served is based on criteria like the web browser being used, the viewport size, etc.

Not exactly 911, but somewhat similar. A few years ago my wife & I were in a rental SUV while on vacation. It was a fairly new car with only something like 2000 miles on it. We were in the third lane of a 4 lane highway when a drunk driver hit us from behind with almost no warning. It caused our car to spin 360 degrees across 3 lanes before coming to a stop in the breakdown lane.

Within about 5 seconds of the car coming to a stop we heard a voice asking if we’d been in an accident and were we ok. It turns out the rental car had one of those OnStar types of services. We were so pumped full of adrenaline that it was all just a blur as we tried to remember what highway we were on, near what exit, etc. We were so panicked… Luckily a state trooper on a routine patrol stopped maybe a minute later so we didn’t have to keep trying to figure out how to tell the OnStar person where we were.

I spent a couple winters in the 80’s working as a drivers assistant for UPS. One of the places we picked up packages from was a back door of a strip mall. It was just a room with racks of VHS recorders where the owner was duplicating porn videos. We’d pick up literally a few garbage bags full of packages every day. I doubt that setup would have been there if it was all Betamax. It probably would have cost significantly more both to set up and for the blank tapes.

IT professional for 20 years. C/C++ developer for 10 years prior to that.

My first job out of college was mostly luck. I took a job doing tech support but after a couple of years was able to transition into development work.

Virtually every job since that first one has been thanks to connections I made among coworkers. I got my current job because I knew two employees here. One of them was a co-founder of the company, and somebody I’ve known since the 1990’s and worked with at 3 other companies prior to this.

Does anybody else miss Compuserve, Delphi, etc?

20 years ago I worked on the top floor of a 5 story office building. We wanted to build out a server room with a pretty hefty UPS for backup. The amount of steel reinforcement we had to install in the ceiling of the 4th floor was pretty insane…

How do you decide which open source projects are worthy of taxpayer money, and how much does a given project get?

I have a couple projects I’ve put up in GitHub as open source. Would they qualify? Or are you just talking about well known open source projects like Linux?

20k is a drop in a bucket when it comes to boats. The maintenance, etc. is a significant ongoing expense. And if it’s the kind of boat you keep at a marina and not on a trailer in your driveway then that’s another huge expense. There’s a reason people call boats a hole in the water that you throw money into…

The severed head rolling into view in the hole of the sunken boat still freaks me out. I think it was filmed in the back yard pool of one of the producers.

When I was a kid it was shaving cream. Take a can, put a needle in the nozzle, then melt the nozzle with a cigarette lighter. Once it’s cooled pull the pin out so you have a pinhole nozzle. It’ll spray the shaving cream ten feet or more.

I honestly forget how I learned that trick…

The very first thought when I saw the photo of it:

I am Groot!

I was going to mention this as well. I doubt it’s the case with this theft given how it was done, but my wife recently finished reading a book about Stéphane Breitwieser who admitted to stealing over 200 works of art from smaller museums throughout Europe in the late 90s. He kept pretty much everything he stole for his personal collection.

So called “less than lethal” weapons can and do still kill people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Victoria_Snelgrove

My wife has a dog boarding business, and a good number of the dogs have air tags attached to their collars. Most of the owners geofence around our home/boarding facility so that we don’t get constantly nagged by them. But when we drive one of these dogs somewhere (usually to walk/exercise them on a hiking trail etc) we often get alerts on our iPhones about unrecognized air tags that have been nearby us for a prolonged time. It will include a map showing our track and where/when the air tag was detected each time along the way.

So while I don’t use them personally I’ve seen that they do indeed work quite well. Maybe next time I travel I’ll get one for my luggage.

By April of 2007 I had completely burned myself out working for my third tech startup in the Boston area. By the end of April I was in New Zealand followed by Australia on a month+ long solo trip to unwind and recover from the burnout.

Thank goodness the west coast states have created their own health consortium and a bunch of east coast states have followed suit. I live in one of those east coast states, and just got a covid booster no questions asked. It is also covered 100% by my insurance.

I remember where I was when Reagan was shot.

Sigourney Weaver battling the queen alien in that loader is one example that often pops into my head when this sort of question comes up.

Those new Mexicans are so much worse than the old Mexicans! At least the old Mexicans know enough to stay in Mexico!