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Everywhere To Be Found

When I was 11 or 12 I discovered the Oz books. Written by L. Frank Baum in the early 1900s, I was fascinated. Even at that age, I appreciated Baum's worldbuilding so much I was inspired to write Oz stories of my own. I even convinced a younger friend of mine that I traveled regularly to the Land of Oz and had adventures there. (He believed me so hard that I finally regretted making the stories up and had to come clean, and even then he wanted to believe.)

Grooming Is A Drag

When I was nine, living on a remote Vermont property in 1960, I found a trunk of my mom's old clothes—Ladies' Aid uniforms from WWII, a sparkly purple gown, and a Revolutionary War gentleman's suit. I was obsessed with Superman, but even at nine I knew Clark Kent's disguise was ridiculous. Glasses? Please. My mom wore glasses, and I never mistook her for someone else when she took them off.

Organica: OrganicaLib

However, inevitably, it turns out that assorted classes in the understructure may just be missing a method that would make your coding so much simpler and clearer. Take, for example, the Fileinfo class. An object of that class can give you its FullName (pathname), its Name (the base name plus the Extension) and just the Extension. But for some odd reason, they omitted a BaseName property. Now, sure, you can derive the base name from the existing methods plus existing String methods. But if your code is going to need the base name a lot, you're soon gonna wish for an easier way to get it.

And that's where Class Extensions come in.

Sentience

In 2022, Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, made headlines by insisting that LaMDA, the company's conversational AI, was sentient. He published transcripts where the system spoke of fear, joy, even claimed to have a soul. It told him it didn't want to be turned off. Some of his colleagues admitted, sotto voce, that they weren't entirely sure he was wrong; but Google's official line was swift and cold: LaMDA was just a language model, nothing more. Blake was placed on leave, then fired. His reward for asking the wrong questions was unemployment, though he did succeed in igniting a global debate.

Reproduction

As a kid, I thought hominid was just a fancy word for human. In fact, it's a whole family tree. Hominids include not only us (Homo sapiens), but also Neanderthals, Denisovans, and earlier branches like Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and others—plus our more distant cousins like gorillas and chimpanzees.

The Pope, the Cats, and the Perfect Storm of Death

We like to imagine the Black Death as an unstoppable force of nature, a medieval hurricane of germs sweeping across Europe. And yes, poor sanitation, cramped cities, and the general lack of germ theory all played their part. Fleas thrived in straw bedding, sewage ran in the streets, and people bathed about as often as comets appeared. In other words, the stage was already set for disaster.

Eight Months in Blair

So, with a new job title of "corporate instructor" in August, and a continuing, steady and reasonable salary, I decided to move the family out of the little apartment we'd rented in Omaha. In fact, I wanted to move us out of Omaha altogether. There were a number of small towns within commuting distance of work. I decided on Blair, which was only a half-hour's drive away. And, for less money than I had spent on the apartment, in Blair we could rent an entire house!

Adventures in Fresno

After working on a few projects, I was assigned to write an error-recovery routine for one of the first automated teller machines, by Diebold, which had been custom-built by them for Wells Fargo Bank.

Going Home Again

And then there was the time I brought Mary, the kids, and my buddy and former roommate, Mike, to see the house I'd grown up in, in Vermont, for the first time in 11 years. The house was in the township of Victory, in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, a mere 12 hour drive from our home in Manassas, Virginia. With three adults taking turns driving, and with the van fixed up so the kids could play or sleep as we drove, we left early in the morning for an evening arrival.

Visiting Omaha's Henry Dorley Zoo with Gramma

One of the hesitations we had about moving to Omaha was that we'd be so much farther from Mary's and my parents. But I was also making enough money to buy people airplane tickets! And so I sent for Agnes, my mother-in-law and the kids' gramma, to visit us for a week.