Debbie had a little birthday celebration...

Debbie had a little birthday celebration...  She had a beer with a couple of her best friends!

Putin vs. Obama...

Putin vs. Obama...  Reader Simi L. passed these along.  I was incapacitated for a while by a potent combination of laughter and despair...

Great low-key rant...

Great low-key rant ... from an old TV show.  Reader, former colleague, and fellow Duke's mayonnaise lover Doug S. passes this along.  He was reminded of it by the Bill Whittle video I posted a couple days ago.

My first thought on viewing it: I can easily imagine this happening here in Paradise.  Today.  I cannot imagine it happening in San Diego anytime in the past 50 years.

I'm not entirely sure what to read into that thought, but it's a good example of why I feel so much at home here...

Dowsing for water...

Dowsing for water...  This is very popular here, a bit to my surprise because in general the people I know here are big on science, and not at all believers in magic or direct supernatural intervention (at least not in everyday life).  It's also surprising to me for another reason: so far as I can tell, you can drill for water anywhere here and you'll strike water.  I've also had people use dowsing in an effort to locate underground water pipes.  We have a large number of such pipes here (mainly for irrigation), so there's a very real danger of digging into one and breaking it.  Of the five efforts to locate a pipe by dowsing that I have witnessed, all failed outright.  Yet the belief continues :)

This article has a great discussion of the entire phenomenon, including a possible explanation for the generally unexplained (and documented) success of dowsers for siting wells.  The explanation makes sense to me...

Flying past Pluto...

Flying past Pluto...  All images forming this video are from the New Horizons spacecraft, of course.  The apparent time is greatly accelerated, but slows down near the planet.  You'll want this full screen!

Microservices cargo cult...

Microservices cargo cult...  A good post, and a good example of the plague of “cargo cults” that the software industry suffers tremendously from.  I count the entire “agile” development methodology craze amongst them, along with the Ruby programming language (which reminds me strongly of dBase of years ago), and the more fervent practitioners of functional programming.

There: in a single sentence I've probably alienated 90% or more of my colleagues :)

Rainy birthday in Paradise...

Rainy birthday in Paradise...  It rained off-and-on most of yesterday, and today is shaping up the same way.  The rain has been very gentle, so we haven't accumulated much, though.

Today is Debbie's birthday – a “milestone” birthday that she'd really rather not think about, or discuss.  I'm just thankful that we live in a time, place, and circumstances that allow us to reach such a pinnacle of ancientness and still be at least partly functional :)  Her birthday present is a day to do whatever she wants (which I suspect means we'll be out looking at wildlife) and dinner wherever she wants (which she's now whittled down to a list of four places).  It will be a nice day...