My BIL still gives his weight in “stone”. As in, “I’m 12 stone, 7 lbs and 3 ounces”.

I joke with him that only makes sense to people who are comfortable with Pounds, Shillings and Pence, too.

I cannot express adequately how different blades are from each other. Some are smoother than others, some are sharper and some improve after a few uses. Some last longer.

I have fairly fine whiskers, so I don’t need a crazy sharp blade like Feather. My skin is also a bit sensitive, so a smooth blade is best.

For me Big Ben, blades made by Lord in Egypt are really good. One of the versions of Shark, also made by Lord are pretty good too.

I find Wilkenson Sword blades to be horribly scratchy, and the name for some of the Gillette blades. Voskhod aren’t bad, except they are Russian.

You don’t realize how different they are until you try.

Blades vary greatly between brands. Get a sampler pack from eBay to find ones you like. Then buy them in bulk. 100 blades will generally cost from $8-$14, depending on the brand. Some, like Feather, are more expensive.

I call BS.

I’m Canadian and my parents immigrated here from England before I was born. I have a UK passport as well as a Canadian passport.

I’m not English-Canadian, I’m just Canadian. No one hyphenates in Canada, and you cannot say that Canada has any more unifying cultural heritage than the USA.

In the very first real programmer job that had, back in 1986, the IT department estimated that they had a 51 man-year backlog of development work. That would have translated to two or three calendar years of work. Probably more, considering how crappy estimates always are, and the always under-estimate.

It turns out that this is pretty much the industry standard. Virtually ever place I worked for the next 35 years had a similar size of backlog. And that backlog isn’t standing still, either. All you can hope is that 3 more years worth of new requests don’t come in during the two years it takes to complete what you already have.

Some of those new things are going to have a higher priority than stuff that’s already in the backlog. The reality is that some item that’s down at the low end of the list is going to get bumped down, again and again, and never get done. Or it’s going to someday become an urgent priority that can’t wait any more.

So the pressure is always intense for the developers to go faster, faster, faster. And the business doesn’t understand or care about good engineering practices, even though the shit hits the fan when a critical bug gets released to production. And God help you if that backlog of 51 man-years has grown to 70 after a year because of the technical debt you introduced trying to go faster.

The fight to rein in scope is constant. At that first job, the head of the department told us, “to build Volkswagens, not Cadillacs”. It was laughable, because they were struggling to keep up while building Skodas.

You can’t just add more programmers because the productive backbone of the development team is a group of programmers that have all been there for at least 5 years and they are domain experts. It’s going take at least 5 years to bring new hires up to that level of knowledge.

And that’s all three sides of the project triangle: scope/quality, resources and time. You can’t meaningfully add resources, scope’s already stripped down to bare bones and the time is too long.

And the truth is that every one of those projects in that 51 man-years backlog is important, even critical, to some aspect of the business. But the development process is unfathomable to muggles, so can’t you just go faster? Can’t you wring a bit more productivity out of those domain experts?

Except I’m not actually talking about spelling, per se, but about attention to detail. Spelling errors in a resume is just sloppy rubbish.

As an IT/Development manager, I only had one role that I hired for where the skills for getting the job matched the skills for doing the job: Business Analyst. Not job entailed presenting information clearly, both written and verbally. So I expected the resume and cover letter to be organized and clear.

Programmers, on the other hand, I wouldn’t expect the same level of polish. But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count – a lot.

A lot of the people that applied, and that I hired, did not have English as a first language. So I gave a lot of latitude with regard to word selection and grammar. But not spelling. Use a goofy word or two, but spell them right.

I figured that most people were highly motivated when writing a resume – about an motivated on you can get. And if not level of motivation cannot get you to take care, then you’ll just be a bug creation machine if I let you touch my codebase.

This is true, but…

Moore’s Law can be thought of as an observation about the exponential growth of technology power per $ over time. So yeah, not Moore’s Law, but something like it that ordinary people can see evolving right in front of their eyes.

So a $40 Raspberry Pi today runs benchmarks 4.76 times faster than a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer from 1978. Is that Moore’s Law? No, but the bang/$ curve probably looks similar to it over those 30 years.

You can see a similar curve when you look at data transmission speed and volume per $ over the same time span.

And then for storage. Going from 5 1/4" floppy disks, or effing cassette drives, back on the earliest home computers. Or the round tapes we used to cart around when I started working in the 80’s which had a capacity of around 64KB. To micro SD cards with multi-terabyte capacity today.

Same curve.

Does anybody care whether the storage is a tape, or a platter, or 8 platters, or circuitry? Not for this purpose.

The implication of, “That’s not Moore’s Law”, is that the observation isn’t valid. Which is BS. Everyone understands that that the true wonderment is how your Bang/$ goes up exponentially over time.

Even if you’re technical you have to understand that this factor drives the applications.

Why aren’t we all still walking around with Sony Walkmans? Because small, cheap hard drives enabled the iPod. Why aren’t we all still walking around with iPods? Because cheap data volume and speed enabled streaming services.

While none of this involves counting transistors per inch on a chip, it’s actually more important/interesting than Moore’s Law. Because it speaks to how to the power of the technology available for everyday uses is exploding over time.

https://youtube.com/shorts/zC8eSSvnYXg?si=cqs53b_6ggLjU7NP

Also, the final note on the bass is a mistake, but they left it in.

I’m not sure if traffic is “convenience” at this point. At least where I live, it’s a nearly essential piece of functionality.

In fact, for local driving it’s often the only reason to use a map app. I already know how to get to most of the places I want to go, I just need to know the best route to avoid traffic now.

Many, many years ago I used to have two Wyse50 terminals, running split screens each with two parts. I did a lot of support on remote systems (via modem!) and I would have a session on a customer system, source code and running on our test system and internal stuff. I didn’t have space for a third terminal.

At another job I had an office with a “U” shaped desk. I would spread printouts across half the “U” and swivel around between the computer and the printouts.

Technically, he would have three drives and only two drives of data. So he could move 1/3 of the data off each of the two drives onto the third and then start off with RAID 5 across the remaining 1/3 of each drive.

Yes, $15 CAD/day to “roam like home”. I have an Orange eSIM that I can keep alive if I use it at least once every 6 months - with a local french number that stays mine. It costs me about $40 CAD for a 30 day - 20GB top up. My wife uses Nomad for data only, we both don’t need local numbers, and it generally costs $12 CAD for 5 GB 2 week top-up.

So I figure about $60-70 CAD for 3 weeks travel virtually anywhere in Europe. Calls and SMS included (for one) without long distance charges. Compared to $630 for “roam like home” for two people from a Canadian carrier - doesn’t matter which one as far as I can tell.

We both recently got new phones to be able to use eSIMs.

And the physical SIMs stay active. So my elderly parents can call my Canadian number if there’s an emergency and it will ring through.

In fact, on our last trip to Rome, when we used a credit card at the hotel, it was refused and then seconds later I got a text from the bank asking for confirmation on my Canadian number. I had no choice but to text “Yes” back, and that single text activated roaming for the day and cost me $15.