There is a story in my family, about one of my aunts, now passed away. She grew up in in a big east coast city, and then during the Depression era she met this nice Mormon boy, and moved with him into the far beyond of deep rural southern Colorado. And then wrote back to her family in the big city, who were concerned for her welfare. Her letter ( Read more... )

 At a tech job I had many years ago, the mailroom and to-desk mail delivery was done by a teenage girl who suffered from some intellectual disabilities of types I never felt the need to ask about. She had the mind and the attitude of a young child, she was always happy to say hello while dropping off and picking up packages and envelopes from ( Read more... )

About 10 years ago, I was involved with something that completely accidentally suddenly turned into an unlicensed supper club. And demonstrated exactly why supper clubs strictly control their RSVPs and headcounts ( Read more... )

Long ago, almost two decades, which is a few eons in internet time, on discussion forums long since destroyed and passed away, I observed two different social justice zealots. This was before the term "social justice warrior" had been invented. (And as an aside, the term was invited and taken up by people who loudly described themselves as such ( Read more... )

At one company I worked at, one of the problems it didn't have was IT ( Read more... )

I was working on a highly constrained consumer electronics device, a little "satellite device" that spoke to the main device over a CATV RF coax cable and also received commands from an IR remote control. My code was failing in bizarre ways. I adopted an extremely paranoid defensive programming stance, filling my code with asserts and doing ( Read more... )

In the early 90s, I worked for a small company at which the president and one of the co-founders was high-caste Indian. While I was working there, he got married. All of the staff were invited to the reception ( Read more... )

So an hour or so ago, I was sitting here at Center Camp Playa Info, uploading photos to Flickr, when this lovely young lady, wearing a bikini and a pair of boots, comes up to me ( Read more... )

About ten years ago, I worked for a small company, that had issued pagers to all their staff. When several people, all wearing pagers, work around each other a lot, what usually would happen is everyone would set their pager to vibrate instead of ring, because otherwise when only one went off, everyone would reach for their own, not knowing who's ( Read more... )

Many years ago, I lived for a couple of winters in Alaska, doing work that had me outdoors quite often ( Read more... )