I enjoyed watching Westerns. It included a temporal duality: a time long ago (the 19th century Western US) and a recent time ago (the 50s and 60s when these movies were made). So much has changed since both thens, but the absolute distance in years isn’t great: a film made in the 1940s from almost equidistant from me in 2025 as it was to its original time period of the 1870s. Stuff changes.
An experience very early in my career taught me a very valuable lesson about software development.
This was in the mid-aughts (2005 maybe?) and the existing reporting was using Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus 1-2-3. So it needed to go. We had to decide if we should build a totally new analytics suite or utilize the one we already had.
We were funded, but picking a technology path was more complicated than it sounds. This project was for our Canadian offices, and there was more than a little resistance to simply taking what we had and using it. The initial US implementation hadn’t gone well, so the reputation of the system I supported wasn’t great.
I needed to have a simple webserver for my home network and was not interested in trying to setup Apache. (I’ve done it before, not keen to do it again.) It’s helpful to have read-only access to files that I want to view, not necessarily need to copy wherever I’m working.
I was looking for any easy alternatives to apache and google suggested a python module that I could run easily enough from the command line:
I repurposed an old laptop that was sitting around and have become delighted with the results. It was a cheap number from 2020 that never ran Windows very well.
My biggest disappointment when starting out was that I couldn’t get FreeBSD to run a USB stick. Even though it’s been 20+ years since I’ve used it regularly it’s still my favorite flavor of Unix. Maybe I’ll install it if I ever get an extra computer. (Like bicycles, the solution is always n+1.)
taps microphone
Is this thing on?
After a very extended break (10+ years?), I’m going to try blogging again.
Things I will probably write about:
I reserve the right to write about anything else I want.
Things I will probably not write about: