Larry Osterman

There's nothing that feels quite like sending an email to a couple of VP's asking them for help with a technical problem, only to have to send them a second email saying essentially "never mind"...

Sigh.

If it was on lake Bellevue it was probably the Crab Pot.

I owned that one for years... Even though it had nothing to do with anything I wrote (Ungermann Bass XNS transport offloaded to a coprocessor which sometimes became unresponsive).

And I believe there are still people who curse me because of it.

Oh, I thought that was me 😊. Heaven knows I broke enough stuff in your design when I reimplemented it (for example the aforementioned race condition was only exposed because I misread your spec and set a timer to too short an interval).

The Ancillary Function Driver?

And of course, both bowser.sys and afd.sys were named by our mutual boss.

Umm. You didn't spend a day wandering through various offices trying to find a particular WFW machine which refused to relinquish the master browser role courtesy of a race condition in the WFW browser implementation.

I wonder who that might have been...

That was written before I was tasked with writing the MS-BRWS protocol spec. Mostly because I was one of the only people who remembered the details of how it worked.

That was 6 weeks of my life spent staring at code I wrote 15 years earlier.

I wonder how that happens, I've been doing rust for a couple of years almost exclusively and no crabs :(.

I cleared off two shelves in my office. Still have a pile of electronics to go through, but I have two mostly empty shelves.

Somewhat proud of myself for getting rid of a bunch of junk.

My new office overlooks a driveway and parking lot. And my chair backs into a concrete column.

And I have almost no coworkers in the room I'm assigned to, except for one.

I'm jealous.

Maybe? I usually think of legalese as the Latin phrases and unfamiliar terms which show up in documents.

But to me, a better example is the terms of service on any web site - about every 6 months or so there's a panic over the ToS on a web site because the ToS are lawspeak for "a web site".

For years, I have have said that legal documents are written in a Domain Specific Language which vaguely resembles English, however it should never, ever be confused with the language we call "English".

Similar to how COBOL is a DSL which also resembles English.

It's only in the past three weeks or so that memory has become somewhat reliable (I spent a month trying tasks that required reliable memory subsystems).

It's somewhat terrifying how fast this space moves.

It's even faster than the browser wars of the 1990s.

What she said. Omg such yelling and swearing.

"So, did you actually do the thing I asked you to do?"

"You're absolutely right, I totally ignored you. But in my defense there was an ambiguous instruction, so I didn't have to listen to you"

Asshole.

Maybe the best cirque show we've seen in years. We're going back in two weeks.

Yup. post-polio == long polio. Though I personally think "syndrome" fits better (at a minimum, it sounds more "medical" :)).

My mother's entire life was shaped by her childhood polio infection. She had a relatively mild case, but she dealt with post-polio syndrome related issues throughout her adult life.

<Searches for the Damn You Ned Pyle gif>...

I am so not looking forward to that.

At least our buildings will be spared the parking nightmares until next month.

So happy we don't have to deal with that michegas till the ides of march.

VS Studio Github Copilot and Github Copilot CLI, both with Claude Opus 4.6.

SideQuested by K B Spangler | Brick and Mortar Books The course of true love never did run straight…For fans of The Owl House and Critical Role comes the first volume in the lighthearted and epic adventure SideQuested!Magic makes the world go round, but...

Ooh, found it at my favorite local bookstore: @brick-mortar.bsky.social : www.brickandmortarbooks.com/item/pTAB62u...

But now we have the actual documents, which is nice.

And she's going to legally change her name next month courtesy of the "SAVE" act.

And I shudder to think of what other people (mostly women) without the kind of resources we've been blessed to have would go through.

It helps that COVID forced a bunch of places to enable online ordering of forms. She started this process when RealId was becoming a thing (which required a birth certificate and marriage license, both of which she didn't physically have).

We ended up just getting passport cards, which was easier.

Valorie spent *months* trying to come up with ours.

It was a nightmare because originally, the town we were married in didn't have its marriage license forms digitized so she would have had to appear in person to get a copy of the license.

Fortunately, that changed during COVID but still...

Ditto. Utterly disrespectful comment and I don't need to ever hear from them again.

Yummy!

And I'm almost certain they have routine drills where they turn off stuff (networks, servers, etc) to make sure stuff fails over properly.

My sister tells stories of when such a drill went horribly wrong for her old company a decade or so ago and she had very senior govt officials calling her.

Pro tip: If you have a large monorepo in GitHub and are ever thinking of having copilot open 200+ minor formatting issues assigned to copilot, so that copilot agent creates 200+ PRs and then telling local copilot to automate approve/merge of those 200+ PRs, maybe just... don't.

I have to say I'm not upset that my jury duty got cancelled today.

I really wasn't looking to being in downtown Seattle on Wednesday (although I'd likely be in a courtroom during most of the chaos).