The Great Canada Snowboarding Adventure
The pandemic came in 2020 and ground all traveling to a halt. I had bought both IKON and EPIC passes that season, but by the beginning of March things started looking iffy. By mid-March the resorts all closed and travel, especially the international kind, had stopped. And for three years, all attempts at getting a trip together failed among successive waves of COVID-19. Then, at the end of 2022, it looked good. Continue readingHow I Became the World's Best Wordle Player
Wordle 233 1/6 đźź©đźź©đźź©đźź©đźź© The world is gripped by a new game: Wordle, which is an odd and addictive combination of a word guessing game with MasterMind, a game involving color created in 1970. You have six tries to guess a five letter word, and for each guess you get in reply which letters of your word are correct, which ones would be correct in a different location, and which ones are plain wrong. Continue readingThreshold Chunking
The Problem How do you distribute a file in pieces such that you need exactly a given number of the pieces to rebuild the entire file? This article was inspired by the Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS), a cryptographic scheme (process) by which a secret key is shared between $n$ fragments, any $m$ of which can be used to recreate the entire key (n and $m$ being determined at the beginning of the process). Continue reading
Steamboat During the Bomb Cyclone
It was (and still is) an amazing snow season, one of those you can tell tall stories about to your grandkids surrounding the fireplace. But the crown of the worst storm of the many definitely goes to the one that dropped a blanket of white from Aspen to Chicago. It marked the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in Colorado, with some of the worst winter winds recorded. What a better day to do a road trip? Continue reading
I Can Tell-u-ride!
Yes! We finally had the most fantabulous snow season of the (this) century! 2018-2019 will forever go into snowboarding history as Colorado’s most fun, especially with the future being warmer and the snow trending towards occasional more than regular. In fact, I haven’t been updating this blog for a long while because I was having way too much fun on the slopes. Now the season is winding down and it’s time to recap almost six months of awesomeness! Continue reading
English-based Creoles, Esperanto, and the Quest for the “Perfect” Bridge Language
Meet Mom and Dad See the man at the bottom with the jet-black hair? The lady in the chair to his right? The bundle of joy in her arm? Those are respectively my father, my mother, and myself. Both my parents sadly passed, but their story is remarkable. He was Italian, she was German. The official story is that they met on the freeway, passing each other repeatedly over hundred miles. Continue readingCyberSecurity Done Right
I received an email. It came from TaskRabbit, a company about whom I don’t know much. I used them to get moving help when my containers were delivered and had a really strongly positive impression. Also, they had some heavy-handed product placement in Unbreakable – Kimmy Schmidt, which still was endearing. While I know little about the company, I know something about their handling of a cybersecurity incident. Here is what they had to say: Continue readingFAQ: Did Jesus Really Save a Gay Couple?
What’s this thing with Jesus saving a gay couple? Explain it like I am in a hurry. Continue reading