CRS

We have a tradition of going on a special trip over Martin Luther King day weekend.We also have a tradition of going on a special trip in mid-August for our anniversary.

But I find that I forget things so fast, and I can't remember where we went when.

And of course everything was a blur during COVID.

• January, 2020: we were in Tucson, AZ. We're pretty sure Donna had COVID on that trip
• January, 2021: we stayed home; COVID was too scary then
• January, 2022: we were in Mendocino, CA. I got COVID on that trip
• January, 2023: we were in Paso Robles, CA
• January, 2024: we were in Petaluma, CA
• January, 2025: we went back to Mendocino, CA. I did not get COVID on that trip

• August, 2020: we went to Half Moon Bay. There were terrible fires in the Santa Cruz mountains.
• August, 2021: we went to Sonoma and stayed at the Sonoma Mission Inn. It was a beautiful trip
• August, 2022: we went to Timber Cove CA. Quiet and peaceful
• August, 2023: we went to Occidental, CA. The redwood grove outside Occidental is glorious
• August, 2024: we stayed home. Recovering from knee surgery
• August, 2025: will be our 40th anniversary!

Sigh, AI

At some point, Google turned their powerful AI systems loose on news.google.com, presumably hoping to improve its results.

Hmm, well.

One of those articles has something to do with Physics.

I guess Google thinks that 1 outta 3 ain't bad.

My relationship with my "office"

It's now been exactly five years since I came home on a Wednesday, and told my wife: "I don't think I'm going back in to my office for a while". The following Tuesday, the company notified me (and everyone else) of the truth of that statement.

I had spent the first 40 years of my professional career, through nine different jobs across three states and both coasts (three coasts if you count Lake Michigan), always in a "white collar" job where I had an assigned desk, with space to set up my computer and other equipment, hang my coat, put up a picture of my wife, have a desk drawer where I could store various necessities.

If anyone needed to find me, I had a phone and I was at my desk, unless I was away at a meeting. And if I needed to find anyone else to discuss things, I knew how to do that, too.

I was totally unprepared for any other way of doing software engineering.

I'd had about 10 years or so of Open Source activities, so I wasn't completely unaware that there were other ways to collaborate on large software projects, but I had no idea how completely unprepared I really was.

I rarely used social media chat programs for informal conversations with co-workers who were 5 feet away.

When I wanted to brainstorm ideas and describe large unfamiliar concepts, I was great at a whiteboard, but horrible at getting my thoughts across in a phone call.

And what was this video conference stuff? How did it work? What was all this unfamiliar software? Skype? Zoom? Google Meet? I knew the names of this stuff, but couldn't find the buttons to click. None of my computers had webcams.

Oh my how much I've learned in five years. Perhaps old dogs can indeed slowly learn some new tricks.

I still struggle mightily to organize and conduct a 25-person technical design review effectively. When I can't "read the room", it's hard for me to tell when I'm moving too slow, or moving too fast, and losing my audience either way. I often spend too much time on small talk when I should move on to the meat of the matter, or jump right into a challenging conversation with someone I've barely met before I've even gotten to know them.

And it's so, so, so hard for me to meet people online. I have colleagues with whom I've collaborated extensively, over hundreds of hours, but whom I've barely met face to face. I couldn't tell you how tall they are, whether they are left- or right-handed, or if they prefer slacks and a dress shirt or blue jeans and a hoodie.

The next generation will grow up completely comfortable with these topics that I only came to late, near the end of my career, and undoubtedly these sorts of things will fade away into the mists of time.

But my goodness what a difference five years has made in my life.

California Wolf Project releases their 2024 report

The California Wolf Project is a relatively new effort operated by the University of California's Berkeley and Davis campuses to do serious study of the state of affairs when it comes to wolves in California.

What?!?? you may say, are there actually wolves in California?

Yes, actually, there are (although I've certainly never seen any). Wolves re-entered California more than a decade ago, after nearly a century of absence from the state, as part of the splintering of a wolf pack that roamed the high desert of Oregon. The wolves in California occupy the parts of the state that are both:

• extremely rural and sparsely populated
• supportive of an ecosystem in which wolves can find both reliable sources of food and minimal human contact.

For now, as illustrated on the project's 2024 annual report, this means mostly the high plateaus of far north-eastern California.

I've followed the recovery of wolf populations in the high country of the far west for most of my lifetime; the California Wolf Project seems like they will be an excellent contributor to our knowledge of how we are co-habiting with these fascinating animals.

The Duolingo employee handbook is surprisingly good

Have you read the Duolingo employee handbook?

It's really remarkably good, and it's also not dry. I think that second point is really important: over my career, I've participated in at least a dozen of these attempts to write down engineering culture in a way that explains what is good and what is toxic. It's really hard to do this without being bland and dull. Bland and dull means "unread", and so I think the first goal of any employee handbook has to be: get the employees to read this thing! The Duolingo Handbook accomplishes that.

I really liked the little interlude about the Super Bowl advertisement.

When debates broke out over the “right amount of butt” to show, we knew we had a winning idea.

On a more serious note, here's a section that I strongly agree with. My current company spends a lot of time trying to reinforce this same idea, and I know how hard it can be to do this properly. Engineering processes typically involve a lot of review, which means a lot of feedback, which means you need to be thinking about this:

The standard here is “hard on the work, easy on the people.” That means giving constructive, clear feedback that sharpens ideas without undermining relationships. (We stick to the “what,” not the “who.”) It also means being open to receiving feedback and not taking it personally. This candid, constructive approach allows us to hold each other to high standards while fostering trust and collaboration.

If you're involved with engineering culture at your company, you would find it time well spent to read the Duolingo handbook.

WikiTok is clever!

https://wikitok.vercel.app/ is extremely simple, but also surprisingly clever and addictive.

All it does (I think) is:

• Call Wikipedia's "special:random" tool to find a random Wikipedia page.
• Fetch that page and summarize it with an image and a short textual summary
• Display that on your screen.
• Wait for you to scroll down and do it again.

Poof! Endless scrolling of random Wikipedia articles.

Olive the Labrador is 8 weeks old ...

... it's been eighteen years since we had a puppy; I've forgotten everything I thought I once knew.

Time to start learning again!

OUSD lead levels status

I was not paying attention, and did not understand the severity of the problems with lead levels in drinking water in the Oakland Unified School District schools.

OUSD maintain some information on their web site here.

Reading through the site, it's clear that this has been a long, slow effort:

• August 2017: OUSD inquired about district-wide water quality testing through a state-funded program administered by East Bay MUD (EBMUD).
• On Feb 28, 2018 the Board of Education adopted Board Policy 3511.3 Clean Drinking Water. This policy requires the district to replace or remediate sources of consumable water that contain lead levels higher than 5 ppb. Previously, the district had been adhering to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended action level of 15 ppb.
• March, 2022: Work order for repair and retesting (these fixtures were taken out of service and are awaiting repair).

So after five years (three of those years covered the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, when surely progress was slow, work was still required to repaire and retest water fixtures known to be delivering dangerously high levels of lead.

Several more years passed until last summer the city revealed that there were still massive breakdowns in the project.

• The protocols previously established were not followed as there were gaps in communication, workflow, and the ability to conduct testing and communicate properly with more sites being tested in the Spring of 2024.
• An average of 62 days of communication gaps has been identified between the testing date and notification to department and sites of the schedule and status of the quality testing process.
• The realization of this failure occurred August 10, 2024

Six more months have passed, but this week we heard that the district is deploying water filtering systems into a number of schools, funded by some (welcome!) private donations:

Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry and his wife, Ayesha Curry, are helping public schools in Oakland where high levels of lead plague water systems and pose health hazards to students.

The power couple’s nonprofit organization, Eat. Learn. Play., announced on Wednesday that it donated more than half a million dollars to rapidly install water filtration stations across 60 elementary, middle and high schools this school year.

Elevated lead levels were found in nearly 200 fountains and faucets at Oakland Unified School District buildings during testing last spring and summer.

It's truly sad and tragic that this problem is moving so slowly but I'm glad to see any little bit of progress being made.