Tag Archives: Tech

I have to admit to being a bit of a weather nerd. Florida, of course, has very active weather—especially in the Summer—so some of my obsession is self preservation but I also follow the weather where family members reside and … Continue reading →

If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you know that I’ve always been conflicted about ad blockers. On the one hand, I recognize that content providers have to make money some how and that the only reasonably way in … Continue reading →

For reasons having to do with adverse serendipity, I’ve never been able to achieve one of my long held employment goals: remote work. For one reason or another, I’ve always ended up working for control freaks who just knew that … Continue reading →

Michał Poczwardowski has a nice post on Goodhart’s Law. The law is usually expressed as “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” That may seem a little abstract but its application is familiar to … Continue reading →

Someone reposted Trey Harris’ famous story about the 500 mile email. The TL;DR is that Harris, working as a university system administrator, received a call from the Statistics Department claiming that they couldn’t send an email further than about 500 … Continue reading →

I was going to make the fact that Microsoft 365 and other Microsoft tools are down into a Red Meat Friday post with a title that included the word “schadenfreude” but my better nature prevailed and I forebore. Today, though, … Continue reading →

Addy Osmani has been working at Google for about 14 years. During that time, he’s learned a few—basically non-technical—lessons about life as a software engineer. His post, 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google, lists some of the things he … Continue reading →

I wrote what was supposed to be today’s post last night but in the light of day I decided I didn’t like it and had to start over. Fortunately, I found this set of slides on Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft … Continue reading →