I don’t care much for new year “resolutions” and other such contraptions, but seeing how my last post here was from January last year, while the Drafts folder is getting thicker and thicker, I decided to give it another try. As they say, “perfect is the enemy of good” so I’ll try to focus more on the content and less on tweaking every little comma this time. Here’s to an amazing New Year for everyone...
A little while ago I was writing about configuring SSL/HTTPS to secure my own website. In the meantime, I read about some “interesting” experiments the Chinese government seems to be running with Github, which reminded me of the equally nasty shenanigans employed by otherwise respectable ISPs (40% government owned by the way) in Romania a couple of years ago. I therefore realised there was still some work to do to configure things...
A Dutch historian called Johan Huizinga wrote about the “Playing Human” (Homo Ludens) in a 1931 book, among the first to discuss the important part games have played in shaping our culture and civilisation. He even goes as far as to say that playing is a necessary condition for culture to develop. In my case, I’ve been fascinated by games of all shapes and sizes since I was a child. While running around in the sun or sitting...
There are few TV shows that really capture my interest, but the ones that do tend to combine intriguing ideas, unusual characters and decent amounts of fun in an unforgettable blend. One of the series that achieved this masterfully was Fringe, a little show I discovered a few years ago while spending the night in a Parisian Hotel. What attracted me to this show was less the main premise — in the beginning a simple procedural drama with...
As I got out of the house yesterday, I was greeted with the first surprise of the new year — the white blanket covering everything, a première this winter (we had a sort-of-blizzard in December, but that doesn’t count as it only lasted half a day or so). I’ve always enjoyed the child-like state almost all adults get into when there’s snow around, as well as the calm, serene atmosphere that descends upon a city when the...
Sometime one of these days, I will become 1,000,000,000 (one billion) seconds old. Of course, being born tends to be a messy affair, it’s not an exact science, and then there’s all those pesky leap seconds to contend with — so the exact moment will just come… and go… in a heartbeat; I won’t even notice. I remember being a bit apprehensive about the change of “prefix” when I turned 30 years old,...
Note This was initially written for our internal company magazine Offline where it was published in the December 2012 issue. I added it here for your reading pleasure… Enjoy! I was fascinated with magnets from the earliest age, amazed by the magical force that was keeping all those pieces of plastic fruit attached to the outside of the fridge. A little later I discovered that seemingly mundane objects like door latches contained these...
