KFCblog - December 2021

Life

Thanksgiving has passed; we're now officially flying into the Christmas/Holiday season. In case you missed it, on Black Friday I published my annual Mostly Techie Holiday Gift Guide. Thanksgiving was calm (no travel this year) but we are all getting ready to head to New York for Christmas. Chicago is already cold (20's F at night), but the cold doesn't start bothering me until February.

Sports World

The Braves won their first World Series since 1995, beating the Houston Astros 4 games to 2. I think 17 people in Atlanta noticed. College Football is entering conference champion week. Everyone looks beatable except for the #1 Georgia Dawgs. Coach-less Notre Dame might even get in the playoff. In college basketball, Duke is back at #1 (which I mention, not to bring joy to my sister and brother-in-law (alums), but to annoy @Tom and @KMac).

Hello, World!

After a virtual-only 2020, the first week after Thanksgiving brought us AWS re:Invent 2021 in Las Vegas (where I am right now). New AWS CEO Adam Selipsky had big shoes to fill keynoting the big conference that Andy Jassy always rocked. I think he showed well but I was a bit disappointed about the lack of any "Wow, I want to go play with that!" type announcements.

Caught My Eye

We know data security and data privacy is hard, even at big, tech-skilled companies like Amazon. This expose from Wired is a bit over-critical, IMHO, but gives you a view of a) how hard it is and b) how practices that were acceptable 5, or certainly 10 years ago seem crazy now.

You know Netflix, but you may not have heard of Open Connect. Open Connect is Netflix's proprietary, private Content Delivery Network that it uses to provide consistent, high quality streaming service to it's millions of customers around the world.

Here's a great table of ongoing learning opportunities for developers and computer scientists.

I put $100 into the pot of Constitution DAO in its failed attempt to try to buy a copy of the US Constitution. Cool idea. I spent 5 minutes trying to get my Ether back, but the gas fees exceeded my investment.

If you were a kid in the 1980s in the NY Metro area, you probably experienced Action Park, a famously dangerous water park in northern New Jersey. If you have HBO Max, watch the documentary Class Action Park. Here's the trailer on YouTube.

If you're an avid digital photographer and a user of Adobe Lightroom, you must check out The Best Free Adobe Lightroom Presets.

Have you ever played pickleball? Here's the origin story. TL;DR - bored kids, clever dad.

This Person Does Not Exist. These amazingly realistic photos are all generated by a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network).

Is the blockchain coming to video games? Blockchain Gaming Revolution

A nice, fun list of wisdom. My favorite one was about taking out the trash.

I read a lot of comic books as a kid (but not as many as my brother). Douglas Wolk read every Marvel comic book ever - since 1961 - 27,000 issues. That means he even read all 4 issues of Night Nurse.

If you're bored, go play with the double-pendulum simulation for a few minutes.

Do you have a family member who is particularly inept with modern technology and therefore can't communicate well with you? Get him or her a Yayagram.

We know photos can be photoshopped and videos can be Deep Faked. Can we believe what we see? The Content Authenticity Initiative hopes we can.

Siddhesh writes a blog post discussing a number of items of culture shock he noticed after coming to graduate school in the US after growing up in India.

How about this combination? Kat Norton talks about Microsoft Excel on TikTok and makes 6 figures per day!

I Bought This: I had some old-fashioned timers on my outdoor Christmas lights and needed to modernize.

Closing Quote

"Be present in all things and thankful for all." - Maya Angelou