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Alexandr Hrustevich Vilnius 2013 A.Vivaldi-P.Fenyuk. The four seasons "Summer"

I will never be as good at anything as he is at playing that instrument. Amazing.

An excellent answer

Advent of Code - Day 4 complete!

Just wrapped up Day 4 of the AoC event. This one began to stretch my mental muscles more as I figured out what was needed.

I only submitted one wrong answer, and that was due to a quirk of Javascript where I realized it was possibly parsing numbers as strings and thus making faulty comparisons. For the second puzzle, it took me a little bit to figure out what was needed, but my second submission was right the first time.

Today is also the first day I am going to seek out other solutions in Javascript and see if there were more optimized ways of writing the code, not that mine was long, but I feel like it was pretty optimized and am curious where I could do it better.

"Iran suspends morality police. What does it mean?"

Tehran, Iran – The morality police in Iran have been shut down, at least for now, according to the country's prosecutor general. But what does that mean?

Mohammad Jafar Montazeri was quoted as saying by local media on Saturday that the morality police force "has no connection with the judiciary and was shut down by the same place that it had been launched from in the past".

The announcement was made in the third month of protests that erupted after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was arrested by the morality police in Tehran for alleged non-compliance with Iran's dress code.

A look at Seattle Duwamish Indigenous Place Names and Settlements

The graphics aren't large, but it has some very interesting maps showing historic settlement locations of where the various groups of Duwamish people lived.

26. SWAH-tsoo-gweel ('portage'). Duwamish. Around the top margins of Union Bay. Five longhouses were located on the N edge of the bay, which--pre-1916--lay nearly a mile further N. One longhouse was near the present UW steam plant, and one near the former Battelle Institute campus. This was the principal village of an influential group known as hloo-weelh-AHBSH who took their name from the s’hloo-WEELH (literally, "a tiny hole drilled to measure the thickness of a canoe"), the narrow passage through the resource-rich Union Bay marsh. All the people living around Lake Washington were collectively known as hah-choo-AHBSH, that is, people of HAH-choo, meaning 'a large lake' and referring to present-day Lake Washington. (2, 8)

"My secret life as an 11-year-old BBS sysop"

My own interaction with BBS' was limited. Primarily I recall my dad using one that was provided by the local computer part supplier - and the only thing I really recall is that they would (cringingly) include a 'blond joke' on the BBS every day. I don't recall him actually ordering anything or doing anything on there - not to say he didn't, but that he was using it for work and I was simply uninterested in it other than the 'joke' that I could (sometimes) understand.

However, the era of the BBS remains a fascination for me. I found this retelling of someone's experiences running one as a kid very interesting and entertaining, and also I see it as something that could have been me. My usages though really came with the world wide web and the internet. I did a fair bit of usage of MUDs over Telnet.

Online time was precious back then. Since most BBSes only had one phone line, you didn't want to hog the line for too long or the sysop might boot you. And there was extra jeopardy involved. Since we were using our regular house telephone line to connect, the odds that my mom would pick up and try to dial out—thus ruining the transfer process—remained very high. But whatever the risks, the thrill of remote projection by computer sunk into me that day and never left.

So true. The era of when we had to utilize the house phone for online access, whether it be the BBS or the Internet, we lived in fear that someone would pick up the phone and cause a disconnection. I was lucky in that my home had two phone lines, one for calls, and one for business faxes & we put the modem on the fax line to minimize the risk.

Writing this, I realize I can still remember both phone numbers. My main house phone was 407-292-0911, and our fax line ended up being 407-292-0225. Memory is a funny thing, it's been over 20 years since we had that fax line. Though, I suppose, I probably continued to see it on business cards and flyers dad would have laying around the house for years afterwards.

In those days, I used the same password on every BBS I called, including my long-distance friend's BBS. As a result, he and his friends had my login credentials to every BBS, and they began logging into them as me and posting mean public messages under my name, and starting arguments with other people. When I discovered that, I was devastated. I tried to defend myself, but it was impossible. My friend and his buddies played with my name and character as if it were a puppet, making fun of me and humiliating me in front of others.

Around that same time, I had another friend named Radon, who designed my custom BBS menus (the same ones I use, albeit modified, to this day), and he regularly called The Cave and provided updates. Somehow, my long-distance friend and his crew knew about what we were doing. He called in impersonating Radon one night, uploaded an EXE file, and said something like, "Here are the new menus you wanted." I trusted him and ran the file.

It was New Year's Eve 1992, and I sat and watched as a Trojan called "Schizophrenia" wiped my hard drive, destroying everything I had built.

Just brutal. I can easily imagine this and put myself in that position. Again, so much of what was written echoes with me as a kid who came naively into an adult playground and would sometimes be met with cruelty. This is heartbreaking.

Review: Bros (2022)

Katie and I finally sat down to watch Bros, and holy shit is it a good movie. I really enjoyed it.

The Harguesa holocaust or the Isaaq genocide

I just learned about this event from a video on Yes Theory. Horrifying.

The Isaaq genocide or Hargeisa holocaust, was the systematic, state-sponsored genocide of Isaaq civilians between 1987 and 1989 by the Somali Democratic Republic under the dictatorship of Siad Barre during the Somaliland War of Independence. The number of civilian deaths in this massacre is estimated to be between 50,000 and 100,000, according to various sources, whilst local reports estimate the total civilian deaths to be upwards of 200,000 Isaaq civilians. The genocide also included the levelling and complete destruction of the second and third largest cities in the Somali Republic, Hargeisa (which was 90 percent destroyed) and Burao (70 percent destroyed), respectively, and had caused up to 500,000 Somalis (primarily of the Isaaq clan) to flee their land and cross the border to Hartasheikh in Ethiopia as refugees in what was described as "one of the fastest and largest forced movements of people recorded in Africa", which resulted in the creation of the world's largest refugee camp then (1988), with another 400,000 being displaced. The scale of destruction led to Hargeisa being known as the 'Dresden of Africa'. The killings happened during the Somali Civil War and have been referred to as a "forgotten genocide".

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