
Algorithms For The Masses
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The personal website and blog of Julian M Bucknall, in which he discusses algorithms, photography, and anything else that takes his fancy.
Algorithms For The Masses
3w ago
There was I thinking – when I wrote my previous blog post – that I could circumvent the brain rot I was tolerating. Nope.
Voicemail from the beginning of this year:
“Hello. I'm calling you today as a courtesy. Your number was given as a point of contact to reach [some name] Please inform [some name] that they have been named as a person of interest in an important matter that requires their immediate attention. Federal law prohibits me from disclosing any further information. If you know this person, please press 1 now or contact us directly at 833 883 2793. Again, that phone number is 833 88 ..read more
Algorithms For The Masses
2M ago
You may have read a couple of weeks ago that brain rot was named the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024. The definition read as follows: “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”
To me this seemed to hit home, especially given the election palaver over the past few months here in the States. In a way it brought forward my “overconsumption” of the news articles and so on that I was reading up until Election Day. Sure it’s great ..read more
Algorithms For The Masses
3M ago
Yesterday was, shall we say, a really awful day. Our tabby cat, Musaeus, has not been too well over the past couple of months, losing weight like crazy despite being the one cat in our feline assortment who ate the most every dinner time. He’d also gotten into the habit of suddenly awakening at like four in the morning and then miaowing in the bedroom to make sure everyone was awake and could give him some loving. He’d also decided that having a sleep by the laundry basket was the best thing. Yesterday, he was there, miaowing every now and then until I stroked him and got him to purr. The last ..read more
Algorithms For The Masses
5M ago
Earlier this month, I confirmed, by looking it up in an old diary I’d kept, that it had been exactly 45 years since I started my first job as a programmer after university. 10 September 1979, with CAP Group, at their offices in High Holborn, London. Sure, I’d had previous “manual” type jobs (working on a local farm to my parents over the previous summer I was getting £1.20 per hour!), but they were not career-defining ones like that first one. If memory serves, I think I started at £4,200 per year, plus £600 London weighting. We had two weeks of training on some kind of PDP 11, using MicroCobo ..read more
Algorithms For The Masses
6M ago
On Friday, I got a sudden unexpected phone call.
“Hi this is <name> from Colorado Springs Utilities. Are you the owner?”
I immediately thought this was about the replacement sod their contractor had installed on our front lawn a couple of weeks ago, where the other contractors had had to dig up in order to put in the new neighborhood fiber optic cable for faster internet. It had been trashy looking for some four months already, and I was glad to see the new sod being installed.
“Yes”, I said.
“Your payment for your electricity bill is overdue and your electricity will be cut off in ..read more
Algorithms For The Masses
6M ago
A couple of months ago, I decided that we had to do some work on the house, and also to sort out a couple of loans I had. Easiest way would have been an equity loan for sure, but our lender isn’t doing those at the moment. So next easiest was a mortgage refinance, and I took advantage of the opportunity to also reduce our mortgage period. All fine and dandy, it took a little while, sure, but eventually it was all closed and we moved on.
Except…
I started getting these weird letters/postcards:
You have recently closed on this mortgage with [bank name]. We need you to please call us about an im ..read more
Algorithms For The Masses
6M ago
Imagine my surprise when I got this email late last week. It starts off with:
My name is Akash and I'm a recruiter at Axelon Services, our records show that you are a professional with experience in Assembler III. I have an opening for a contract position with one of our clients in Colorado Springs, CO that may be a fit for you.
Wowza! Experience with an assembler? It’s been years since I even wrote any code in assembly language, I’d even say a good couple of decades. In fact it was when everything was being written for 32-bit and I needed to write some Delphi functions in assembly language ..read more
Algorithms For The Masses
7M ago
A quick set of comments for this past week…
As explained a couple of weeks ago, the English Post Office scandal really hit home for me. This week, there was a half-hour documentary on the BBC called Surviving the Post Office in which the actor Will Mellor (who played one of the sub-postmasters in Mr Bates vs the Post Office) went to meet some of the actual sub-postmasters who were affected by the scandal and how they have managed (or not) to recover. Damn, it was heart-wrenching.
Talking of wrenching, a couple of days ago someone discovered that XTwitter had flipped on a switch for everyone th ..read more
Algorithms For The Masses
7M ago
Back in November, my Audi A3 finally gave up the ghost. It wouldn’t start, even though the previous evening it was fine in transporting back some boxes and crates from a charitable event we had been involved in. That morning? Nowt. Had it towed to my usual mechanics to see what the issue was, and they said the engine was getting no compression. They quoted some $5K labor just to take said engine apart to see what the issue might be, and then it’d cost more to fix. Alternative? A refurbished engine for some $9K. At which point I decided to scrap it. It was 14 years old and had suffered already ..read more
Algorithms For The Masses
10M ago
Just for a laugh, over the past week or so, I’ve saved a few sentences from spam emails that I’ve received, some to my work account and some to my personal one. Ready? Here’s the first:
Looks like Developer Express is actively using .Net, Julian.
No shit, Sherlock. Onto the next:
Congrats on your success as CTO, you should write a book!
Been there, done that. You can get Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures from Amazon Kindle, iTunes, or Lulu (as a printed book). Next!
Dear Owner, I just spent some time on your website Boyet.Com (Yes, I do random site analyses for a living)
Sooooo ..read more