Vivi doesn't really know what's going on. Sure, her vocabulary is ridiculous. It's just that a 2-year-old brain can only grasp so much. We take advantage of this by making it her birthday, any day we feel like it. What could go wrong?

Vivi never could figure out how to blow out candles. We tried and tried to show her. Then, like everything toddlers do, she just seemed like she knew how to do it all along.

More amazing, Vivi can sing the Happy Birthday song by herself. Super Cute!!
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I push my computers. Hard.

By crushing the disk drives with large compilation jobs, I rarely get even 3 years out of a spinning hard disk or laptop. With a PC, the hardware is modular and super easy to replace. With Apple, not so much. Sketchy Apple hardware design is the reason ifixit exists.

I can engineer the cooling of my PC's to handle the loads. With Apple, you get what you get. As a company, Apple never really "got" developers. So even if Apple built their hardware to handle heavy usage, you can't service and replace parts yourself. iMac's just can't handle huge software work.

For example, my latest software project builds saturate all CPU cores at 100%, while compiling over 1 MILLION source files. This takes 3 hours.

Here I show that, for most of the 3 hours, iMac cooling systems are overwhelmed. The 4GHz base clock rate of an Intel CPU is supposed to be the absolute minimum. Well, here we see that Apple lies, in this case. This was my life for a year, using my iMac as a VM server, using VMware Fusion. BTW VMware Fusion + OS X + iMac 5k  is a great combination!! I'd rather have that software stack on less-than-reliable hardware than a perfectly reliable Windows 10 box.

After a year of intermittent abuse, I came home to a dead iMac. *sigh*

I tried everything. Not a peep or beep. D-E-D DEAD. After a trip to a Mac repair store, and about $1,000, it turns out the entire motherboard was completely fried.

Since Apple hardware is weak (especially cooling) but their software is strong, I'll also put in an order for an iMac Pro. Then we'll see if that lies and dies too... 

Worst case, I'll have to go back to the dev stack we used in my previous company. Apple iMac's a displays/terminals, VMware ESXi servers, dedicated iSCSI servers for the ESXi, remote monitoring and reboot and VPN's for all the things. It's gross, I know. But we have ESXi servers which have survived almost a decade.

Here's hoping I won't have to do that just yet... Fingers Crossed!!

​:)

My parents have lived in the deep woods of central Pennsylvania for decades. It is gorgeous, but very remote. There have only been really two tenuous links to civilization, one wire brings power, and another wire brings a phone landline. For many decades, and for my entire childhood there, that was it. No cable TV. No Internet. Nada.

For example, the house is located off a dirt lane off a highway. There are 3 neighbors and you can't even see them. It's out there!

Slowly, and with great effort, my brother and I have upgraded the house over the years. They now have Satellite TV, Mobile Internet, Mesh WiFi, routers, firewalls, iPads, mobile phones, caller ID on their TV, a huge backup generator (for when a tree knocks their power out for weeks), LED lighting everywhere, etc...

Here is a little welcome lighting for when my brother and his family visit later in the week.
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Then, as if by Christmas miracle, we got a perfect dusting of white snow on Christmas eve.

(In the background is my ridiculous and fun rental car, a 400HP, flame-orange, Dodge Challenger. Highly recommended!!)

Ho Ho Ho! 

Merry Christmas from the Brennan family!

The audio is a little quiet, but priceless...
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Nothing like fresh WA farmer's market veggies, and New Seasons fresh pasta, with some fresh basil from our plant!

​Wash it down with Steven Smith Teamaker home-made Exceptional Iced Tea (and organic turbinado sugar). YUM!
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Mark has always made pizzas from scratch, even when I knew him as an undergraduate student in Wisconsin. Lovely Kristin is a gourmet pizza chef as well. We are celebrating, so we finished with Sheridan's Frozen Custard, Danish Almond Kringle, and Veuve Clicquot champagne.

The pizza and salad were the stars of the show, with bouncy Maryn presiding!
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The climate in Boston is evil to wood. Torrential rains, frigid cold, snow drifts which bury cars, weeks of humid 100-degree days, damp mildew, etc...

We decided to create an oiled-wood fence, just to see if it could survive. With the miracle of Penofin, wood can survive. With care, the wood will develop a pretty patina over time.

After 3 years, our fence was mildewed and tired. I powerwashed the wood, let it dry out, got skunked by fall rain, let it dry out again, then a group of friends joined me and we refinished the wood.

Much better!

The powerwasher shredded some wood, and the mildew got into the oil, so we did some light sanding. Before and after sanding:
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I have the best friends!!
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It turned out great!
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Uncured organic hot dogs, ketchup, Sriracha, with a home-made Taiwanese milk tea.
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So fun!