Recently updated blogs

We had a nice afternoon of rum exploration in Alameda a couple weeks ago at Forbidden Island, an event produced by the Rum Curious Club and sponsored by Flor de Caña rum. I’d attended a couple previous Rum Curious events locally that had different formats, but this one seems to be the right scope. This Happy Hour event had free registration and was held in the afternoon on Forbidden Island’s …

I’m thankful to the thousands of readers of this blog. Well, not the few submit troll comments from multiple pseudonymous handles, but the 99.9% who don’t. I’m thankful that they’ve stayed here even when events (as they do more and more often) send me into a spiral of doomscrolling and just subsisting hour-to-hour—when I’m left literally without words for weeks. I’m thankful for Thanksgiving itself. As I often try to …

This Thanksgiving, reflections on America, from the Global South. American Embassy Kyiv. Image credit paparazzza via Shutterstock © 2023. Like many other people in the Global South, I put my hope in ordinary Americans. Unlike us, Americans have more power and say in almost everything. Any of our countries can suffer under sanctions imposed by the US, or be invaded and occupied for decades with no recourse or justice. Any …

In my recent Boost Your Django DX update, I added a new chapter on debuggers. Here’s an extra technique I didn’t finish in time for the update, but I will include it in the next one. Django templates can be hard to debug, especially to figure out which variables are available after several levels of {% extends %} or {% include %} tags. The template engine doesn’t provide a built-in …

I continue to check my little dashboard of San Francisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether going into a cafe for professionally-made coffee is worth the risk or will be an embarrassing thing to explain to the medical professionals treating my long-COVID-induced heart condition[s]. This morning, my dashboard is b0rked. Good news: The California Department of Public Health has a new dashboard for COVID-in-wastewater data. Bad news: the …

Happy Thanksgiving! We are capping our epic Woks of Life Friendsgiving spread with their phenomenal Honey Glazed Cantonese Turkey which takes the classic flavors of Cantonese roast duck and applies it to turkey! A day before roasting, you marinate the turkey in a complex blend of bean and hoisin sauces, garlic, shallots, ginger, Shaoxing wine, and five-spice powder, letting the flavors meld overnight in the refrigerator. Roasting begins with the …

I recently took Dr. Sophie’s Pharos Course Critical Thinking Approaches for Genealogy. One of the things that she encouraged us to do is identify our biases, so we can find ways to address those and minimize the impact on our research. That led me to thinking about the cultural biases I may have as a Dutch researcher. I grew up with the idea that the Netherlands is a tolerant country. …

The first profession I remember I wanted to pursue as a kid was that of what I called an inventor. Building new and useful things for others seemed like fun. I was eagerly spending my time searching for expendable things within our household and recombining them to look like new machines and invented a purpose for them. Then, I learned about space travel. I don’t remember what age I was …

The Suffolk coastal town of Lowestoft has the distinction of being the most easterly settlement in the British Isles, and thus the first place in the UK to see the sunrise. Nearby Ness Point is the actual most easterly point in Britain, and there is a marker here, overlooking the shoreline, which celebrates this unique fact. Once famed for its fishing industry, Lowestoft still boasts a thriving fish market, which …

[We are proud to introduce our newest associate, late of Texas and now a confirmed Golden Stater. Don't let her self-effacing first paragraph mislead you—Winona is not only a brilliant young engineer, but she has a talent for prose, as you will soon see…] by Winona Menezes Several weeks ago, I was plucked from obscurity … Continue reading [November 28, 1969] Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s The Sirens of Titan → The …

Family photo My mother loved Thanksgiving. She died in February, at the ripe old age of 99, so this will be my first holiday without her for as long as I can remember. The ones in recent years weren’t elaborate. My uncles and stepfather had died and eventually my mother had to move to a care home. Although my siblings and I did our best to make it a special …

The Mad Hatter Looks FamiliarIt's not graffiti when there is an associated booklet. An intriguing first walk with the Worcester Ramblers takes me on an Urban plod around Droitwich. Net curtains twitching as a Goretex clad posse went through estates, with only one stop to report an abandoned mattress.7 works of art by would be Banksies, with everyone too polite to mention the added Johnson on the final mural. Droitwich …

On this week’s show we also touched on questions about diversification as a younger investor, a pep talk for younger generations, financial planning with Chat GPT and paying down your mortgage vs. investing in fixed income. Further Reading: Why I’m Selling Some Bitcoin The post Is It Too Late to Buy Bitcoin? appeared first on A Wealth of Common Sense. ...

I think Thanksgiving is mostly about belonging.I was raised in a culture other than that of either of my parents or my nationality: what they call a Third Culture Kid. With that sort of profile, belonging is hard to come by. As a child, I sounded British but wasn’t; I didn’t get the overt cultural references and didn’t share the unspoken common understandings that mark someone out as being from …

The first time I heard Andy Paley’s name was when my New York friends Richard and Lisa Robinson gave me a copy of the first album by a group called the Sidewinders in 1972. It had been produced by their friend — soon to be mine, too — Lenny Kaye. It was on RCA, where Richard had taken a job as an A&R man. “Listen to the song called ‘Rendezvous’,” …