I recently participated in a workplace hackathon.

Here are some reflections on the experience:

• It’s hard to completely step away from day-to-day work for 2 days. Release schedules set long ago don’t change, we choose to keep customer facing meetings, incidents still need to get addressed
• Conversely, much can be deferred (many emails can wait!), and a lot can still be accomplished in two part days
• Two days of development and a 7 minute presentation are great constraints which force many decisions

It’s amazing how much you can get done when:

I’m on a roll this week - a record number of posts (3 in 7 days…).

The bar code on my library card has been worn out for a while.  My last few trips, its probably taken about a minute for me to play around with the positioning of the card on the library’s scanner to get it to read correctly.

Years ago, I’d read how my friend Chris created a custom library card with all of his family’s card numbers on it.  Although I’m sure the instructions he provided would work (I suspect the library’s barcode readers handle many formats), the bar codes his method created didn’t match the one on the card.

The Hispanic Fiesta Latin-American festival descends on Mel Lastman square in North York every labour day weekend.  The festival has lots of live music, a beer tent, and food vendors.  And every year, I buy a coconut ice pops (“Paletas”/popsicles) from Polar Real Tropical Fruit.  They’re awesome, and I never see them sold anywhere else.  Perhaps its the ambience of the festival, but I prefer them to other coconut ice pops I’ve tried.

Our 2018 balcony crop is in.

We didn’t grow corn this year.  This year, we bought our tomatoes and red peppers from Emma Biggs, co-author of Grow Gardeners. These tomatoes were the best we’ve grown so far on our balcony.

“I was in Boston recently and visited Old Ironsides at its berth, coincidentally at a time when the ship was being painted. I chatted with one of the supervisors and asked him about the length of the government specifications for this particular job. He said it numbered two hundred pages and laughed in embarrassment when I told him to take a look at the glass display case showing the original specification to build the ship in 1776, which was all of three pages.” - Ben Rich, from Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

“The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.”
- Wikipedia

I’d heard this neat story recently, on the More or Less Human episode of Radiolab, on how it has become easier to write a chatbot that passes to Turing test, because how we communicate has changed.

Over the last 5-10 years, most of our chat clients (eg: Messages, WhatsApp, Android Messages) have auto-complete, canned responses. Often, when you try to type something unique, the chat client suggests something else.