I missed the notification, but yesterday marked 10 years since I registered an account with WordPress.com. This came just two days after I crossed the five-year employment mark with Automattic, WordPress.com’s parent company. It’s all a bit surreal. At this point, I’ve been writing code for a living for more time than I’ve done anything else.

Some choice quotes from the article: “Americans eat 35 pounds of cheese per year on average” “The cheese glut is so massive (1.3 billion pounds in cold storage as of May 31) that on two separate occasions, in August and October of last year, the federal government announced it would bail out dairy farmers by purchasing $20 million worth of surplus for distribution to food pantries.” “With an entire ounce in the shell, the Quesalupa has about five times the cheese load of a basic Crunchy Taco.

As a child, I read most of Tom Clancy’s novels, including Red Storm Rising. Even though it’s been twenty years since I read the book, a phrase from the opening paragraph has stayed with me: singsong Azerbaijani accent. I don’t know what it is about the phrase that made it so inescapable, but whenever I think about it, I have flashbacks to my childhood and the hours I spent devouring Mr.

Thanks to The West Wing, and subsequently the Oxford English Dictionary, thing can now also mean “a genuine or established phenomenon or practice.” “Thing” now has a new definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, thanks to “The West Wing” from Quartz

Survived my wisdomteeth extraction 🎉

Without the -O flag, curl normally outputs what it retrieves, even when a binary file is requested. I’ve “rendered” binary files this way more times than I can remember, making the 7.55.0 release quite welcome. One of the least favorite habits of curl during all these years, I’ve been told, is when users forget to instruct the command line tool where to store the downloaded file and as a direct consequence, curl instead sends a lot of binary “gunk” to the terminal.

When Verizon asks me, yet again, to switch to their new “unlimited” plan, my response is “Nope!” With the new Verizon Plan Unlimited, you get a 10 GB allowance of high-speed 4G LTE data for Mobile Hotspot each billing cycle. Once you’ve used the 10 GB of 4G LTE data, your Mobile Hotspot data speed will be reduced to 3G speeds for the rest of the billing cycle. Data will continue to be unlimited while your Mobile Hotspot is reduced to 3G speeds.

People are nothing if not creative at making money. “I Dialed a Wrong Number and Stumbled Into International Phone Fraud”

A fascinating read about data leaks and what the NSA is working on to crack modern encryption: From The Intercept: “NYU Accidentally Exposed Military Code-breaking Computer Project to Entire Internet”

From The Boston Globe, how we got Kellyanne Conway: “George Conway is the man at the center of everything”