philiplu

6 ms·

1.
by philiplu 4mo ago
Thx for linking that. Just … wow
2.
by philiplu 5mo ago
Learning club juggling was fun. That led to partner club juggling as well as flaming clubs. Got a nice video of me juggling flames and overrotating a club so I catch the flaming end. Whoops.
3.
by philiplu 6mo ago
Or Puyallup, WA. Those two are definite shibboleth tests in the PNW.
4.
by philiplu 7mo ago
Sorry, but this 65 yo grey-beard disagrees. A TUI to me, back in the 80s/90s, was something that ran in the terminal and was almost always ncurses-based. This was back when I was still using ADM-3A serial terminals, none of that new-
5.
by philiplu 9mo ago
Huh, my childhood version was almost the standard US one, but the ending was “and Alfred saved the day”, not shown in the article’s diagram. This would have been learned in the Midwest US (St. Louis vicinity), late 1960s.
6.
by philiplu 10mo ago
Not only are they still releasing problems weekly, they have a long backlog of problems waiting for release. I submitted a problem back in April 2024, and it didn't get published until October 2025 (problem 963). There's an exce
7.
by philiplu 11mo ago
Sorry - my 9 year old golden doodle still doesn't get the concept of fetch. He's an expert at keep-away though. Throw the toy or ball, he'll chase it gleefully, then come back to just out of reach, drop the toy, and hover o
8.
by philiplu 1y ago
I’ll have to remember that one
9.
by philiplu 1y ago
I had heart surgery 2 months ago to repair my mitral valve. In the lead-up to that, I had to make a decision what to do if it turned out replacement was needed instead of repair. Choices were metallic valves requiring me to be on warfarin t
10.
by philiplu 1y ago
He has a speaking role in an old 1987 baseball movie, "Long Gone", with William Petersen and Virginia Madsen, as the son in a father/son partnership who own a minor league team (Henry Gibson was the dad). Very disorienting t
11.
by philiplu 1y ago
No clue. I left as a full-time employee in 2007, did a few contractor gigs with various old teams of mine to help out, but that was done by 2013. I lost touch with how things were going internally after that.
12.
by philiplu 1y ago
I worked on that! I was a dev on the team that built the first IntelliSense engine for C++. It’s a miracle it worked at all. It was based on a hacked-up version of the C++ front-end, but when it inevitably hit errors attempting a single-pa
13.
by philiplu 1y ago
No, there were two devs working on the 68k Mac compiler, with ~10 devs on the x86 side (though both targets shared a lot of code and differed mainly in the late codegen and peephole optimization phases). I never worked on the 16-bit code; t
14.
by philiplu 1y ago
No, that's not really true. I was on the C++ compiler team from 1991 to 2006. When I first started, the DevTools team reported up through the Windows team, but never really felt a well-integrated part. We were never in the same buil
15.
by philiplu 1y ago
A 40-year younger body :-) I'm blind in one eye nowadays; highly doubt I could pass the medical. It was a fun hobby in my 20s, though.
16.
by philiplu 1y ago
It’s been really sad to watch the decline of sea stars the past 10+ years. Tide-pooling just hasn’t been the same at Cannon Beach or the San Juan Islands. It’s very encouraging to pin down the culprit.
17.
by philiplu 1y ago
Never got far past my PPL decades ago (less than 100 hours total iirc) but landing was always such a fun dance in Pipers and Cessnas, slipping the plane into the cross-wind to line up the plane at the last moment before touching done.
18.
by philiplu 1y ago
I’m pretty sure that’s due to Unix’s early existence on PDP machines from DEC, which used octal instead of hex for encoding binary values. Why DEC did that I don’t know - I never got a chance to use DEC equipment back in the 70s.
19.
by philiplu 1y ago
I've had tinnitus since my teen years, half a century ago. At least, what I normally hear is, I assume, tinnitus, but it comes in two forms. There's a constant sort-of grey noise, not too loud (definitely softer than people talk
20.
by philiplu 1y ago
My first computer, purchased in 1978 for about $700, was an 8k Commodore PET. I've just finished building my first new PC in 15 years; a Zen 5 9950X with 96G RAM and a 4TB PCIe-5 SSD for about $2800. That's roughly the same, inf
21.
by philiplu 1y ago
Compuserve had a port of this available for playing, back around 1980. I spent so much money I couldn't really afford as a broke college student, logged in for hours.
22.
by philiplu 1y ago
That PET is in amazingly good physical shape. I think the keyboard on my 8K PET back in 1978 looked that bright for at most a year or so, before the plastic overlays started fraying.
23.
by philiplu 1y ago
I spent so much time typing in the Star Trek game from that book into a Commodore Pet, and then so much time playing the game. Hunt the Wumpus as well. Good times
24.
by philiplu 1y ago
Past the edit time, but I had the name wrong. It's a Vita-Prep 3, not Vitablend, that's the commercial model I bought.
25.
by philiplu 1y ago
Yep. I paid something like $650 for a Vitablend at a restaurant supply store about 20 years ago. That's the commercial version of a Vitamix. Thing is a tank, and has blended many many gallons of soups, smoothies, grain into flour, e
26.
by philiplu 2y ago
Back about roughly 1978 to 1982, I wrote and sold a 6800/6809 disassembler ("Dynamite Disassembler") for I think $200 a copy. Sold enough copies to pay for computer equipment during my college days. I think we reduced the p
27.
by philiplu 2y ago
Another parent with an ARFID kid here, though it sounds like our case is somewhat different. My kid, almost 16 now, has always had an extremely limited diet repertoire, starting at a failure to switch to non-smooth baby food as a toddler.
28.
by philiplu 2y ago
This would have been assembly code, probably 6809 or 68000 system I had back then. 6809 would have required dumping intermediate data to a disk. I don't recall just when I first got a hard-disk, which would probably have been a massi
29.
by philiplu 2y ago
Back in the 70s, when I was a teen, we had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. It came with a service where you could send off for various pamphlets for more focused information. I sent away for a paper listing pi to 10k or maybe 100k digits.
30.
by philiplu 2y ago
I lost vision in my right eye after failed retina detachment surgery damaged the optic nerve. I don’t see blobs of light like you describe, though I do see a dim pattern of swirling lines when I walk into a dark room. Also, weirdly, if ther

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