My Life and Code

Last November, my wife decided to take up bird watching as a hobby. We bought one of those bird feeders with a built-in camera, but due to the holidays and a lot of snow, I didn't get it all set up until February. Within 30 minutes of filling it with bird feed, we got our first customer. Of course, it was a squirrel. If you're going to feed the birds, then, by proxy, you're also feeding the squirrels, unless you take steps to try not  to, which we didn't think was right. So in addition to the bird feed, we began to buy nuts as well. Prior to COVID, I'd feed the squirrels in the park near my office every day, and I learned that they're smarter than you might realize. They recognize people, even by voice. One day, when feeding them at lunch, I ran out of nuts with one squirrel left. I made a quick mental note of some distinguishing characteristic to help me recognize that squirrel, and came back out later to try to find him/her. I walked all the way around the bui...

As I mentioned in my last post , I worked at a haunted hayride with some friends during the fall after I graduated high school, and the one after that. That whole period of my life between the end of high school and the start of my career was an interesting time, kind of an adventure, kind of some lost wandering, directionless, but free from those long school days I'd known for most of my life. My friend Ed had heard about it. It was the Sleepy Hollow Haunted Hayride, and is still around and has a website, which you can visit here . On the nights we'd want to work, we'd just show up, and be given our assignments. It was usually me, Ed, our friend Brian, and Brian's girlfriend at the time, Liz. And by work, what I mean is "act" -- we'd be actors in whichever scene of the hayride we were assigned to. We could be zombies, werewolves, vampires, you name it. It was almost always a social activity as well: for example, if you were a zombie, you were part of a gr...

Pictured: Part of the Penn State Abington campus during a Philly.NET code camp I attended a number of years back. This is my favorite time of the year, but where does the time go? I couldn't believe, when I looked at the date a few days ago, that we were already in mid-September. I feel like I look forward to fall every year, but never really stop to enjoy  it, usually due to whatever else is going on at the time. It also seems like it doesn't start getting cooler as earlier as it used to. The cooler weather is part of what I appreciate about fall. That, and the leaves changing color. I remember both from being a little kid, rolling around in piles of leaves in the brisk weather. It was later, when I was in high school, that I gained an even greater appreciation for it, when my 10th grade biology teacher gave us all an assignment to collect 10 different kinds of leaves and use clear contact paper to collect them into a book of sorts. As I just typed that sentence, it sounded bo...