John Russell

I'll never get over the fact that I went to high school with Mike Jr. Thinking that Critch is a standard name for Nfld. (Lots of Crouches, Gruchys, Crumbys... why not Critches.) So when we all regaled him with "Dis is Mike Critch fer da VOCM news sarvice", I just thought the name was a coincidence.

I've never been to Bakka after they moved to Harbord St. But when I heard that was their new location, somehow I knew exactly what building it must be. One I have fond memories of.

OH: You aren't gonna hit my $4000 mouth... You're the only one of us that hasn't been KILLED by ORTHODONTIA!

If you see this, we IMPLORE you to post a picture from whatever device you're using without explanation.

TIL: the origin of the "Pink" and Copland defunct Apple operating system initiatives. Different-colored index cards when deciding which OS features to do in the near and long term. (The near-term features that actually shipped were on blue cards.) www.macworld.com/article/3136...

80 characters? I mean, my Commodore 64 had a 132-character display. I did my Comp Sci homework assignments for the first couple of pre-Amiga years using a 2-pixel-wide(!) font in a VT52 or VT100 terminal emulator.

I have memories that make me smile from every one of those tennis courts.

@bakkaphoenix.bsky.social somebody playing a prank on you

In my personal music rankings, the best bangers/duds ratios are kind of an unusual pairing. AC/DC and Tedeschi Trucks Band. Well would you look at that.

I would eat scorpion lollipops. And have eaten gator - in Toronto of all places.

Somehow I came to the exact same conclusion as in this thread.

TIL: the ancient Olympic games weren't held anywhere near Mt. Olympus. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia...

Coogler's vampire film “Sinners” broke records with 16 nominations. Born in Oakland, he attended St. Mary's College High School in Berkeley.

I've posted my latest recap of the world of databases: www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/... All the hot topics from the last year: • More Postgres action! • MCP for everyone! • MongoDB gets litigious with FerretDB! • File formats! • Market movements! • The richest person in the history of the world!

Greatest first line of a song ever. The lyrics contain a lot of what I think of as "teased rhymes" even if that's not strictly what they are. Every time I hear it, I'm thinking ...a werewolf drinking a Pina Colada at Trader Vic's, and his hair was purple. Huh! I'd like to meet James Taylor.

The most accessible explanation of quantum physics I ever heard was from @robertjsawyer.com at his science fiction writing course at Ryerson. Of course, he's since explored that area further in Quantum Night. Interested to hear what his latest thinking is!

There are a bazillion Unicode codepoints where if an email contains one of them, it's 100% guaranteed a phishing attempt or spam trying to evade filters. You would think the anti-spam folks could do more with this knowledge. (E.g. render suspicious characters as boxes or question marks like BITD.)

🟡 M4.8 #earthquake detected 3 km ESE of Berkeley, California at 9/22/2025 2:56:12 AM PDT This reflects data from the U.S. Geological Survey that is subject to change. Visit the USGS page linked below for the latest #quake information

I can level a continent. But Where. Are. My. PANTS! (I'm just teasing Galactus. I thought he would have been a better Big Bad than Thanos in the Avengers.)

Come hear the first-ever reading of my next novel at Dragon Con! Sunday at 11:30 a.m., Learning Center Hyatt [Lower Level 1, Atrium Tower — see map below]:

Today is the new semester for @db.cs.cmu.edu's Intro to Database Systems! We're going harder into material than before. More challenging projects but you can use LLMs to help. We also have 10min talks each Wed from leading DB companies: 15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2025

Oh no. Just the other day I was saying, you know, Tom Lehrer is still alive at almost 100 and living in Santa Cruz. variety.com/2025/music/n...

This happens to me so often that I've set up automation to remove such stuff. On Mac, copy the URL, then: pbpaste | <unix command to search-replace-remove the particular cruft for that site> | pbcopy Now what's on the clipboard is the bare URL.

Basketball, huh. I am 6' 3", I live walking distance from UC Berkeley, and I'm feeling like I could use some continuing education.

delighted to announce that my new zine "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is out today!! You can get it for $12 USD here: wizardzines.com/zines/terminal

it's happening! "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is coming out tomorrow! here's the table of contents:

TIL: If there's a Mac drive that seems to be completely bricked and can't be mounted or even erased, there's a non-obvious "Show all devices" control in Disk Utility. That will show the container device of the drive and you might be able to reformat that. apple.stackexchange.com/questions/12...

I told you we’d be back

SF Bay Area residents, whether you felt this evening’s #earthquake or not, please complete the “Did you feel it?” survey earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/...

TIL: there's a name for the wild-looking stratigraphic layers of rock that you see along the "gorge" sections of Rennie's River in Newfoundland: "flysch". (Must try that in Scrabble some time.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flysch

As someone who was told this urban legend from earliest times, there's a lot I could say about this.

TIL: the $BASH_REMATCH array variable in bash lets you do the Pythonic operation: match a regex using ( ) groups, then retrieve the value of group 1, group 2, ... As Python evolves more towards numeric analysis, I'm using bash more and more for string processing use cases. medium.com/@linuxadminh...

Potatoes trending as fuel for athletes? About time! wapo.st/4dihulG

When I was growing up in eastern Canada, some people had a strong affinity for New York, others for Boston. I always wondered what the factors were. (More English ancestry = Boston, Irish = New York?) My granddad worked construction on the Empire State Building, which puts me in the New York camp.

TIL: Peter Weller got his PhD in Italian renaissance art history. Not that long ago either. That's in character for Buckaroo Banzai, not so much for RoboCop. escholarship.org/uc/item/0dm8...

Am I the only one who, given an address or a neighborhood in Manhattan, visualizes it in terms of what Peter Parker did or who Spider-Man fought there?

TIL: in vi, q/ to bring up a menu of recent searches that you can cursor through, edit, and run again. vi, always a new surprise waiting somewhere.

This is a new image from #JWST. The bright points with spikes are stars in the Milky Way. Everything else is a galaxy. Everything. Else. Is. A. Galaxy.