Erick, I kept hoping to meet again at a future conference and have an extended version of the talk we had the first time we met. It was very valuable but I felt I only got a glimpse of what was possible. Perhaps, one day, I can travel near your actual "nest" and buy you a beer or two and listen to the true war stories at the search coalface.
Until then, I wish you luck with the furry rats. We have some in our backyard, but since we haven't - yet - started growing things, I view them with amusement rather than anger. But, next summer, I will probably follow your steps too. I wonder if Tesla coils are more DIY then the laser-guided heat rays. Though heat rays on lower settings could be quite nice in Montreal winter, I am sure. Regards, Alex. P.s. Good old days! When one had to tell the disassembler that the next instruction was "probably" a start of the string as one tried to hack Xonix and Arkanoid levels! P.p.s. If you need any listening material while you garden, I suspect you will enjoy the hardware/software discussions podcast: "On the metal" https://oxide.computer/podcast/ On Wed, 30 Dec 2020 at 09:09, Erick Erickson <erickerick...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 40 years is enough. OK, it's only been 39 1/2 years. Dear Lord, has it really > been that long? Programming's been fun, I've gotten to solve puzzles every > day. The art and science of programming has changed over that time. Let me > tell you about the joys of debugging with a Z80 stack emulator that required > that you to look on the stack for variables and trace function calls by > knowing how to follow frame pointers. Oh the tedium! Oh the (lack of) speed! > Not to mention that 64K of memory was all you had to work with. I had a > co-worker who could predict the number of bytes by which the program would > shrink based on extracting common code to functions. The "good old > days"...weren't... > > I'd been thinking that I'd treat Lucene/Solr as a hobby, doing occasional > work on it when I was bored over long winter nights. I've discovered, though, > that I've been increasingly reluctant to crack open the code. I guess that > after this much time, I'm ready to hang up my spurs. One major factor is the > realization that there's so much going on with Lucene/Solr that simply being > aware of the changes, much less trying to really understand them, isn't > something I can do casually. > > I bought a welder and find myself more interested in playing with that than > programming. Wait until you see the squirrel-proof garden enclosure I'm > building with it. If my initial plan doesn't work, next up is an electric > fence along the top. The laser-sighted automatic machine gun emplacement will > take more planning...Ahhh, probably won't be able to get a permit from the > township for that though. Do you think the police would notice? Perhaps I > should add that the local police station is two blocks away and in the line > of fire. But an infrared laser powerful enough to "pre-cook" them wouldn't be > as obvious would it? > > Why am I so fixated on squirrels? One of the joys of gardening is fresh > tomatoes rather than those red things they sell in the store. The squirrels > ATE EVERY ONE OF MY TOMATOES WHILE THEY WERE STILL GREEN LAST YEAR! And the > melons. In the words of B. Bunny: "Of course you realize this means war" > (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XNr-BQgpd0)... > > Then there's working in the garden and landscaping, the desk I want to build > for my wife, travel as soon as I can, maybe seeing if some sailboats need > crew...you get the idea. > > It's been a privilege to work with this group, you're some of the best and > brightest. Many thanks to all who've generously given me their time and > guidance. It's been a constant source of amazement to me how willing people > are to take time out of their own life and work to help me when I've had > questions. I owe a lot of people beers ;) > > I'll be stopping my list subscriptions, Slack channels (dm me if you need > something), un-assigning any JIRAs and that kind of thing over the next > while. If anyone's interested in taking over the BadApple report, let me know > and I can put the code up somewhere. It takes about 10 minutes to do each > week. I won't disappear entirely, things like the code-reformatting effort > are nicely self-contained for instance and something I can to casually. > > My e-mail address if you need to get in touch with me is: > "erick.erick...@gmail.com". There's a correlation between gmail addresses > that are just a name with no numbers and a person's age... A co-worker came > over to my desk in pre-historical times and said "there's this new mail > service you might want to sign up for"... Like I said, 40 years is enough. > > Best to all, > Erick > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@lucene.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@lucene.apache.org > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@lucene.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@lucene.apache.org
