Bonjour Montréal. This has been an extremely civilized journey so far at speeds frequently reaching 150 km/hr. High speed train travel by Canadian standards. Also they had lots of coffee. Thanks Via!
I always wanted to kick off a WWDC presentation by inviting the 5,000 attendees to stand, crank the volume to the max, and all play their ringtones simultaneously.
— “Our junior programmers don’t know how to escape and normalize metacharacters in database queries of our GIS”
— “I’ve got it: why don’t we just change all the street signs?”
Today we consider country calling codes - the phone number prefixes used to route calls to different countries. For example +49 for DE 🇩🇪, +61 for AU 🇦🇺, etc.
What is the longest chain of countries such that each successive country/territory in the chain shares a land border with and has a calling code greater than the previous one?
Example chain: FR 🇫🇷 (+33) - ES 🇪🇸 (+34) - PT 🇵🇹 (+351)
@opencage Tried hard to find one that started Canada > Denmark (thank you, land border on Hans Island) and was then going to argue for "greater than or equal", so you could start USA > Canada > Denmark but .... Can't compete with these other winners!
Today I learned from a travelling friend that Delta hands out trading cards like this to kids with details of the airplane you were on. What a great idea! (And she tells me the pilots of DL1368 were great to the kids too.)
On behalf of the frequent flyers of the world, I would like to urge all airlines to hand out collector cards like this to all of us!
Not that they'd ask me, but they could print a few tips on the card to explain how to spot that kind of plane - look for these engines, or these winglets, or this arrangement of windows or whatever. Help raise the next generation of plane-spotters who can tell an A321 from a B757.
It's a lot harder than it used to be, since so many jets are just "one engine on each wing" now. So little variety.
Chatted with some young scholars at the Science Fair today who had built a nifty 3D-printed gadget to attach to your glasses so they wouldn't slip around too much.
So of course I asked them if they'd seen Steve Martin in "The Jerk", a relevant film that came out a mere 45 years ago.
They hadn't, of course, but I hope that some day, years from now, they'll see it and they'll vaguely remember that some weird guy at the Science Fair asked them about it and then when the Opti-Grab scene happens, I hope they'll think: "Oh. That's why."
I think you'll all be grateful that I did not live blog my particular experience today, but Dave Barry sums it up very well.
Get checked. Be an adult here. Quit being squeamish. It's better to know that everything's fine, or to know that there's an issue so it can be dealt with, than it is not to know.
(Dave's article on his colonoscopy made me laugh dozens of times this week and that really helped me quit worrying.)