Maultasche

I saw the one in Seattle and I was surprised at how small it was. I was envisioning it being quite a large aircraft.

I once stopped in a small town in New Brunswick a couple hours drive south of the Quebec border. To my surprise, not only did they all speak French there, but the people we were trying to order lunch from didn't speak a word of English. I never realized that there were French-speaking places that far into New Brunswick.

I had an easier time communicating even in smaller towns in Quebec, where it seemed that most people were capable of speaking a little English, even if they spoke French all the time.

The Snooze button on iOS alamrs can be turned off by editing the alarm. I never use Snooze, so I turn it off for all my alarms. All that's left now is a nice Stop button.

The description made me think of Black & White as well. I still have memories of smacking my creature around every time he ate someone.

I heard a good guideline somewhere, that if multiple pieces of code change at the same time for the same reason, it should be combined into one. If the separate pieces of code can change at different times for different reasons (they would likely diverge in different directions the future), it's best to keep them separate places to keep it from being a maintenance nightmare.

Excessive DRY as how you described leads to complexity and complexity is bad for code maintainability. Properly applied DRY is supposed to reduce complexity.

Interestingly, there were multiple copies of the Declaration of Independence that were printed and distributed. The one that everyone focuses on is just the copy that the delegates signed.

I read through the entire thing over many years when the site first began and a new entry was being posted every day. I found it to be surprisingly interesting and I enjoyed reading about daily life in the 17th century. The comments could also be quite informative. I recommend it to anyone who think they might be interested.

I had a similar reaction: "What a strange name for an Elixir library!"

Yep, my old Brother Printer/Scanner is no longer supported on modern versions of MacOS, but VueScan works great with it.

That may not work. I think the wormhole controller AIs are getting pretty tired of his antics by now.

I find his writing to be very interesting. I hadn't realize that most types of horses used in Europe had evolved to be large enough to not get enough calories from just eating grass, and needed their food to be supplemented with grain.

That was the very first thing I thought of when I read this article about horse bread.

I don't know much about the bar exam myself, but I had a professor in college who was also a practicing lawyer.

He was of the opinion that in order to pass the bar, you mainly needed to really know the legal fundamentals and be good at making a legal argument in the bar exam, and that knowledge of specific laws is less important, because those are always available in reference books.

He told us a story of passing the Massachusetts bar exam (just to see if he could) without knowing anything about the state laws in Massachusetts, and won a bet he had made with his friend, who didn't think it was possible.

In the Netherlands, companies can sponsor a software engineer for a work visa as a highly-skilled immigrant. In Germany, a software engineer can easily get a blue card, which gives someone the right to work and live there.

In both of these countries, the first step is to get a job offer from a company and go from there.

I ended up getting a job through Triplebyte late last year. My current employer reached out to me through the platform, and was interested in interviewing me. I had never heard of my current employer prior to that.

So it helped me in introducing me to companies I wasn't previously familiar with, but other job platforms work in similar manner.

I get the impression that Triplebyte has changed from what it used to be. I never even talked with anyone at Triplebyte. I did well enough on some skill test that I was put on a fast track and quickly approved without any interviews. I also got opportunities to take other tests to rate my skills in particular areas.

It seemed like a decent place for presenting possible candidates to employers with some pre-screening, but it wasn't anything particularly innovative. I imagine that as an employer, it helps filter out a lot of unskilled candidates with pretty resumes and reduces the number of interviews required.

I used to live in Germany (as a student) before having kids, and now I live in California with kids (around Sacramento), so I'll give my perspective.

It's a tradeoff of money vs family-friendliness.

Germany is definitely more kid-friendly and provides a lot of stuff (events, museums, walking trails, etc) that is found in much lower quantities in California. I've taken my children to Germany a couple of times, and I was always pleasantly surprised at how many things there were for them to do.

The salaries are definitely higher in the US. I don't want to go anywhere near the Bay Area or San Diego due to the cost of living not making the salary increase worth it, so I currently have a remote job with a company based in Mountain View (a fairly small company), but costs of childcare and tertiary education are far higher here than in Germany. When I lived in Germany, the higher education costs were something like $80 a semester, but I hear they've done away with all fees since then.

In Germany, you get a lot more services and a good quality of life, but the salaries are quite low. They're a little higher than the Netherlands on average, but still quite low in comparison to the US.

One thing you may want to consider is that any form of childcare in California is enormously expensive. During the pandemic, a lot of childcare providers went out of business, and the ones that remain are all understaffed. So now childcare spots are difficult to find and very, very expensive. So expensive in fact, that typically most of the salary from one of the parents will go towards childcare.

Housing is really expensive all over the US, and very much so in California. It's hard to afford anything around Sacramento, and it's a lot cheaper than the Bay Area, Los Angeles, or San Diego. I get the impression from the occasional browsing of German real estate that houses are not cheap there either, so I'm not sure which is the better option. I bought my house in late 2008 after housing prices collapsed. I wouldn't be able to afford what I have with current prices.

Having spent some time in small villages in Germany, they are very non-diverse, if that's an issue for you. My kids go to a school with a great deal of diversity. German cities of a decent size tend to be fairly diverse.

I hear the practices of German primary and secondary schools can be hard to learn for those who didn't grow up there, but your wife should already know what's going on, since presumably she grew up there.

Another aspect of life in California that has changed since you left are the almost constant droughts and wildfires. It's way worse now. It used to be rare to see smoke from wildfires in the Sacramento area, but now it's quite common and the air is usually filthy in summer and early fall. In 2020, it got so bad that we had to stay inside for 3 weeks straight and there was ash falling everywhere, even though the nearest fire was at least 150 miles away. 2021 was a little better, but there were times we couldn't go outside because the smoke was so heavy. It's fairly similar all over the state.

Healthcare is way more affordable in Germany and the Netherlands and that is a big plus for me.

We are personally planning to move out of California due to some of these issues. If it weren't for my disabled stepson who is over 18, we'd probably go for Germany or the Netherlands due to the improved quality of life. I have no idea if my kids will be able to afford healthcare when they are old enough to work and I have no idea what their college costs will be.

I advise going to Germany. The salaries are not ideal, but I think that your family would have a better quality of life. Family support is very nice to have.

I don't know how common remote positions are in Germany nowadays. I have seen remote job advertisements that are EU-wide and I have interviewed with companies who hire all over the globe. A US company that is willing to hire from EU countries would be your best bet for getting a better salary, but those jobs aren't the easiest to find.

I don't know where in Bavaria you would be living, but it may be possible to commute to a larger city like Munich (train is the easiest way of commuting, if available), which has a lot of IT-related jobs. The salaries there are higher, but so is the cost of living.

I really like the Elixir programming language documentation: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Kernel.html

It's easy to find things, clearly written, and usually answer any questions I have about how to use a particular standard library function.

I really appreciate the code samples, which are present all over the documentation.

When I lived in Germany, I saw a video clip of Arnold speaking German. To my great surprise, he had the same accent when speaking German that he does when speaking English. He apparently speaks a regional dialect from the part of Austria he comes from, and it really affects how he sounds.

I had the same experience when I was doing an internship in Germany. One particular coworker kept speaking English to me, despite everyone else speaking German to me. At this point, I had lived there for a year already and spoke German pretty well, so comprehension definitely wasn't an issue.

I think he was either used to speaking English with non-Germans or just liked having the opportunity to speak English.

I just kept replying in German and he eventually switched to speaking German to me.

That happened to me many years ago with Microsoft logins. They were truncating passwords to 12 characters and my generated 16-character passwords never worked. I kept resetting them over and over until I did a Google search for Microsoft password requirements and found out that they were being truncated.

That was likely fixed a long time ago, but I'm still wary of increasing my Microsoft passwords past 12 characters.

I strongly recommend reading this for anyone who's interested. It's a really interesting view of what Mexico looked like prior to Spanish colonization, told from a Spanish perspective of course.

It also became clear that the Spanish, despite their superior technology, were so outnumbered that they wouldn't have been successful if it weren't for their local allies. They were nearly all killed in a desperate escape from Tenochtitlan when things went downhill.

In my experience with no-code tooling in the past, it works great as long as you stick to the narrow use cases it was designed for and are satisfied with that.

As soon as you want to do anything advanced that the no code tooling doesn't already handle, it gets ugly and complex, and you have to bring in specialists who know how to modify the system or work around it, and that requires coding and IT specialists.

It always happens that people want the application go beyond what the no-code tooling was designed to handle and behave in some particular way that requires advanced functionality and coding. Not once have I ever seen it go any other way. Organizations are attracted by the simplicity and speed of no-code development, but they always want it to something that goes beyond that tooling.

Does that mean that no-code tooling is useless? No. Just expect that it is limiting and you will likely require coding specialists to supplement the things that can be done without code.

I've been writing a lot about Elixir as I've been learning it: https://inquisitivedeveloper.com/. The idea is for people to learn Elixir along with me as I learn it.

It's not a quick start though: I really dig into how Elixir works and move fairly slowly. I've finished covering the language itself, and I'm about to move into the OTP functionality that's inherited from Erlang.

The Azores. They're virtually unknown here in the US, but they look like a nice place to take a vacation.

I joined First Tech just to get that Chip and PIN card. It worked great everywhere I went in Europe.

I don't see why that is stereotyping. I would assume that anyone on the customer side of the counter is a customer and anyone on the other side of the counter works there no matter what they look like.

If you had done that while she was on the other side of the counter or if she was wearing some kind of obvious uniform you'd have a point. However, if she was on your side of the counter and had no obvious signs of working there, there would be no reason to think she was anything but a customer.

The alternative would be to address all the customers as if they worked there, and that's just not practical.

It's probably because they don't meet some California environmental regulation (like energy efficiency or toxic chemicals) or aren't certified to meet those regulations. California tends to have the strictest environmental regulations.

Some models of cars are unable to be sold here for the same reason, although most are designed to conform to California regulations due to the manufacturers not wanting to miss out on the California market.

After I learned German for a few years, I lived in a region of Germany where many people spoke in a dialect. At the time I thought I had a pretty good handle on what was dialect and what wasn't. A good amount of dialect made it into my speech anyway, since that's how the locals spoke.

Later I discovered to my surprise that a few of the words I had placed in the "standard German" category were actually from the regional dialect.

I actually think it was more helpful to my language abilities to have learned two different German dialects (one of which was standard German). It also helped me to understand how languages change and what it must have been like several centuries ago when there wasn't a standardized German and people had to struggle to understand someone from far away area that in theory spoke the same language.

We've also been overwhelmed juggling a full time job (while working at home), but I've learned to compensate by picking and choosing what they do. My childrens' school is throwing more work at them than they could possibly handle (elementary school kids cannot handle huge amounts of self study), so there's no way they can do it all.

So I just pick a variety of lessons, intersperse them with periods of free time throughout the day, and if everything doesn't work out, oh well. I'd rather have them do less than having them be stressed out and me feeling stressed out from having to do so much.

I've been emphasizing reading practice with some math exercises, where they can be self-directed and letting the other stuff (which means lots of time for me) only be occasional. I've found they've made some significant improvements in reading, so I'm content with that.

The school my children attend have been doing a great job with online learning. Teachers have been posting videos and worksheets on Google classroom, they have regular zoom meetings, and they have various online educational software the children can log into and learn things.

The problem is that my elementary school children (who are ADHD and on the autism spectrum) have a hard time sitting there all day on the computer by themselves and learning, so I have to break the day up into lesson time and fun time and regulate that because they're too young to regulate themselves yet. At school they have teachers and peers to interact with, which keeps them interested.

So while working full time from home, I have to also support them in their learning and keep them on task. I also have to help them login to various things, set up zoom meetings, help them out with their work when they get stuck, and get the computers set up for them to do their work. Juggling logins and zoom meeting links gets complicated and time consuming.

If that were my only job, it would be manageable, but trying to work on my work and manage them has proven to be quite a challenge. If they were at a point in their lives where they could manage this all themselves, that would be great, but they're not there yet.

So I think that some students can benefit greatly from online learning, but others struggle.

For my kids, at home online learning is not as good as being with their peers, but it's been a lot better than nothing at all.

I'm looking forward to summer when I don't have to balance both work and managing their school work, but I do plan to keep giving them things to read and math worksheets. Those are the things they can do well on their own.

I spent about six weeks traveling in Hungary in the summer of 2000, enjoying the great food and wine and practicing my rudimentary Hungarian skills. At the time the country seemed to be a place with crappy past and a bright future.

I even was in Budapest during the celebrations of the 1000 year anniversary of the founding of the Kingdom of Hungary (which was really just the anniversary of the Christianization of the country and the Pope tossing a crown to King Istvan). The fireworks were great and the I stood in the square in front of the Parliament building and watched a then much younger Viktor Orban giving a speech.

At the time, I was under the impression that Orban was viewed as a vibrant leader committed to democracy and modernization. Oh, how times have changed.

He's now a wannabee dictator, stomping on democracy and free speech, and taking the country on a reverse course back to the darker years of Hungary's past.

What the hell happened to you, Viktor? Did you grow to like power too much? You were so promising, but turned out to be so disappointing. Another Mugabe.

Now I feel sad when I think of Hungary and the nice people I met there. I also marvel at the inability of the people to learn from their past. Hungarians always seemed very well-informed and knowledgeable of their history.