You grow up loving animals. When your dad takes you fishing as a little kid up in New Hampshire, you scoop them up and hold them in your tiny hands and talk to them before you toss them gently back into Winnisquam Lake. When you forget to feed the family goldfish one day - one day out of months of faithful feeding - and one fish dies a few weeks later, you confess that your "neglect" was the cause of death. When you're 12 your neighbor gives you two baby rabbits. A couple years later your family gets a dog, … Read More
Sometimes passengers say really ridiculous things, and sometimes I am smart enough to write them down. "If I use free Wi-Fi in a coffee shop, how do I pay for the data?" "I've logged into the Internet Box but my messages aren't there." "I signed up for your Internet but you only gave me The Google, I want to send textses!" "I only bought this thing so I could Facepage my grandkids!" "Hey, I put 'my email' into Google, but it didn't bring up my emails." "If I give you my name and cabin number, can you find my Yahoo … Read More
Eleven years ago, when I spent a semester at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, my friends took me to speak with Mormon missionaries. The meeting hadn't been set for me - another friend was actively seeking to be baptized – they just invited me to tag along. At the time, I knew next to nothing about their faith. Even though I still do not consider myself a religious person, eleven years ago my atheism was practically anti-theism. Catholic and Lutheran and ex-Mormon friends alike had all given me stern warnings to "stay away" from missionaries. But my Mormon … Read More
So... I moved. After six years at sea - six years of ups and downs and mostly great times but also really shitty times - it's time to try out this "real life" thing. My boyfriend was offered a job working for our corporate offices on this fancy new cruise ship technology initiative, and I decided that this was the engraved invitation I was looking for to get my butt off of the high seas and onto land. We live in an apartment - which neither of us has ever done before - and the whole thing is really quite … Read More
So, I suck at coding. I desperately want to be good at it. I'm just not. I've done the Python tutorial on about 97 different websites over the years. I've cried and failed at Advent of Code twice in a row now. I've played around with PHP, JavaScript, Haskell, Scala, Go. It doesn't stick. And yet, I persevere. I'm not sure why. I am pretty good at a lot of things in the broad realm of IT. If I applied myself, and studied really hard, I could probably get a job in any number of them. Programming? Probably not. But … Read More
