Updates, Sep 2016

• This week I've been taking Python3 training at work: 4 days of staying at home and concentrating on Python. The result? 4 days to work on Python, sharpening my skills, and that's a good thing. The lecture was not that hot, but what was useful was having the exercises in front of me, waiting to be done and no distractions to keep me from them. And after all that, the biggest difference I notice between Python 2.7 and Python 3 is print "foo" vs print("foo"). (Which shows you how much Python I know. But still.) I finished the exercises a few hours early, so I spent the time trying to solve the coding challenge we give new people at OpenDNS. (I didn't get that one; instead, I got the "this machine is borked in 12 different ways, please solve it" challenge.) This has been a wonderful way to stretch my brain, and work on something very very different from what I do every day. I wish work had the same sort of course for Ruby and Go.

• Have I mentioned that I've come to love Bandcamp? Lots of excellent music, and I keep finding lots of excellent music. I mean, really really excellent music.

• Like Hairy Hands.

• Or Mars, Etc.

• Or Snail Mail.

• Also on the music front, one really excellent station I've found is Popadelica.

• But back to Python: despite the click bait title, O'Reilly's "20 Python Libraries You Aren't Using But Should" is wonderfully informative for this Python n00b.

• I loved showing this video to my kids, demonstrating how bacteria evolve.

• Set up a Tor node last week for the cause.