The Great Annular Eclipse of 2023

I am still remembering the Great American Eclipse of 2017 with fondness and surprise. Even to a trained physicist like me, the sudden disappearance of the sun for a few minutes in the middle of the day was surprising, even startling. It’s probably my fondest memory of a natural event, together with the sight of lava falls on Hawai’i, the Big Island of the state.

But there was a much more convenient eclipse happening in 2023. It happened in October, in the middle of Colorado’s Mud Season, and on a Saturday. The weather was forecast to be absolutely perfect, warmish and sunny and with no clouds in sight. Still, was it not going to be a letdown after the Great Total Eclipse? I mean, we all had heard the song, Total Eclipse of My Heart. Had anyone written anything about the Annular Eclipse of the Heart?

Colorado 14ers: Mount Missouri

The Great Canada Snowboarding Adventure

The pandemic came in 2020 and ground all traveling to a halt. I had bought both IKON and EPIC passes that season, but by the beginning of March things started looking iffy. By mid-March the resorts all closed and travel, especially the international kind, had stopped. And for three years, all attempts at getting a trip together failed among successive waves of COVID-19.

Then, at the end of 2022, it looked good. There seemed to be a window of opportunity, with the world mostly immunized against the disease and quiet settling in for the moment. The war in Ukraine was going on, but that wouldn’t prevent us from traveling between the USA and Canada. Inflation was high, but that was no different up North. So I sat down with the trusted Tim and we hashed out a plan.

How I Became the World's Best Wordle Player

Wordle 233 1/6

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The world is gripped by a new game: Wordle, which is an odd and addictive combination of a word guessing game with MasterMind, a game involving color created in 1970. You have six tries to guess a five letter word, and for each guess you get in reply which letters of your word are correct, which ones would be correct in a different location, and which ones are plain wrong.

Threshold Chunking

The Problem

How do you distribute a file in pieces such that you need exactly a given number of the pieces to rebuild the entire file?

This article was inspired by the Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS), a cryptographic scheme (process) by which a secret key is shared between $n$ fragments, any $m$ of which can be used to recreate the entire key (n and $m$ being determined at the beginning of the process). Recreating the key from fragments is automatic and requires no further password or other. If you can find $m$ fragments and know which index they each have, you can recreate the key in its entirety.

Steamboat During the Bomb Cyclone

It was (and still is) an amazing snow season, one of those you can tell tall stories about to your grandkids surrounding the fireplace. But the crown of the worst storm of the many definitely goes to the one that dropped a blanket of white from Aspen to Chicago. It marked the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in Colorado, with some of the worst winter winds recorded.

What a better day to do a road trip? I collected my friends in Vail Valley, from which you can drive directly to Steamboat without going over the famously finicky Rabbit’s Ear’s Pass, and we decided to have a good time in the blizzard. To be fair to us, it wasn’t exactly that we planned to be in a blizzard: we simply had heard there was a storm system coming, the season was ending, and we wanted to all go to Steamboat. Changing the day invariably meant the trip was going to fall apart, so Bomb Cyclone it was.

I Can Tell-u-ride!

Yes! We finally had the most fantabulous snow season of the (this) century! 2018-2019 will forever go into snowboarding history as Colorado’s most fun, especially with the future being warmer and the snow trending towards occasional more than regular.

In fact, I haven’t been updating this blog for a long while because I was having way too much fun on the slopes. Now the season is winding down and it’s time to recap almost six months of awesomeness!

English-based Creoles, Esperanto, and the Quest for the “Perfect” Bridge Language

Meet Mom and Dad

See the man at the bottom with the jet-black hair? The lady in the chair to his right? The bundle of joy in her arm? Those are respectively my father, my mother, and myself. Both my parents sadly passed, but their story is remarkable. He was Italian, she was German. The official story is that they met on the freeway, passing each other repeatedly over hundred miles. It was, by all accounts, love at first sight.

CyberSecurity Done Right

I received an email. It came from TaskRabbit, a company about whom I don’t know much. I used them to get moving help when my containers were delivered and had a really strongly positive impression. Also, they had some heavy-handed product placement in Unbreakable – Kimmy Schmidt, which still was endearing.

While I know little about the company, I know something about their handling of a cybersecurity incident. Here is what they had to say:

FAQ: Did Jesus Really Save a Gay Couple?