OK, it has been a while since the last time I published this data, but I have a valid excuse . The most striking feature of the 2024 chart is the zero’ing out of IBM’s piece of the pie. Big Blue, which once billed the government $107M in a year, has been reduced to a billing rate of less than $5M per year over the last two years. Everything else feels more or less the same. After seven years of…
Back to entry 1 I recently “celebrated” my “cancerversary”, the one-year mark since my GI doctor phoned me up and said the fateful words – “you have cancer”. At that moment, my universe shrank down immensely. All the external stuff, job, professional relationships, volunteerism, just kind of fell away, I had no mental space for it. It was just me and my immediate family and the many, many unknowns…
A funny thing happened when I wrote up my 2025 book list – a lot of the books were parts of pairings. And I started wondering what other pairings I had read that were memorable. So here’s another list! Wicked , Gregory Maguire and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , L. Frank Baum You wouldn’t know it to look at me (or would you?) but I am a person who has read all 14 books of the original L. Frank Baum…
For PostGIS Day this year I researched a little into one of my favourite topics, the history of relational databases. I feel like in general we do not pay a lot of attention to history in software development. To quote Yoda, “All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was . Hmm? What he was doing.” Anyways, this year I took on the topic of the early…
I have been watching the codification of spatial data types into GeoParquet and now GeoIceberg with some interest, since the work is near and dear to my heart. Writing a disk serialization for PostGIS is basically an act of format standardization – albeit a standard with only one consumer – and many of the same issues that the Parquet and Iceberg implementations are thinking about are ones I dealt…
I did a lot of reading last year, a lot , perhaps because I had a lot of down time . I tend to read before going to sleep, and recovery from surgery and other things means I go to bed early and then fill the time between bed and sleep with books. Books, books, and more books. To be totally precise, I read books on a Kindle, which allows me to read in the middle of the night in the dark with the…
Back to entry 1 I was glancing at the New York Times and saw that Catherine, the Princess of Wales, had released an update on her treatment. And I thought, “wow, I hope she’s doing well”. And then I thought, “wow, I bet she gets a lot of positive affirmation and support from all kinds of people”. I mean, she’s a princess . Even us non-princesses, we need support too, and I have to say that I have…
Back to entry 1 What happened there, I didn’t write for three months! Two words: “complications”, and “recovery”. In a terrifying medical specialty like cancer treatment , one of the painful ironies is that patients spend a lot of time suffering from complications and side effects of the treatments , rather than the cancer . In my case and many others, the existence of the cancer isn’t even…
Back to entry 1 So, I got the news from pathology. There is no cancer left in me, I am officially “cured”. Since I am still recovering from surgery and relearning what my GI tract is going to do for the future, I don’t feel entirely cured, but I do feel the weight of wondering about the future lifted off of me. The future will not hold any more major cancer treatments, just annual screening…
Back to entry 1 Scanxiety. This is where I am right now. Scanxiety. Each stage of the cancer experience is marked by a particular set of tests, of scans. I actually managed to get through my first set of scans surprisingly calmly. After getting diagnosed (“there’s some cancer in you”), they send you for “staging”, which is an MRI and CT scan. These scans both involve large, Star Trek seeming…