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The Boston Diaries

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Did I inadvertently unlock someone else's car doors?

I went out to get Bunny and I some lunch, and as I was leaving, as I used my fob to pop open the trunk to store the food for the trip home, I noticed that a car near my own honked briefly and flash its headlights. Odd, I thought. I then used my fob to unlock the car, and again, the nearby car honked briefly and flashed its headlights. I then used my fob to lock my car, but this time, the nearby…

Gmail might partially be to blame for me receiving emails from other Sean Conners

I was reading the Lobsters thread about the article “ A researcher bought noreply.net. Companies started sending him secrets ” when I left a comment about my own struggles with receiving emails for other Sean Conners . That started a thread that swamped the comment section about other people who had similar stories, so it's nice to know that I'm not alone. Also, here's one of my favorite comments…

Mowing Da Lawn, part II

As I was mowing the lawn today at Chez Boca, cursing myself for letting it go a few weeks, I was reminded that it wasn't as bad as that one time at Casa New Jersey . I'm thankful for that.

What is even taste when it comes to programming?

[This is me reposting a comment I left on Lobsters about “ Taste Is All That's Left ,” a post about vibecoding. I think my comments works well enough on its own here as a post. —Sean] As I read this, I was reminded of two quotes. The first is about the taste gap from Ira Glass: Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it…

Unary operators and the Shunting Yard algorithm

I use the Shunting Yard algorithm to handle precedence when parsing expressions in my assembler . It's great because not only is it simple to implement, but it simplifies the code in a hand-written recursive descent parser . The BNF is effectively: ; BNF per RFC-5234 expr = factor *(op factor) op = '*' ; just the basic ops for now / '/' ; adding more is just adding / '+' ; them to this definition…

Notes on an overheard conversation coming from the Family Room

“The TV remote isn't working again!” “You need to really smash that select button.” “I am! See?” “Hmmm. Let me try … oh. There you go.” “The remote hates me!” “It seems so.”

The surprising email to “Sean Conner” that wasn't meant for me

I received yet another email for Sean Conner but this time, it wasn't at Gmail! It was surprising because it was sent from my friend Lorie who currently lives in Pennsylvania, about the new Area Director for Toastmasters , which is funny, because I do not live in Pennsylvania, nor have I been involved with Toastmasters since the 5 th grade (ages 9–10 for non- US people). I wrote her back about…

Alarm clocks

Chris Siebenmann uses iPhone as an alarm clock , and his reasons are largely why I too, I keep my old iPhone (which is no longer supported by the Oligarchic Cell Phone Company) as an alarm clock (and why I don't have a new iPhone that is supported is a complicated story I'd rather not get into for my own sanity). And I use the iPhone for all the reasons that Chris does. But one aspect that Chris…

The precedence of the factorial operator

Back when I added a factorial operator to my assembler , the code only applied it to numeric literals because the code that implemented it appeared in the same function as parsing a numeric literal. I only found the bug when I tried to apply a factorial to a subexpression in parenthesis, for example, -(2+1)!. The fix was easy, just move the code out of the numberic literal parsing routine rvalue()…

“I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.”

I know it was probaby inevitable, but I still found it surprising and rather upsetting to see that our television updated itself and that we had to accept the new terms of service. I'm not sure what would have happened had we refused. Would it have bricked itself? And what “service” has changed that required new terms? Sending back our watching habits to the mother ship? Watching one more ad ad we…

A week of appointments

You would think that now that Bunny was home now that we could relax for a bit. But nooooooooo! We had to call today to schedule a follow-up visit at the house. This follow-up visit is for tomorrow, then a scheduled visit to Bunny's general doctor on Thursday, and a follow-up visit to the orthopedist on Friday. I don't think she's ever had this many scheduled medical visits before. Nor so quickly.…

A sprung Bunny

After nearly two months from breaking her shoulders, Bunny is finally released from the rehabilitation center . Her arms still hurt and she still has some range issues with her arms, but nothing that requires her to remain in the center. After signing a bunch of forms, we were able to walk out, and with no help, she was able to get into the car. We're home now. I still have a few observations…

The sounds of silence

I'm at the rehabilitation center where Bunny is rehabilitating her broken shoulders and all the TV s in the place shut down, and it's suddenly quiet. Maybe not as silent as Rachel, Nevada , or maybe when a Las Vagas casino lost power (talk about dead silence—it was weird !), but still, it's eerie.

Extreme abstract staircase, Boca Raton edition

While Bunny was otherwise occupied with a nurse I took the opportinity to look around outside. While there, I found this odd staircase off the side of a path: I'm not sure what the purpose of such a structure could be, perhaps a place to sit down? But there were benches along the path. Perhaps stairs to Narnia? Perhaps?

It's no surprise that the LLMs confabulate what I've worked on

While I am known to some of the LLMs (link via Flutterby ), my own score (or “strength” as the site calls it) is in the upper two digit range. It picked up that I'm a blogger, but it also confabulated that I worked on the Apache module mod_python . Heh … close, but no cigar !