I mention Michael Collins a lot to my kids. Imagine if you got in a rocket and went all the way to the moon, but didn't get to land! How do you think he felt when he was all alone? Do you think he was scared? Jealous? How do you think you'd feel?

I try to explain that some jobs are really important even if they're not the ones that get you fame. I hope they learn that being part of a team, working together, doing your job well, helping others do their jobs well, sharing recognition, and celebrating each other is important.

There were only 1-3 days notice because too few people were paying attention to what was coming. Most people were waiting for someone else to tell them what to do and the people in charge everywhere utterly failed to do any planning.

We offered to help my kids' teachers make photocopies of worksheets and stuff so the classes would have something to do if school closed. They declined, acting like we were crazy to think schools could possibly ever close. This was after some schools in the area had already closed temporarily due to kids having been exposed to the virus at home. Some businesses in the area, including my own, had already started shifting to work from home, and schools and businesses in other parts of the country were already closed. But somehow it was inconceivable that the virus would come to our town?

Our school closed a few days later for a day so they could do a deep clean, then a day turned into a few weeks, then a few more weeks, then for the rest of the school year statewide. We had to wait over a week for anything from the school for the kids to do at home. We had to wait weeks for anything remotely structured. Even now, we only get an hour or two of work per day. The work is only review and all optional, due to equal access concerns. Thankfully, we have lots of teachers in my family who helped get us more resources and lessons for our kids.

At work, I asked my boss if we could have a team meeting to plan for working from home. Would we keep the same priorities? Would we all keep the same hours? How would we replace the hallway interactions that sometimes resulted in breakthroughs? How would we maintain our social relationships that helped us be a productive team?

He was genuinely surprised that I was concerned about the virus. This was after a major outbreak in our city. This was after our offices in other parts of the country were already working from home. This was after our offices in China had been closed for well over a month.

We never met. All offices closed a few days later and we won't go back to the office regularly until next year at the earliest. We had no plan to work together while apart. It's fine now, but we could have planned ahead and not wasted the first few weeks.

Saying this was a surprise lets leadership at many levels in many organizations off the hook for their total failure to plan. Teachers, principals, and superintendents failed to see what happened in the next town over and think, "What if that happened here?" The state failed to look at neighboring states. The country failed to look at the rest of the world.

All of us were let down by so many people. We have very few leaders. We should never forget that.

ZigBee issued a press release today about this. They say the attack exploited a bug in one vendor's implementation of the protocol, not a weakness in the protocol itself.

So Tim Kaine was involved too?

As I said, this was a long time ago, so maybe I'm not remembering the exact performance problem we hit. My larger point still stands: we were burned by an abstraction, possibly made worse by our own lack of expertise. In our defense, we weren't there to build a website. Or research was in a totally unrelated area, not even really within the realm of computer science, and none of us had expertise building websites that scaled. The website was just the thing we used to collect data and do experiments. We built it because we couldn't get someone wide to do it for us. Someone before my time picked Ruby on Rails because it was supposed to be something people like us could use.

I worked on a project around 2007 that used Ruby on Rails. That was my first experience with Ruby and my first experience with a real web product. I liked Ruby and Rails, but it was easy to get bitten by some of the abstractions. I remember the site bogged down really bad whenever we searched for a record in a large database table. The problem was that the database was hidden behind ActiveRecord, so it was easy to forget we were using a database at all. Writing a for loop to search for a record that matched some criteria felt natural, because our interface was with objects, not the underlying tables. However, behind the scenes, each iteration was a separate query. The result was thousands and thousands of queries, instead of just a single query with a simple WHERE clause. We were essentially doing in Ruby what we could have done much more efficiently in SQL. Once we realized the problem, we rewrote that kind of code so it used more or less raw SQL. The result was much faster, but we lost the readability of the abstraction. Everyone on the team was new to Ruby and Rails (grad students who shuffled in and out each semester), so it's possible that we were just doing things completely wrong. Still, it feels like it shouldn't have been that easy to shoot ourselves in the foot. Have things improved since then? How do you balance nice abstractions like ActiveRecord with performance? How do you make it clear to novices what's going on internally, so they can avoid the mistakes that we made?

The point of gun-free zones is not to deter bad guys. It is to help prevent good guys bringing guns to places where they aren't needed, getting involved in an argument or whatever, and escalating things to the point where someone is shot. Another reason is to prevent unintentional shootings, either from a malfunction or a dumb accident.

You can argue that it is still not a good idea, but at least be honest enough to acknowledge the real reasons behind the policy.

Assert your rights. For example:

"I am disputing this debt. You must verify this debt as required by the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. Because I am disputing this debt, you must not report it to the credit reporting agencies. If you have already reported it, contact the credit reporting agencies, inform them that the debt is disputed, and request that they delete it from my credit report. Reporting information that you know to be inaccurate, or failing to report information correctly, violates the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Aside from verification of the debt, do not contact me about this debt. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, 15 USC Section 1692c requires that you honor this request."

Yes, the thermostats still have ZigBee radios. The first ones were TI chips while the new ones are Silicon Labs (formerly Ember) chips. The smoke alarms have them too.

Forget the fire codes. If you lock the shooter in a room, you might also lock a lot of potential victims in the room with him. Say someone enters a packed cafeteria and fires some shots. No matter what, people will instinctively run to the exits once they realize what's going on. If the doors are open, they'll have a chance to get away. But, if the doors locked, everyone will pile up near the exits and be trapped. Now, the shooter has a lot of targets clumped together.

There is a nice and humorous obituary on their website.

You can't be American, because you're apparently unaware...

Let me stop you right there. You must not know Americans, because unawareness, of our own history and so many other things, is one of our hallmarks. The fact that the signing of the Declaration of Independence wasn't promptly followed by the "shot heard round the world," or that the war dragged on for years and wasn't particularly popular while it was raging, or that our Constitution was our second attempt at self government is not something people know. The details of our history just aren't taught, or aren't taught well at least, so we end with people having a weak grasp of the highlights and not understanding or even being aware of the rest.

Hue bulbs speak ZigBee, not Wi-Fi. Communication between the bridge and the lights is done with a mix of the ZigBee Home Automation and ZigBee Light Link application profiles on a ZigBee PRO mesh network using an IEEE 802.15.4 MAC layer. The bridge is an IP-to-ZigBee gateway, but there's no direct IP connectively to the bulbs.

This is why I only vote for candidates who have pledged to support only the wars they don't support.

I develop applications for BlackBerry and I've talked to RIM about what restrictions corporate users will see. According to RIM, only 40% of BlackBerry users are on BlackBerry Enterprise Networks (BES) and over 90% of BES installations use the default settings. The default BES settings do not impose any restrictions on the device.