DJGPP was important to me years back, as a demonstration of capability of GNU tools for embedded systems development. Thank you!

42, in all trials

Nothing new, this California case from 1973 is memorable: Geiler

Fiber optic installation is already being mechanized: Drone fiber festoons

80 km pluggable optical modules have been commonplace for 8+ years. POTS "aggregators" (digital loop carrier equipment) originally worked over T1 lines (24 line TDM on one copper pair in each direction, electrical repeaters also supported), were often retrofitted with fiber mux backhaul, and by around 1992 integrated the fiber backhaul function and served larger line counts.

Show me the fiber, at my 38 year old location, not at some conveniently greenfield site, and I'll believe it.

Lawyers make poor and ethically questionable gum. I prefer plant derived and microbial gums: dextrin, British gum (not made of British people), guar, xanthan, modified cellulose, gum Arabic. My copy of "Handbook of Water Soluble Gums and Resins", does not have an article on lawyers.

This is the era of geeks bearing grifts.

In the '70s-80s in the Los Angeles aerospace realm, it was common for aerospace companies to hire recent BS graduates, then support them for an MS. Consider the specialized and deep problem spaces of control systems, materials, RF devices, RF propagation, error control coding, modulation, structural dynamics, fluid dynamics, ...

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

My grades 3-5 next door neighbor long ago in Southern California was a toll call. My grandfather had given me a couple of wooden box crank ringer phones left from rural East Texas modernization. My friend and I ran speaker wire between the two houses and used two of these relics for utility and prank calls.

Thank goodness for this. I had an opportunity to observe a pair of impressively large orb weaver spiders residing for several weeks in the outdoor corners of a picture window. For a while, each spun a web and kept to its corner. Then one day, one spider made its way to the other, envenomated it, and wrapped it.

I read a little about orb weavers, and learned that females frequently cannibalize males after mating, that they frequently mate with siblings, and that cannibalism of males is a little less frequent in this case.

In Plano, Texas maybe 1992, a dinner group of us took a shortcut across a vacant lot. The ground was littered with numerous Robitussin bottles. In around the same era, I was in a drugstore in Eureka, California buying clip-on sunglasses, when I overheard the pharmacist say "Susie, I can't sell you any more cough syrup on credit, until your mom pays the bill.'

My experience from some years ago using the low-rent combination of a Bialetti stovetop "espresso" pot and whirly-blade grinder, was that Sulawesi Kalossi tasted like Comet cleanser, but the same grind was excellent when brewed in a French press. These days, I go to a local shop with a real espresso machine and a good coffee supplier. This region is usually cool and damp, but when a streak of dry weather arrives, the espresso quality worsens: fast bitter shot with little flavor body, and poor crema, unless one of the more careful baristas adjusts the grind and packing,

Staticmaster, with delicious polonium, makes a fine Russian espresso.