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Laia has to submit a picture of when she was 2 for her 8th grade year book. Last night I spent a few minutes putting the potential pictures on a virtual scrapbook so she can see them easily and pick one that she likes best. Here it is:

Laia at 2 years old

A friend of Nicole's shared this challenge that they gave his kid in school. The kid is in second grade and going to a gifted and talented program. Seems harder than it is when you sit down, it requires very good understanding on how addition works - which sounds easy, but...

You have 9 letters to solve, and each one can have a value between 0 and 9, so 10 values. No number can be repeated, so that becomes permutations of 10 over 9, i.e. the number of ways you can assign one of 10 values to 9 items, without repetition allowed, and with saying that every time you change the order it is a different arrangement. That is technically P(10,9) = 10! which is over 3 million combinations! Luckily they give us some breaks, including the fact that T and D cannot be 0, along with a few other clues that reveal themselves as you attempt to solve it.

I was trying to do it in my head at first, but that did not wok. I had to get old school pen and paper, and work through it.

So, we experienced a large www.cloudflare.com outage today. A lot of people may have never heard of Cloudflare, and may be surprised to hear it underpins a large amount of internet services. Over the past few years, they have grown tremendously. They provide cheap, efficient, fast internet infrastructure services such as CDN, DDoS protection, DNS, and much much more. It is said that as much as 25% of the web runs on some sort of Cloudflare service.

So many websites went down today (X, Spotify, Adobe,...) when Cloudflare went down (because of a log file that got too large, hahahahaha!) that everybody was checking DownDetector, which also went down, and so they had to create a DownDetector for DownDetector hahaha.

On a sidenote, it's amazing how many things are STILL linked to "hard drive ran out of space" essentially. Very much sounds like this outage was another case of this, a log file that grew unexpectedly large. I used to argue over this with our sysadmin 30 years ago asking him why he would add more HD space preemptively or have jobs that aggressively circled the logs. His answer was "it rarely happens" but of course it does happen which is the problem.

Ever since COVID, when I retrieved my long forgotten Magic The Gathering cards, I caught the "collector" bug again, and have been slowly but surely filling in the holes and completing missing parts of old sets that I had started 25 years ago or longer....

First it was the Arabian Nights set, with the awesome Juzám Djinn. Then it was the Antiquities set with Mishra's Workshop, and finally The Dark with its Blood Moon. For the past few months I have been pursuing a set Legends - the final Horsemen of Old Magic The Gathering. That is a very large - 310 cards - and old set, released in the summer of 1994. It is going to take me a veeeery long time to get them all, especially since I am missing some of the pricier cards like the Tabernacle at Pendrell, but it's fun to have something to slowly collect.

Related to all of this, a few Legends cards came in this week - including The Abyss, one of the coolest ones in the set.

Making memory of a trip we went on about 18 months ago to Las Vegas with friends to see Kylie Minogue live. It was a fun experience. She performed at the Voltaire. We have a stage-side table which provided a great experience, Kylie was a mere feet away from us. She played all her hits, plus songs from her most recent albums. I happen to be a big fun of her pop music, remember all her hits growing up in Spain. Recommended!