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Friday, Nov 28 2025

A Lazy Thanksgiving Morning

As Laia and Sofia still in their pajamas watch the parade in the downstairs living room while multi-tasking on their iPads of course


Monday, Nov 24 2025

Sachem East Turkey Distance Event

This weekend we attended two swim meets, one for Sofia (Patriot Games) and one for Laia (SCC Turnkey Distance).

It was only Saturday so we had most of the weekend available to us. I was on the stands for Laia's meet and was able to take a few shots. She raced the 500 yard freestyle event, and did well, moving up very close to a BB time.

Sachem East Turkey Distance Meet 2025

Sachem East Turkey Distance Meet 2025 Laia

Sachem East Turkey Distance Meet 2025 Laia swims 500 Freestyle

Friday, Nov 21 2025

Laia's scrapbook

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

Laia 2 years old

Thursday, Nov 20 2025

Cryptarithm solution for DOUBLE TROUBLE

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.

Cryptarithm DOUBLE TROUBLE

Cryptarithm solution for DOUBLE TROUBLE

Cryptarithm proof for DOUBLE TROUBLE

Wednesday, Nov 19 2025

Cloudflare major outage

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.

A DownDetector checker for DownDetector

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