USPS is in financial trouble. That's been pretty well documented recently. Most reasonable people will recognize that the USPS is both an important service and while it receives no taxpayer support would be profitable were it not for the GOP imposing unfair and unrealistic pension funding requirements in 2006. Although I'm an ardent supporter of the post office and feel that privatization of such an important intuition would be criminal today I want to talk about some small repercussions of so many things going to email rather than snail mail.

Yesterday was the start of Passover and like many others we weren't able to physically gather with friends and family to celebrate. Since the Talmud, unlike the NYC Dept of Education, doesn't seem to ban Zoom, like many others, we used Zoom to connect with family. Tonight we'll do it again. In the meantime, I thought I'd share this small bit of research Natan did a couple of years ago on a traditional part of the seder: A Historically Informed Echad Mi Yodea

Preamble I've never accepted a guest post before but when my friend and long time colleague JonAlf Dyrland-Weaver said he had something to say I was all for it. JonAlf's one of the best teachers I know - he started at Brandeis HS and has been at Stuy forever. Really sharp guy, great teacher, and really perceptive. When he has something to say it's 100% worth listening to. To JonAlf - since I know this is one of my blog posts you'll actually read - you should set up a blog of your own.

<figure class="z_image_center"><img src="/img/carrot-cake.jpg"/> </figure> Not my normal post but these are not normal times. Besides, this isn't the first recipe I've posted. I'm one of those that will, as long as supplies allow, bake and cook my way through our shelter in. Today I made Brazilian carrot cake. It's not quite the same as an American carrot cake as you'll see from the recipe below. First, carrot cake rules:

I was talking to a friend yesterday who had just started doing grad work in school leadership. It got me thinking about my original career plans and how you never know where you're going to end up. Well, not my original original career plans. When I started on Wall Street I had no idea what the future would bring. For all I knew, I could have been a career professional programmer or even gone over to the business side.

Happy new year to everyone. I've been reading some prediction posts this morning on blogs and social media. Big national and world level stuff. I've never been much for predictions so I thought I'd share some more local and personal things I'm looking forward to in the coming year. First a couple of big ones. I'm just about to complete my fourth year at Hunter. Time really does fly. It's been a long road but late in 2019 NY State finally approved our CS Teacher Certification programs!

No, this post is not about the Waterfall development model. Devorah and I had a chance to take a little vacation up north. First stop, Niagara Falls. <br clear="all"> We did the Canada side 9 years ago when we did our Erie Canal bike trip (you can read about that by checking out some of my early blog posts). This time, the American side. My take is that the Canadian side is more polished and all private attractions - think Times Square or Disney.

I spent today at Codeland, a one day conference in NYC designed for developers in the early stages of their careers. Just as at CSTA, I was there with the GitHub contingent. Codeland had talks and a keynote in a common auditorium, smaller breakout workshops and a couple of small vendor areas. I spent most of the morning upstairs in the GitHub lounge so I onl caught part of one morning talk.

There were a bunch of threads on the 10X Developer recently. You know - that mythical beast that's 10 times more productive than the regular software engineer. I didn't see any of the original threads but I'm guessing they started with "your startup needs them" and then moved to the "they can't work with anyone" along with tons of fun tongue and cheek 1X engineer tweets. It got me thinking about 10X students.

I'm a big fan of E Ink e-readers. I had one a number of years ago. An Aztak EZ Reader. It was great. Small, cheap, and independent - that is, not tied in to Amazon or Barnes and Nobles and I found myself doing a lot more recreational reading with it. I still preferred paper for technical books but for easy reading there was nothing like having tons of reading options always available.