In a Cambridge restaurant, a table away from mine:
Guy: … so anyway, Geneviève is totally my sugar mama now. What can I say, I like my women like I like my wine: rich, French, and full-bodied.
Girl with German Accent: And here I thought you were going to say “white, German, and having dinner with a chauvinist asshole.”
Much love, Dinner Girl.
In the four weeks that the ask me anything post has been up, I’ve received two questions. My father wanted to know when I was going to call my mother, and my mother asked what a “blog” was. The third question arrived just as I began typing this post. My friend Katherine, she of the photography critique, writes:
Oooh, I have a good one: when are you going to update your damn blog?
You know, if you’re having writer’s block, I could contribute as a guest writer. Then again, the only articles I can think of right now are “How to make awesome cheese sticks,” “The optical properties of cyanobacteria”, or “How to attract pallid, underweight, socially maladjusted men.” I could write any of these articles with some level of expertise, but none of them go well with the computer security theme.
Maybe we should have some guest articles.
Okay, no, I received over three hundred questions, which is remarkable because I didn’t even know there were 300 people on the Internet. I’ll start sorting out the questions and answering the best ones in the coming weeks. To help you pass the time until then, I’m including above a gratuitous photograph from Boothbay Harbor in Maine, shot on July 4th. Which is an American national holiday celebrating Thomas Edison’s invention of fireworks in 1776.
When I’m giving a talk that doesn’t have a firm time limit, I like to end it with an Ask Me Anything™ segment, which I briefly described before:
That’s where I brilliantly field all questions I can answer, and make up incredibly convincing answers for any I can’t. (In the past, I’ve been asked about computer science, geophysics, abstract algebra, and British post-modern literary theory. Really.)
As an experiment, we’ll try to do the same right here. If you have a question for me, ask away in the comments. Ideally you would ask about things like systems security, programming, scalable systems and Python, but I’ll take humorous questions about education, technology, educational technology, math, British post-modern literary theory and just about any other subject. The questions you leave won’t show up below this post, but I’ll read them all and answer any interesting ones in a followup post. Bonus points for making me think, and don’t be shy. And please don’t ask why I’m so handsome — there’s just no accounting for good genes.
(Update, July 28th: questions are now closed.)
Feed available for your pleasure.
