Writings from a Philadelphia Software Engineer…
I don’t normally like to talk about these sorts of things, but I am not only getting older, I am also mortal. So I just wanted to put out there that if something does happen to me some day, I wrote a blog post expressing my final wishes.
Now back to your regularly scheduled blogging. 🙂
I found myself between jobs a short awhile ago, and suddenly had a few weeks of downtime. Since I had an open invitation to visit Sweden and Denmark from friends living there, I figured I would take the opportunity and head over. I took a few pictures, and noted some observations about those countries.
If you want to take a package tour and see the parts of the country that are tourist attractions, feel free. But you’ll get much more out of the experience if you know locals who can show you things that they think are interesting. I was fortunate to know both Pinky Fennec and Joel Fox, who were more than happy to host me while I visited.
The train system in Stockholm is pretty extensive. Trains and busses run pretty much everywhere you’d want to go. Both systems used a wireless card that you could buy with a week’s worth of fare, and just swipe it at the turn style or at the front of the bus. Subway stations had displays above the tracks stating how much time until the next train would arrive. When bus schedules said that busses arrived on the quarter of every hour, they meant it.
It was also pretty much the same in Copenhagen, except I spent more time on busses. The bus service there was simply phenomenal. They had busses that would arrive every 8 minutes, and they meant it. I regularly commuted from a friend’s place on the outskirts of Copenhagen to the central part of the city every single day.
Getting from city to city was also fun. I rode on what amounted to the Swedish version of Amtrak from Stockholm to Copenhagen. It was a single train ride, about 400 miles in 5 hours. That’s an average of 80 mph, but with the stops we made I’d say we did somewhere between 90 and 100 mph most of the time. The train ride was exceptionally smooth, and several times when we started moving I thought that the train next to us was moving. Naturally, these trains were also on time.
Continue reading “An American’s Visit to Sweden and Denmark”…please read this web page.
This page is here so that if something happens leaving me in a state where I am no longer able to run my websites, people will know what to do.
While I have no plans of buying a farm anytime soon, sometimes accidents and sudden illness happen. That also means that if I am in a persistent coma of some kind, or have a terminal condition, please don’t keep me on life support for months or resuscitate me–just let me pass on peacefully.
I designate Samuel C. Conway, PhD as my virtual executor to organize such things. In the event that Sam is not available, then I designate Tom Geller as virtual executor. They’ll know what to do, or know people who will.
All my websites – Including (but not limited to) this one, IsSeptaFucked.com, and SeptaStats.com, Sam (or someone he designates) should be the new webmaster/site admin. Please keep the websites operational where possible. Where appropriate, pages should contain a note about what happened. Please update this page with a link as well.
I would prefer that my social media be kept in situ. If you don’t speak Latin, that means “leave it the hell alone!” My Facebook security settings allow anyone to post on my wall, and having had a few of my own friends pass away in recent years, it was really nice reading comments and notes left by their friends and loved ones. I’d love if my friends did the same for me on my Facebook wall.
In a little more detail, that means I’d like my Facebook account to be memorialized. For Twitter, if you’re able to get control of my Twitter account, a pinned message will work nicely. If not, some tweets from friends mentioning my passing and funeral stuff that show up when searching “to:dmuth” should suffice.
Anything that is publicly available on my GitHub account should already be available under an open source license. If it’s not, please consider the Apache 2.0 License.
My family has a series of plots purchased in a cemetery, I will leave it to them to bury me there. I expect something about cheetahs written on my tombstone. I mean it! While friends are welcome to come to my funeral, I’d rather there be a Celebration of Life held weeks/months after my passing so that friends can travel from further distances to attend. A hotel would be an ideal spot for this. Having alcohol on hand for guests would be a really good idea. I expect my friends to laugh, cry, and damage their livers while talking shit about me.
For anything else, contact Sam or Tom.
Oh, and I’ll miss all of you. Even the cheetahs.
Updates:
(Based on Aaron Swartz’s page)