Today is pain management day. He hurts but they already got him up and standing. Real food before long.

The nurse assures me that bitranch is doing extremely well for 15 hours post surgery.

HAPPIEST OF STATUS UPDATES: Bill is through surgery, now being settled into the ICU.

I'm headed over there to hug him (oh so carefully).

My husband @bitranch is having open heart surgery today so if there was ever a time to send me jokes and cat photos, this is it.

Giving compliments is one of the easiest things we can do make someone happy - so why are we so stingy with our praise? The more people believe that one good turn deserves another, the more likely they are to follow a compliment with a helpful deed. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210722-why-we-dont-dole-out-many-compliments-but-should

Overheard: "I think he’s finally put a down payment on a clue."

"That poses the question: how many rounds of interviews should it take for an employer to reasonably assess a candidate before the process veers into excess?"
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210727-the-rise-of-never-ending-job-interviews

A cat walks into a bar. The bartender says, "What'll you have?"

The cat says, "A shot of rum."

The bartender pours the cat his drink.

The cat slowly pushes the shot off the table. "Another."

Can you name any of the fastest-selling books of all time? In the United States? Maybe. But people tend to focus on the best-selling books, which is slightly different.
https://bookriot.com/what-are-the-fastest-selling-books-in-u-s-publishing-history

"Proteins from yeast make craft beers distinct from beers from larger breweries." https://www.futurity.org/craft-beer-mass-spectrometry-taste-2609242/

You might like this if you...
...had the good fortune of playing Monkey Island back in 1990 on a PC clone...
...while listening to the crappy-yet-magnificent PC-speaker music...
...and you also have a tech/nerdy disposition...
https://www.thanassis.space/monkeyisland.html

It me.

"People, by and large, are bad at probability. We turn high odds into certainties, as when people assume that the accuracy of PCR tests for COVID means they’ll always yield correct results, or when we think of relatively unlikely events, like catching the virus after being fully vaccinated, as impossible. And in between 100 percent certainty and zero chance, the way we interpret any given number can change radically based on how that probability is expressed."
https://www.theopennotebook.com/2021/05/11/fat-chance-writing-about-probability/

What do you wish you'd known earlier about setup and support for conference rooms?

There's a lot of discussion in some communities about offices redesigning meeting rooms, with the expectation that the in-person conference always will have remote participation. That means more attention to mics and camera and other audiovideo equipment -- and, I'm guessing, more emergency calls to IT (or whom?) when there are problems.

What advice would you offer a sysadmin who's new to this?

Airlines succeed about 95 percent of the time in reuniting travelers with bags that go astray, but with 25 million misdirected suitcases each year, that still leaves a lot of orphaned belongings. https://www.messynessychic.com/2021/07/20/where-americas-lost-luggage-ends-up/

For Victorian writers, clothes made the ghost. https://daily.jstor.org/the-dressy-ghosts-of-victorian-literature/

"The concept of the antilibrary has completely changed my mindset when it comes to unread books. Unread books can be as powerful as the ones we have read, if we choose to consider them in the right light." https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary

We cannot understand changes in our political situation by focusing only on individuals. We also need to understand how our networks of social interaction have changed, and why those changes have affected our ability, as a group, to form reliable beliefs. https://nautil.us/issue/100/outsiders/why-misinformation-is-about-who-you-trust-not-what-you-think-rp

NASA has developed an interactive map so you can see exactly where the NASA Perseverance rover has been. https://screenrant.com/perseverance-rover-mars-map-nasa-interactive/