Blowing up the Holidays

As a special Christmas present to myself, I’m solving a problem and making a positive improvement to my environment.  Using Perl and gnuplot.  I’m not going to share the actual code, for two reasons:  one, it’s very specific to an in-house problem, and two, I use a programming technique I call “iterative petulance.”

So instead, here’s something for the holidays:  land mines.

Land mines are bad.  Land mines that we’ve left lying around are really bad.  Clearing abandoned land mines is hard, dangerous, and expensive work.  My new favorite charity clears these landmines inexpensively and safely… using rats.  No, you don’t herd rats across minefields.  Hero Rats are trained to smell explosives, and are too small to set off the mines.

Most of us have too much stuff.  Why not adopt a rat for someone instead of giving them yet more stuff?

Hopefully, I’ll be doing something technically interesting early next year.  In the meantime, happy holidays!