Just this evening, I finished a Sudoku puzzle on my phone using the Sudoku Premium appat the “evil” level, which is actually quite hard. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing Sudoku puzzles more frequently , both in paper and on my iPhone app. Initially, I gravitated towards “medium” levels, but have progressed to more and more difficultly as my focus has improved and I’ve refined a few logic tricks.

Yesterday, my wife and I announced to our family and friends that we’re expecting our fifth child. It’s sort of mind-boggling that we are up to five - in most first-world countries today, that’s definitely not the norm. In fact, for the United States in 2017, the total fertility rate (TFR) is only 1.8 children, which is below the “replacement rate” of slightly more than 2.0 for industrialized countries. I guess all that really is saying is that we have a “big family”. And it’s getting bigger.

Have you ever felt the conflict of what you knew was the “right thing” to do, but were faced with a reality that was diametrically opposed to that standard? During a team teleconference today at work, my project manager reluctantly told the client, “I guess we’ll start into development, even though the designs aren’t done.” The reason for this apparent breach of best practice was that our project deadlines were so short that we had to get started or we would never finish on time.

I’ve recently been re-discovering an app I purchased almost a year ago, but never really started to use seriously. Pythonista is a full-featured IDE for Python that runs on iOS, and it’s really quite impressive. When I initially heard about the app, and decided (on a whim) to shell out the full $9.99 to download it, and I poked around in the examples a bit. Initially, I was impressed; the app has tons of cool coding potential, but for me it likely wouldn’t get more use than simply showing off the examples to friends. “Look! I can code on my iPhone and do cool things, like check my battery level using code… and stuff.”

I don’t have an email app on my smartphone right now - and that’s OK. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, my emails stay out in the cloud and wait for me to get to them, even if it takes a few hours or even a day. In my not so distant past, I can think of a time when I would have been horrified not to have my email available on my phone. But right now, there’s no sign of an email app, and I’m pretty happy with that!