A while back, I switched from DSL to Cable Internet. My awesome ISP, TekSavvy, sent me a loaner cable modem – a SmartRG 808AC. It worked well, despite a few quirks, but lately I’ve noted that the internet would drop out for a few minutes at a time. I was able to deduce that the modem seems to be rebooting itself, but I had no idea how often it was happening.

One challenge of working on a distributed team is keeping track of everyone’s time zone. Most of my immediate team are Europe-based, and my colleagues in the Open Source Mano project are spread across the world. That makes timely collaboration complex. I often need to coordinate a task with someone several timezones away. If I miss them, I have to wait until my next day to talk to them. Not very efficient.

I belong to a few handfuls of mailing list, message forum, and Facebook group dedicated to Genealogy. Every so often, someone discovers that a picture, story, or details from their ancestor has been copied and added to a stranger’s family tree and is very upset. Often, their reaction is to make their research private, so no one can see it.