Ana Rusu

Marcus Aurelius at four in the morning

How the Meditations read on a night shift. Book 5.1 is written for people who choose when their day starts. 8.36 is the one that gets me to five in the morning.

EXPLAIN ANALYZE has never lied to me

A support query that took 13.8 seconds, a report that timed out at 300, and a fix that turned out to be statistics rather than an index. Real plans, Postgres 18.2.

Your starter is not dead, it is cold and bored

Almost nobody's starter is dead. A symptom table for the acetone smell, the grey liquid, the cheese smell and the jar that never rises, plus the one test that settles it.

A case binding in nine steps and one failure

Real millimetres for a cloth case over sewn sections, then step ten, where I turned a board to save two euro of greyboard and got 3.8 mm of warp.

I lost a won endgame and I want you to see it

A Lucena position I knew cold, and the one move on move 61 where I stopped asking which piece was supposed to move. Full annotation, clock times included.

Sea slugs are the best argument against design

Stolen harpoons, stolen chloroplasts, disposable genitals, and a slug that throws away its own body and grows another. None of it looks planned.

My sky is not dark and I have the numbers

Two years of SQM-L readings from one hole in my lawn, the night a floodlight went up next door, and what 0.33 mag/arcsec^2 costs in hours.

The Latin name is Aplysia punctata and it looks like a wet slipper

Five animals from one stretch of Cornish shore: a sea hare that inks with its own lunch, an anemone eater, a limpet, a cushion star, a barnacle.

The five sentences in every fraudulent management letter

Five sentence archetypes I keep finding in letters management writes to auditors and boards, what each one is doing, and which one I circle in red.

Blitz ruined my calculation and I fixed it in 400 games

Four hundred tracked games, blunder rates by time control, and the two rules that halved mine. Includes every reason my own numbers should not convince you.