Boston

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On our flight to Iceland we had a long stay over at the airport in Boston for our Delta connection to Reykjavík. Kate had the very good idea that we should take a quick ferry across the harbor to down town Boston and explore a bit — which we did. We had never been to Boston before and haven't been since, but it looks like an interesting historic city.

I like the idea that you could easily skip across to the city on a ferry rather than be stuck in the airport waiting for hours. Since 9/11 I suppose that's no longer possible.

This note composed, and these photos scanned, in April 2021 during the COVID pandemic. In uncertain times we cherish the past.

Washington D.C.

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Kate had a meeting in Washington D.C. We made a bit of a trip of it and drove there with our friend Cindy.

Along the way we stopped in to see Punxsutawney Phil (oddly Jimmy Stewart is from the same town), Franklin Lloyd Wright's Falling Water and Jefferson's Monticello.

In Washington Cindy and I tramped around the mall taking in sites like the Vietnam War memorials, the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, the Holocaust Museum, some of the National Galleries, the Capitol itself and the old post office. We also visited the Washington Cathedral (which is far from the mall).

This note and the album need a lot more work ....

Ps. this note and photo album created during the COVID-19 lockdown in February of 2021.

Socket Programming

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This note was written in January of 2026 and filed to the date of the paper at left — the blog entry is a bit of a retrospective.

I worked in the Department of Information Technology Services at the University of Western Ontario (now called Western University) from 1984 until 1998 when I took a position as Sr. Tech. Security in the Department of Information Systems and Technology at the University of Waterloo. In both places I wrote a few technical papers and presented at conferences; very few of these have survived. Many are lost to time.

While browsing the internet the other day I bumped into a paper that had survived: "An Introduction to Socket Programming" filed away on the personal web page of Taieb Znati, Professor Emeritus, of the Computer Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh. The paper was prepared as a tutorial for my colleagues. There are copies elsewhere but it's fading fast.

I have copied the paper into my Google Drive to share; so it won't be lost. You can also, at least for the moment, follow the link to the copy at Pittsburgh.

The original paper includes a copyright notice:

Copyright 1991-97:

These notes are the property of the author, the Division of Information Technology Services (ITS), and the University of Western Ontario (UWO), London, Ontario Canada. Permission is granted to freely copy and distribute provided that No charge is applied and due credit is given to the author, ITS and UWO.