Knickknacks, Swag, & Pieces of Flair

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

October 2, 2024 was my last day at my job as a Principal Software Engineer for Cloud ID at Synacor. Originally hired on September 3, 2013 as a Web Operations Engineer I was culled in the “Synapocalypse” in March, 2014. After re-applying for a Configuration Engineer position I was rehired on April 14, 2014 and kept increasing my position until it was finally obsoleted.

Over the 10+ years of corporate work I acquired a hefty lot of company bling. This posting is to go over all the captured “shinies” and reminisce about how awesome and excessive some things can really be.

Read More

Two of every set…

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

My youngest brother and I have birthdays with a difference of 18 months and 14 days. While that’s not a mathematical marvel in any way it’s been interesting in finding pairs of famous people that either share exactly or are close to our birthdays.

The birthday problem asks for the probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, at least two will share a birthday. The birthday paradox refers to the counterintuitive fact that only 23 people are needed for that probability to exceed 50%. This isn’t representative of anyone having my exact birthday which is 1 in 365, but also my brothers birthday which is also 1 in 365. Combining those odds (1 in 133,225) and finding a pair of people considered famous or well-known in some way makes the odds out of this world.

Except the odds seem to favor our pairing, and thus the following…

Read More

livejournal + archive

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

A long, long time ago I used to be known as livejournal userinfo.gifkraqur on livejournal. Although that site has sailed along with it’s previous creator Brad Fitzpatrick, archive.org seem to have some amazing historical snapshots that I feel need to be rehomed here.

So, this is just going to be a sourced squabbling of my early blogging/journaling days, complete with cross-references to livejournal userinfo.gifniffynoo‘s journal, of whom was my on-and-off girlfriend-soon-to-be-wife-then-ex-wife.

Read More