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You might be wondering why I've been up on my bullshit about adblocking and web browsers lately. Privacy issues aside there's a story behind this (which, if you know me, should be entirely unsurprising).
It hasn't been any particular secret that I've been living in the Bay Area for the last decade or so. I'm sorry to say that some of the stereotypes of Silicon Valley are, in fact, true and partially to blame for my encroaching kinetic pattern baldness. One of these things is the compulsive propensity to gather every last scrap of user information, no matter how trivial …
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Note: As I wrote this article, I realized that there wasn't much in the way of actual tutorial documentation for some of this stuff. So, I'll be revisiting it in the near future to rewrite parts in such a way to fit this purpose.
If you keep your ear to the ground about the online world, you might have heard something about Google gearing up to break adblocking, ostensibly as a way to crack down on malicious Chrome addons on a wide scale. As a bit of background, Google isn't really a search company because web search doesn't actually bring …
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Over the summer of 2022.ev, scholar.social (a node of the Fediverse that has cultivated a community of teachers, instructors, librarians, and academics of all stripes) held their biannual online conference called Summer School (Winter School, of course, is the other one). Summer/Winter School is described as an interdisciplinary online conference where denizens of the Fediverse could present their work and hold classes, predicated upon the belief that knowledge should be free and accessible to everyone. I finally heard about this year's conference before the fact and, as luck would have it I had a proposal for a …
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Note: I'm retraining on a new keyboard as I write this, so I apologize for any egregious typos in advance.
Over on birbsite a couple of weeks back a thread was spun up about your worst fuckup on the job and I figured that, because it's been nearly twenty years I'd tell my worst story. However, much to my chagrin and concern I found that I'd bobbled a few of the details. Seeing as how it was one of my career's formative moments this scared me quite a bit. I'd been considering putting some work in on my memoirs anyway …
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Disclaimer: This blog post is not legal advice. Nothing in this post or my site in general are legal advice. I am not a lawyer. I just want to reassure folks who might be nervous about jury duty.
A couple of weeks ago I got one of those little cards in the mail that said that I had been tapped for jury duty. Since I moved to the Bay Area about a decade ago, I get them every couple of months so it wasn't really a big deal. However, this was the first time that I actually had to go …
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"The truth of the world is that is is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control, the truth is far more frightening; no one is in control, the world is rudderless."
--Alan Moore
I've been thinking about that quote a lot lately.
In the month or so since my last post I've been basically keeping my head above water and trying to live as productive a life as possible. It's easier than it sounds, oddly, but it costs a lot …
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"Well, my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle."
--Mal Reynolds, Firefly
I've been relying heavily upon timed posts these last few weeks because my mental health has been forcing me to choose between being able to get essential stuff done (read: work) and, well, anything else. Come the end of the (work) day, all I have the compute cycles to do is goof off with a side of doomscrolling (because when I don't I get blindsided by The Next Damned Thing). Mostly, seeing the world operate on Covid Standard Time is disheartening and the …
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Well, I've uploaded the latest version of my .plan file once again. All the usual warnings and advisories apply.
You know, at some point I'm going to run out of ways to signal that I've updated that file again. I keep the contents of my site in a git repo (several of them, actually) with each post post in a separate file. The filename of a given post makes up the slug of the post when it goes live. Every filename in the repo, logically, has to be unique.
After the events of today (it's the last week of May …
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Yesterday M.Belanger mentioned over on birbsite putting together a 2022 GenX rage mixtape, which got me thinking along the same lines. Even though due to a number of factors, to be perfectly honest with everyone, I don't enjoy music anymore and haven't for a couple of years, that doesn't mean that I've bulk erased everything about music from my long-term memory. So, here's my "I grew up GenX, was told that the world was going to end when World War III happened, every promise was broken" mixtape. Every song was one I used to rock out to.
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shark mode - noun phrase - The state in which a given piece of software is sufficiently developed that it doesn't really need any additional work, save to keep it working in more modern environments. Comes from the idea that sharks haven't evolved notably in millions of years because they haven't had to. They're so perfectly suited to their environment that any changes are minimal at best.
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