ablumeditation - verb - The act of taking a bath or shower to take a break from working on a problem, in the hope that insight will strike.

sharkfinning - verb, gerund - Learning something from scratch in an entirely hands-on way, which is to say, "Swimming with the sharks."  When you don't know what you're doing or how to do it, but you have a job to do.

Some time ago I began a search for a decent note-taking tool that I could carry around with me.  For many years I was a devotee of the notes.txt file on my desktop, constantly open in a text editor so I could add and refer to it as necessary.  When that ceased to scale I turned to software that replicated the legions of sticky notes on my desks at work and home, such as Tomboy.  And that worked well enough for a while, but when I started relying upon my mobile more and more for things it too stopped being as useful as I wanted it to be.  For about a year I turned to Simplenote, which is pretty much what it says on the tin: It's a note-taking system with a nice web interface, applications on all of the platforms that I use regularly, and even a command line utility which I used to back up my notes a couple of times a day.  However, Simplenote is a centralized service and there is always a risk that it could go away at any time.  At the very least, the switchover to the Simperium API could have caused problems in the near term for me, and I have enough on my plate these days that I didn't feel like fighting that particular war.  So, the search for a replacement that relied more upon my own infrastructure than someone else's began.

Faraday roundtable - noun phrase - A meeting conducted entirely offline.  All portable devices and computers are powered down, and ideally locked inside conductive and grounded containers to prevent radio transmissions from reaching or being emitted from same.  Similarly, no active computers are permitted at the meeting.  The proceedings of such a meeting are carried out using Chatham house rules.

Named for the Faraday cage.

Long time readers are probably wondering where I've been lately.  The answer is kind of long and is worth a post all on its own.  The short version of the story is, work's been eating me alive lately.  This is our busiest time of year and it's been all hands on deck for a couple of weeks now.  In point of fact, last week was our quarterly all-hands meeting, where everybody on my team was flown into town for a solid week of meetings.  All day, every day.  Most of my visible activity lately took the form of parts of my exocortex running on automatic with some hit-and-run posting while waiting for the coffee maker at work to top me up in between meetings.

This also means that I haven't had a whole lot of patience for interacting with people.  Not in the sense that people can feel frustrated with other people or their actions, but in the sense that interacting with people in a meaningful way - having a real conversation - takes more compute cycles than I have available right now.  After fourteen hours in a conference room with 40 other people, not only am I out of social, but I'm mentally exhausted.

Earlier this year I got back into urban hiking by taking up war walking again around home.  Not too long after that, I started picking up buzz that upcoming versions of Android are specifically not going to make it easy (or probably possible) to wardrive or war walk by changing how the wifi drivers work.  By this, I mean they're making it possible to trigger a wireless scan once every two minutes instead of whenver you ask it to.  Unsurprisingly, if you read through that ticket's comments this is going to break a lot of other applications out there, but when you're the 500 pound gorilla you can pretty much dictate terms, and to hell with what your users actually ask for.

Yeah, I'm still bitter about that.  Moving on.

squirrel clever - noun complex - The state of being extremely smart when it comes to figuring out how to do something.  Notably, this does not include figuring out whether or not one should do something.

As the title of this post implies, I've been working on some stuff lately that's been taking up enough compute cycles that I haven't been around to post much.  Some of this is due to work, because we're getting into the really busy time of year and when I haven't been at work I've been relaxing.  Some of this is due to yet another run of dental work that, while it hasn't really been worth writing about has resulted in my going to bed and sleeping straight through until the next day.  And some of it's due to my hacking on a new project that wound up being... not as hard as I'd imagined it would be, but there certainly has been a steep learning curve.

It seems that there is another influx of refugees from a certain social network that's turned into a never ending flood of bile, vitriol, and cortisol into what we call the Fediverse, a network of a couple of thousand websites running a number of different applications that communicate with each other over a protocol called ActivityPub.  Ultimately, the Fediverse is different from Twitter and Facebook in that it's not run as a for-profit entity. There are no analytics, no suggestions of "thought leaders" you might want to follow, no automated curation of the posts you can see versus the ones you really want to see.  Socially speaking, you don't find people carefully polishing their brands or trying to game hashtag trends but instead everything from somebody kicking back after work with a cup of coffee to people carefully archiving the firmware of classic computer hardware to in-jokes about pineapples.  Rather than fame, you get people.

But that's not what I want to talk about.  I've been asked by a couple of people to post a brief tutorial of how I interfaced my Huginn instance with mastodon.social, the Mastodon instance that I spend most of my time hanging out on.

onboarding suppository - noun complex - The massive volume of data that a new hire has to assimilate and comprehend before they can understand what they're supposed to be working on to any meaningful extent.