CW: Stuff about medicine, post-surgical care, and cancer. Feel free to close the tab if you need to.
It's been a couple of weeks since my last update. I was working on a different post in my spare time but I'm not entirely pleased with how it's turning out, plus I think it needs a lot more work, so I thought it'd be easier to write about the last week and change. By "easier," I mean "easier to write," not "easier to handle."
A little over a week ago, on the 21st of August, I was killing time with mom …
It seems that every blogger, at one point or other, has to write a thinkpiece about whether or not college is relevant or worthwhile in the 21st century. I seem to have some spare time on my hands, and I haven't bothered t write one yet, so I figured that I might as well. I've been out of college for about seventeen years as I write this, so I haven't completely forgotten everything about the experience. Unfortunately, because I can only speak to my experience in education, this text will be unavoidably skewed in the direction of my perspective.
CW: Stuff about medicine, post-surgical care, and wounds. Feel free to close the tab if you need to.
This won't be easy for me to write, mostly because I'm tired, scatterbrained, and trying to put everything in some kind of order. I'm pretty stressed out and my allergies aren't helping, either. It's also been difficult to find ideas to put together right now.
Cancer is a nasty adversary. It runs you down, robs you of your strength, and tries to steal away your dignity. The overall supply of dignity in the world right now is starting to run low and …
Now that HOPE has wrapped, here's video recording of the panel that the_gibson, Tek, R¥, c0debabe, and I gave at HOPE 2020 this year, entitled Saving Hacking From Zaibatsus: A Memoir.
Observant readers may have been wondering why I seemed to drop off the grid for a couple of days. Timed posts kept going up as expected, and undoubtedly other socnets seemed like they were being operated by my exocortex (which they were, for the most part). You've probably been wondering what happened.
You know what? Fuck it. I don't have the compute cycles right now to do a proper intro. I count it as fortune that I have the compute cycles just to type this right now. There's no easy or polite way to talk about it. My concentration is …
It's going on summer in the Bay Area, which means that it's warming up a bit both outside and inside (because air conditioning is Not A Thing out here). That, coupled with the not inconsiderable research infrastructure I have at home has left me wondering and worrying about just how hot my office gets during the day while I'm working. Now, I could just put a simple little thermometer on my shelf (and I did) but my concerns are a bit bigger than that. What happens if my office temperature reaches a critical point and servers start melting down on …
code puce - noun phrase - An IT or ops situation in which the software installed in production is one version and the management system expects a different version. This results in a situation in which everything is running more or less smoothly, and at the same time everything in the monitoring system is going bonkers. Compare with code red, code blue, and so forth.
I have no idea how long I've been in quarantine. I've stopped counting because the numbers were just making me twitchy. Life is going about as well as one could reasonably expect. We're all save and sound in northern California, as much as we can be during a pandemic. Working from home is working from home. To minimize risk we're getting as much stuff delivered as we can, modulo periodic trips to the local pharmacy to pick up filled prescriptions and suchlike. I wish I could say the same of things back home in Pennsylvania, but I'd be lying and …
