A couple of weeks back while traveling I had an opportunity to spend some time with an old colleague from my penetration testing days. Once upon a time we used to spend much of our time on the road, living out of suitcases, probably giving the TSA fits and generally living la vida Sneakers. I'm out of that particular game these days because it's just not my bag anymore. The colleague in question is more or less on the management side of things at that particular company. Contrary to what one might reasonably assume, however, we didn't spend a whole …
The Paperless Office - proper noun phrase - When the only reason your workplace seems to use no actual paper on a day to day basis is because the printer is always inoperable when someone needs to use it the most. This leads to everyone giving up on the printer entirely.
In September of 2019 a conference called Please Try This At Home was held in Pittsburgh, PA. One of the talks was given by Dr. Mixael Laufer on the topic of how to acquire pharmaceuticals such as mifepristone (local mirror) and misoprostol (local mirror) for emergency personal use. I spoke with Dr. Laufer and the person who made this recording, and they both agreed to let me post it for download and archival as long as I sent them the links to it. So, here it is.
basketball mode - noun phrase - When a service or application crashes and restarts itself over and over, i.e., bouncing like a basketball every few seconds. Considered an outage.
It seems as if another summer is rapidly coming to an end. The neighbors' kids are now back in school, school buses are now picking their way down the streets, and due to Burning Man coming up it's now possible to eat in a real restaurant in the Bay Area for the next couple of days. I've been pretty quiet lately, not because I've been spending any amount of time offline but because I've been spending more time doing stuff and just not writing it up. I've been tinkering with Systembot lately, adding functionality that I really have a need …
A common task that people using Huginn set up as their "Hello, world!" project is getting the daily weather report because it's practical, easy, and fairly well documented. However, the existing example is somewhat obsolete because it references the Weather Underground API that no longer exists, having been sunset at the end of 2018. Recently, the Weather Underground code in the Huginn Weather Agent was taken out because it's no longer usable. But, other options exist. The US National Weather Service has a free to use API that we can use with Huginn with a little extra work. Here's what …
DC AC - noun phrase (humorous) - The primary mechanism of air conditioning inside the DC Beltway. Notionally, the movement of air due to revolving doors caused by the never-ending cycle of contractors becoming civil servants, civil servants becoming lobbyists, and lobbyists forming startups and becoming government contractors once more.
profit harvesting - noun phrase - A polite name for the act of finding each and every little remaining way to gouge money from someone or out of some thing. Called nickel and diming when hard currency was more common.
