Getting the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade is the entire point.
Read more...
-
-
War walking with a Raspberry Pi 0 W.
You've probably noticed from the datestamps of my last couple of weeks worth of posts that they were autoposted by an agent. This is because work has taken a turn for the extremely busy and I haven't had the time or the energy to write anything in particular; certainly nothing really useful. Rather than wasting everybody's time I decided to relax a bit by picking up an older project, namely a new war walking rig and making it work. Since I wrote that original post a few more security updates have come out for my phone and broke not only …
Read more...
-
Neologism: @here grenade
@here grenade - noun phrase - The act of tagging a message @here (meaning, everyone) in a crowded Slack channel (users >= 100), causing everyone who's busy but monitoring to drop whatever they're doing and flame you for bothering them by messaging @here. Normally done by a user trying to get a response to a maximum severity ticket that's been ignored for longer than the SLA.
Example: "PFY threw an @here grenade into the #tech-support channel because the border router was on fire and the admins on call were ignoring their pagers. He got kicked but at least the outage is over."
Read more...
-
Neologism: Proper channels excise tax
Proper channels excise tax - noun phrase - The markup paid on commonplace things when you go through proper channels at work to do something rather than going rogue, buying it yourself and filing an expense report. For example, a flight from Chicago to Boston might cost $176us if you paid for it yourself, but by using your employer's internal processes and vendors the cost of the same flight is closer to $630us.
Read more...
-
Neologism: Trapdoor goalposts
Trapdoor goalposts - noun phrase - When two or more requirements are set up so that meeting one automatically means failing another. This is a bad faith argument whereby it is impossible to meet the requirements someone sets, without admitting refusal to allow the outcome the other person desires.
Example:
"If you're making a decent income you can't possibly talk about poverty, you don't know what you're talking about."
"I'm actually below the poverty line."
"You just want a handout!"Read more...
-
Neologism: Taxonomic debt
Taxonomic debt - noun phrase - The time you spend learning arbitrary jargon at a new job.
Source: Bradford Stephens
Read more...
-
Neologism: Technical heresy
technical heresy - noun phrase - Openly demonstrating the imagination to come up with actual uses for a platform or application that it is currently popular to hate.
Read more...
-
Neologism: Maintenance contention
maintenance contention - noun phrase - When there is only one bathroom but two people need it for the exact same urgent thing.
Read more...
-
Neologism: Rotten egg dependency
rotten egg dependency - noun phrase - A service that a mission-critical application relies upon that nobody knows about but brings everything to a screaming halt when something happens to it. In a sane world, said dependency should have nothing at all to do with the thing that just crashed. Called this because it's as pleasant a surprise as a rotten easter egg at breakfast. Best explicated by the following haiku:
Read more...
-
Linux on the Dell XPS 15 Touch (9570)
UPDATED: 18 March 2019 - External display adapters that actually work with this model (and Arch Linux) added.
For various reasons, I found that I had a need to upgrade Windbringer's hardware very recently. This might be the first time that a catastrophic failure of some kind was not involved, so it's kind of a weird feeling to have two laptops side by side, one in process and one to do research as snags cropped up. This time around I bought a Dell XPS 15 Touch (9570) - I was expecting things to be substantially the same, but this did not seem …
Read more...
