If you haven't been paying attention to social media lately (and for the sake of your mental health, I hope you haven't - ye gods, the world...) I got laid off in the last week of October without warning. A not entirely unprecedented early morning meeting rapidly turned into being told that my position was being eliminated, effective immediately. This was immediately followed by my work laptop and phone factory resetting themselves, while I was in the middle of typing a "so long and thanks for all the fish" message to my now-ex-cow-orkers. 1 So …
Hi, folks. I don't ordinarily address everybody directly like this. It never feels right. Just not my thing, you know?
Anyway, this is for folks who have my RSS or ATOM feeds in their feed readers. I really appreciate it - not enough folks use feeds these days or have presences outside of the walled gardens. However, there isn't any need to poll my site every ten minutes. Or every five minutes. I appreciate your enthusiasm (I really do), but I only post once or twice a month. There's no need to hammer the server quite so hard. Checking once a …
Yes, I know that's not what Shakespeare meant. Not like that's ever stopped anybody in marketing or people with too much money and hungry for more.
Okay. You've been inundated in what the industry is calling AI technology for months on end. I don't need to introduce it because the only way you could have avoided it is to have been in the middle of nowhere for the last year 1 or so. I would ordinarily have said "in a coma" but the way word gets around it would surprise me not a bit if folks would be talking about …
I guess I'm as back on my game as I'm likely to be for the forseeable future. I finished the run of paxlovid a couple of weeks back and things only recently stopped tasting like soap. I still get tired pretty quickly. It's not unusual for me to fall asleep around 2300 hours local time, give or take, but I wake up feeling fairly decent. My lungs are still pretty irritated, which has necessitated adding a hit of advair from an inhaler twice daily. Said advair was prescribed because I was using my rescue inhaler to get asthma attacks under …
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 …
Someone asked me why these blog posts are always backdated. The reason is that I can't write about a day's that's happened until that day's... happened. Plus, if I wrote it up late at night and posted it, probably nobody would see it (the churn of social media being what it is). And, it seems wrong to liveblog somebody's impending death. Especially my mom's.
I guess the cat's out of the bag.
Yesterday morning when I woke up, I made myself breakfast and coffee and then took Dora outside in her stroller for some fresh air. Around my second cup …
Not too long ago I got fed up with how good a job Duckduckgo's site search feature wasn't doing. No matter what I did I couldn't find dick around here. And, folksonomies being what they are, unless you plan them (and then they won't be folksonomies) you probably won't remember what tags you used. It's frustrating to get get lost in what amounts to your own house. So, one night I got well and fed up and decided to put some of my spare computing power to use. I did a walk-around of my exocortex and figured out that Jackpoint …
Late last year I posted that I'd migrated my website to a new blogging package called Pelican, which is a static site generator. If you noticed that my site's been screamingly fast lately, that's why. My site doesn't have to be rendered one page at a time with PHP on the server, and it also doesn't use one of Dreamhost's likely overloaded database servers as its back end. However, this brings a couple of drawbacks. Logically, a site made out of static HTML5 pages doesn't have a control panel to log into, so there isn't any way of controlling how …
