I've been asking myself that very question, every morning, for the last couple of weeks. The job hunt continues as well as before, which is to say not well at all. The only really noteworthy things that have happened were a couple of recruiters thinking that they were being cute by saying things that are highly inadvisable under any circumstances 1, and one "interview offer" (not even a job offer) for a security position which it would seem was a bait-and-switch to get me to sign up for yet another job hunting service that is a black hole for job …
While tinkering with a new project last week that involved my old BBS tagline database I rediscovered the tagline that I used as the title of this post. I've been trying to keep up with my pattern of posting at least once every month but it's been hard, what with everything going on. Out of an abundance of caution I ran a post I'd been working on past my lawyer for advice and was informed that I should refrain from publishing it, even with multiple disclaimers because we live in a time that would have given Cardinal Richelieu an erection …
It's been another one of those months, where just enough is going on that it's hard to keep track of what, actually, is going on, but not so much that it's impossible to put together and write about. Yet, weirdly it's ideal for lots of shower thoughts that, individually, don't add up to a whole lot. It's the exact opposite of a sweet spot for somebody with ADD. So I'm more or less forcing myself to sit down and write this to keep values in those registers. It's undoubtedly going to suck but I figure I have enough editing time …
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 …
"Don't follow me, I don't know where I'm going either."
--Unknown
Since I got my last big project finished up I've been trying to figure out what to do with myself. A certain amount of debugging was involved (as one might reasonably expect), culminating with the microSD card in my weather station tanking with terminal corruption (such that the card's on-board controller permanently locked it read-only). I'm fairly sure this was due to the card being used outside; enclosure aside the thermal cycling of the natural day/night cycle probably wrecked the silicon. I've since replaced it with an industrial-grade …
Things seem to have calmed down a little so I've had more compute cycles free to do stuff. The last week at work was uncommonly... I don't want to say "uneventful," but "less eventful." This left me a little time to work on some projects that have been hanging fire for the last month or two.
Mom's estate is still in a holding pattern, more or less. I'm still trying to get through to her tax preparer, with no success. I've also reached out to the estate attorney I'm working …
Many of the horrors of the last four years are over and not a few of us are sleeping much better, mostly because we have to spend less time keeping our eyes and sensor networks open to catch the latest way that we or people we care about might have the worth of our lives decreased even more. That's not to say that things are perfect, just a couple of points better for more people. The covid-19 plague is still on, unfortunately. Vaccinations are still extremely difficult …
The archival community has a saying: LOCKSS. Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe.
Ultimately, if you trust someone else to hold your data for you there is always a chance that the service can disappear, taking your stuff with it. A notorious case in point is Google - the Big G has terminated so many useful services that there is an online graveyard dedicated to them. Some years ago a company called Code Spaces, which was in pretty much the same business as Github was utterly destroyed in an attack. Whoever cracked them got into their Amazon EC2 control panel left …
Disclaimer: This post has lots of links to the Adafruit website. There are no referral links, I received no consideration, I just buy parts from there and do cool things with them.
A couple of ~~~weeks~~~ months ago I did a writeup of a prototype environment monitoring device for my office built out of a Raspberry Pi Zero W and some off the shelf components. In the time since I've found time here and there to work on the embedded version, which doesn't use a full computer system but a microcontroller with just enough functionality to drive a couple of …
All of March and most of February were spent in lockdown in the Bay Area. I've no idea what's still open or not because the last time I was able to go anywhere outside of the house was two weeks ago. The walk I'd planned for last weekend was cancelled on account of rain, and all things considered I'd rather not risk lowering my immune system a couple of points with cold and damp if I can help it. Plans for the next 12 to 18 months have been unilaterally cancelled. I've already sold my Thotcon 0x0b badge even though …
