Lizardman's Constant - A rough heuristic of the population of people who troll data collection polls. Comes from asking the question "Do you believe that the President is a shape-shifting lizard person?" and consistently getting a roughly 4.5% "yes" response.
Read more...
UPDATE: 20191230 - Uploaded a copy to my Peertube account.
From time to time I carp about how generally lousy our bandwidth is out here. Verizon (our CLEC in the Bay Area) has all but given up on maintaining their infrastructure out here, aside from the bare minimum to keep the copper from turning to verdigris. They gave up on deploying fiber some years ago (local mirror) some years ago, and from the poking around I've done on their side of the fence, their general stance in the Bay Area appears to be "Get everyone on celllar so we can ignore …
Read more...
Long time readers are probably wondering where I've been lately. The answer is kind of long and is worth a post all on its own. The short version of the story is, work's been eating me alive lately. This is our busiest time of year and it's been all hands on deck for a couple of weeks now. In point of fact, last week was our quarterly all-hands meeting, where everybody on my team was flown into town for a solid week of meetings. All day, every day. Most of my visible activity lately took the form of parts of …
Read more...
You've already read my opinion of the 2016 election's outcome so I'll not subject you to it again. However, I would like to talk about some weird stuff I (we, really) kept noticing on Twitter in the days and weeks leading up to Election Day.
As I've often spoken of in the past, a nontrivial portion of my Exocortex is tasked with monitoring global activity on Twitter by hooking into the back-end API service and pulling raw data out to analyze. Those agents fire on a stagged schedule, anywhere from every 30 minutes to every two hours; a couple of …
Read more...
Sometimes, very occasionally, when using the Lastpass plugin with Google Chrome, you may find that Lastpass will start acting wonky. Specifically, if you've had Chrome running for a couple of days, you will notice that Lastpass has logged you out, even if you're in an Incognito Window. When clicking on the browser plugin's icon, you will be able to log into it as usual; multifactor authentication will similiarly work as expected. If you wait a few seconds, the plugin's icon will go dark again. If you're quick and drop into "My Vault," you'll see that screen for a second or …
Read more...
I've never really gone out of my way to publicize the fact that I'm a synesthete - my senses are cross-wired in ways that aren't within the middle of the bell curve. In particular, my sense of hearing is directly linked to my senses of sight, touch, proprioception, and emotional state. As one might expect, this causes a few problems in day to day life - I can't go to concerts without wearing earplugs because I shut down from sensory overload, and too much noise makes it nearly impossible to see (and thus, get anything done). The new office at work poses …
Read more...
Stuck in the asphalt on Smithfield Street, where it's been there about as long as I've been alive.
Read more...
I don't ordinarily write much about work, mostly because it's not that interesting but also because it's a bad habit to get into, lest I let something critical slip and get in trouble. However, the last two days were sufficiently rough (and strange) that I feel that I have to write something about it, if only to give my fellow BOFHes something to go on if they find themselves in the same particular position I was. The past two days have been by far the strangest problem I've ever run into working in IT or information security.
Let's set …
Read more...
Every once in a while around Portland you'll find something odd worked into the environment, like sweaters and cozies knitted for things that don't make sense - poetic terrorism, some people call it, or yarn bombing. While on our way back from Free Geek (which is run by some awesome folks - I highly recommend donating time, money, or parts to them) Amberite and I stumbled across a cardboard dog head peeking out of a tree.
Read more...
Last Saturday was 9/11, a day of infamy that went down in United States history as the day in 2001 when everything started going off the rails. In a strange sort of way, the year 2001 also figures into the history of science fiction thanks to the novel of the same name by Arthur C. Clarke, and the history of culture jamming and art hacking by way of license plate-sized wodges of linoleum and adhesive called Toynbee tiles. I've been fascinated by them for years, those cryptic messages which read TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOVIE 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET …
Read more...
1 / 4 »
