We talk quite a bit at work about technical debt. We typically think about all the things we have to keep updated and how so much of our time gets sucked into them. The real problems are the unknown things lurking where one person knows how they work that are fragile and good enough. Until…
It makes me happy to see Orion in the sky. Looking at it tonight, I thought, “East.” Suddenly, it clicked. My childhood home was east of my grandmother’s house. The most likely time to walk from her house to mine at night is this time of year. (It’s only really visible in the winter when…
I see of late this blog gets weird traffic spikes. They are for older posts, so unlikely to be from subscribers or RSS fed. No referrer traffic, so not from search engines. Gotta be AI scraping the content. All the past week it was mostly China. Today, it’s the USA.
I’m sure my coworkers get tired of me. For someone who works in a bureaucracy, I often question the process. I want to balance efficiency and consistency and accuracy. There are tradeoffs, and navigating them through hashing out (debate and data) the way they function and dysfunction is why I like my work. Why things…
Last spring, I resurrected my https://www.inoreader.com/ account to get RSS feed subscriptions for news sources. My email accounts are so over run that I’m not likely to track what’s happening local through them. So, I made a change. Today, looking through, I noticed an article about a suspicious death and police soliciting for more information.…
Since it is cybersecurity awareness month, I’m thinking more about how secure things are not. Big companies I expect capable of well resourcing their teams get breached. They are giant whales, so the Ahab threat actors really want to take them. The awareness stuff is all the same stuff with a twist: Be careful. Over…
While discussing an update with a colleague via Microsoft Teams about an Excel file he doesn’t have access to—an email referencing a tangentially related conversation in a channel he doesn’t have access to arrived—it struck me how fragmented our digital communication has become. Information is dispersed across emails, chats, and channels, making it increasingly difficult…
The New York City mayoral election is shaping up to make Ranked-Choice voting shine. They held the primary yesterday and the super progressive candidate won. The model where there’s a primary and there’s no winner with 50% triggering a run-off typically sees far fewer people show up for that run-off. I think that makes a…
At work, I post perhaps too many memes. I like them because a picture “says a thousand words.” And, sometimes, the picture works better in my haste to express raw emotion. Most of the time, these come from intense frustration, so the humor of a meme interjected into the seriousness helps me feel better. The…