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Reputational capital
I tend to overcommunicate to my supervisors and teammates. I’d rather they get something they already knew from me, than they get blindsided. That’s played well with several of my bosses and shadow bosses. They often tell me, “thanks, I already know about it.” For my side, that brings relief instead of discouragement. When they…
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Cybersecurity and me
It’s amusing to me that I helped some colleagues get OpenJDK installed. They were trying to do the for all users install and hitting up against the requirement that they don’t have administrator access to install software on their computers. So, I noticed the for me only option and got them to try it. I…
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Question the question
When seeking assistance, the questions we ask inform the thinking of the machines or people giving answers. My initial work experience involved helping people research information. How to find books. How to search the internet or databases. One of the most important skills we taught was to locate salient terms as they influence the answers…
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“Don’t take if allergic…”
Just curious how one knows that one is allergic to a new drug in a commercial. You have to take it to find out you are allergic, right? The subsequent list of symptoms as reasons not to take it. Do those mean one is allergic? Not to my understanding. It’s reasonable if one knows one…
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Books I read in 2025
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Something went wrong
Non-specific error messages without a recourse are the bane of my existence. I need something I can do. An action i can take to fix the issue. In my professional life, my job is to fix it, so a vague meaningless error message means hours of trying things. Depending on impact, this might sit broken…
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Attrition forced technical solvency
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…
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Orion
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…
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AI training spikes?
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.