Let’s go Ballers! 👏🏻,👏🏻,👏🏻-👏🏻-👏🏻
These games feel like small town events in ways people in neither place would believe. Everyone’s having fun and happy to be there, more than at big, super corporate happenings. Local companies dominate the ads. Downtime entertainment has footraces for kids and grownups competing to make funny voices. There are taco trucks.
And I can’t get enough of it.
I am sorry, little spider buddy, but you have broken the covenant. I know you do an important job of keeping pests out of our house, but the pact is clear: we avoid each other at all times, upon pain of exile. And so your removal was swift, unyielding, and punctuated with no small amount of shouting.
To those following in your many footsteps, I warn you to respect the covenant.
China Is About to Show Off Its New High-Tech Weapons to the World
On September 3, China will hold a “Victory Day” military parade in Tiananmen Square to celebrate the 80th anniversary of its victory over Japan—and to send the West a message.
Somewhere, a Chinese PR team prays that this will become the first Google result for “tiananmen square tanks”.
If you ever feel like your career’s been all over the place, remember that the same guy wrote “Fury Road” and “Babe”.
Being on a customer call at 7AM should come with hazard pay.
That feeling when you feel absolutely crummy, then you remember other people have it worse, so then you feel guilty about comparing your problems to theirs, but then remember that it’s not a contest and it’s OK to feel any way at any time, no matter how your circumstances compare to another’s.
I see too many people wearing heavy backpacks with the straps loose so that they’re hanging low on their backs.
Don’t do this. This is how you mess up your back.
You want to carry weight high up on your back. It puts much less strain on all of you. Tighten the straps as much as possible so that the bulk of the weight is under your shoulder blades. You’ll be amazed how much easier it is to carry the same weight.
We’re fostering kittens again. This pair is only a week old and we have to bottle feed them. Their eyes are still closed. One of them snuggled against my hand after its dinner.
Today I learned that our $6000-per-month UnitedHealthcare “platinum” insurance doesn’t fully cover generic thyroid medication, so our monthly cost for them rose from $1 per month under Aetna to $59 per month under UHC.
This is what the Republicans’ “death panels” look like.
In honor of its new financial arrangement with Donald Trump, Intel announced its new flagship CPU: the Inanium.
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
By hiding the eyes, mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sunstaring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws.
This is now online for free reading. It’s a must for young cyberpunks who want to understand their history.
UnitedHealthcare sued by shareholders over reaction to CEO’s killing
The group, which seeks unspecified damages, argues that the public backlash prevented the company from pursuing “the aggressive, anti-consumer tactics that it would need to achieve” its earnings goals.
The investors actually said that. They demand UHC be more “aggressive, anti-consumer” to make more money for them, presumably by killing more Americans.
It’s time to start building the guillotines.
I’ve spent too much of this weekend writing Ansible to make all my Raspberry Pis similar.
This might say more than I’d wish about my nerd level, and about how many tiny computers I have laying around.
Trucking companies sue California, seeking a release from Clean Truck Partnership
They include Daimler, which manufactures about 40% of U.S. trucks, and Volvo, which makes about 15%, along with Paccar and Traton.
Those are among the companies suing California for the right to damage our air and our breathing. They are also among the companies whose vehicles I will never, ever consider buying. They can go rot for all I care.
Def Con was amazing and exhausting and fascinating and terrifying and just all around exhilarating and energizing. Thank you to everyone to helped make it possible, and also delightfully weird.
Time to pour some coffee, take a deep breath, exhale, and start working on next year’s project.
If you get on a plane, stick your carry-on at the very front, then walk to the very back so that there’s no room for the frontward peoples’ luggage when they board and everyone has to wait for them to trek to the back and stow it and return to the front, you are a bad person and should feel bad.
PHP: Not exactly bad, but still a strange one
PHP is so hard for me to describe. I used it a lot in the late 90s when we were migrating off mod_perl because it was a great way to add dynamic data to otherwise static pages, and no one really knew how to develop large sites yet. We were making it up as we went along. But ye gods, the language was bad. “A poor craftsman blames his tools” and all that, but imagine a screwdriver with 2 handles and 3 tips projecting at random angles. Sure, you could assemble an IKEA desk with it, but would you want to? And would you look suspiciously at anyone who claimed to love that weird screwdriver when the equivalent of a Snap-On was available for free from the same place they got the weirdo?
I think that’s the root of much of the horror. No one would bat an eye at using PHP to add little bits of server-side content here and there. It’s great for that! But then you see the giant castles of non-Euclidean horror built with it, and people pointing to them and saying “see what you can make with that weird screwdriver?”, and parts of the castles randomly fall off and kill their owners. No! While that’s impressive, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the screwdriver, or in the people who keep using it to build things larger than it was clearly able to do well. But heaven help you if you point out that there are saner screwdrivers. “You’re just being close minded and out of touch! We added another handle to it and removed the razor blade so it’s much better now!”
Maybe so, but wow, it’s still one hell of an odd screwdriver. reply
I’m about to head to Def Con where I’ll be hosting a mobile Frozen BBS. I’m carrying it into work in SF this morning as a trial run, and also to make sure people don’t call the cops on it.
I just cut The Def Con Release of Frozen BBS, and updated the little radio and Rasperry Pi boxes that are going to be strapped onto my backpack next week.
Target followed up on my compromised credit card, which again, has never left my house except to go on Target runs. They mailed me a long fraud investigation questionnaire that asks for fun data like the PII of everyone who’s been around my house for the last year.
Yeah, no. The compromise was on their end. Go fix that. I’m not triggering an investigation into my friends and family for Target’s mistakes.