Carl Cravens @CarlCravens@mastodon.xyz

I've been grubbing through my home directory, looking for stuff to delete and there's tons of files from organizations and projects going on ten years old or more, including entire archives of mailing lists I used to run. And these things drive me crazy... I have absolutely zero to do with them anymore, but they're history and I have trouble deleting them, yet I will never actually read 6 years of mailing list, nor have I found a need to search the archive in the last 10 years. ✅ Keep.

Man, I loved The Go-Go's so much as a teen (when they were big). I listened to _Beauty and the Beat_ on repeat (meaning I flipped the record over and started it again) while painting D&D miniatures, so that "Our Lips Are Sealed" immediately reminds me of that desk in my bedroom in that house painting that original set of official D&D miniatures. And remembering D&D miniatures unpacks a whole set of other associated memories of my teen years.

Man, I hate the self-review part of the review process most. You think I'm really going to put into writing, that anybody in the management structure can read, my self-perceived shortcomings and need for improvement? I feel like self-review is like a job interview... I'm instinctively selling my best points and not showing weakness. If I have concerns, I'm saving those for a private conversation off the written record.

Sometimes I really miss the 80's. The clothes, the hair, the music, and promise of computing that hadn't reached the socioeconomic complexity of "The Internet".

A lot of that probably has to do with graduating in '86, so the 80's were full of hanging out with friends, working a job just for gas money, driving a sexy car, and a wide, open future. Sometimes I'm not even sure I _miss_ anything... I just listen to the music of my youth and it makes me melancholy over things I can't revisit.

I really feel like my career would be better if I could just get comfortable with Python. But for some reason it frustrates me when I try to work with it. I think I've gotten hung up on wanting to write idiomatic code (in any new language) during the learning process... so I get hung up on correctness instead of just solving problems.

You would think that a desk job wouldn't be physically tiring, but working with people and solving problems under pressure all day can make my shoulders and back so tense, the job wears me out mentally and physically.

The Chamber Brothers' _Time Has Come Today_ is a classic... but man, the last 4 minutes of this 11 minute song are so "welcome to the 60's"

I cannot help but feel that every time I work with docker/vagrant/testkitchen automated build and test setups... that this is all way more complicated and unreliable than my old Makefiles. And the unreliability comes from things like "can't install this required ruby component version to do the tests". When it worked fine yesterday. I swear, I spend more time troubleshooting the build and tests than I do on the code I'm building and testing.

reminder: Today is the day the hamburger money is due.

So it occurs to me that this defiant reopening of restaurants/gyms/etc against government orders where protesters against the shutdown see themselves as patriotic... this isn't patriotic. It's the opposite... demanding your individual desires over the good of the nation? Patriotism is sacrifice for your fellow American, not risking your fellow American so you can feel "normal'.

I finished my on-call shift 11 AM on Sunday, and I'm still tired. 😫

A couple guys at work say to "treat servers like cattle, not pets". And as someone who grew up in cattle country, I'm not sure they understand just how much tender loving care cattle receive. Pets are just comfort animals, cattle are an expensive investment and you don't neglect them.

Is it just me or has "elide" really seen a surge in use lately?

No, #Firefox, I _don't_ want you to route DNS lookups through your own infrastructure... my personal, private, secure DNS resolver can handle them just fine.
It really scares me that DNS resolution is trying to become very centralized to a few points in the name of "security", and browser developers want to bypass normal DNS servers by doing DNS over HTTP (bypassing firewalls, etc).

So one of the funny things about all-remote meetings is we're missing the physical queues that the meeting is over... the picking up notebooks, body language that says I'm ready to stand up, etc. So our team meetings can be like that awkward phone call where you don't know how to end it, except there are 12 people on the call all waiting for everyone else to hang up.

Bah, mid-cycle performance reviews... I hate performance reviews, but the part I hate the most is the self-review. Now we get to do them three times a year, but as expected, everyone still forgets about improvement actions in between.

I used to have a couple aquariums, one 40-gal brackish, under-cabinet canister filters, etc, etc. A fair amount of work, but what really started to get to me was the captured animal trade, which kills a lot of fish in the process of capturing and bringing them to market.
I decided if I ever keep an aquarium again, I'm going to stick to captive-bred, etc.
But this is a tricky hobby to start during isolation. :)