The first time I came out was the summer I turned 18. The last time I came out was about an hour ago when I explained why I kissed the mayor backstage. We’re always coming out. Sometimes every single day. — Chasten Glezman Buttigieg (@Chasten) March 30, 2019

I can’t get enough of this song lately. NPR Music has a review and the full album available to stream: https://www.npr.org/2018/05/31/615243331/first-listen-angelique-kidjo-remain-in-light. It’s available for purchase June 8.

I missed the notification, but yesterday marked 10 years since I registered an account with WordPress.com. This came just two days after I crossed the five-year employment mark with Automattic, WordPress.com’s parent company. It’s all a bit surreal. At this point, I’ve been writing code for a living for more time than I’ve done anything else.

Some choice quotes from the article: “Americans eat 35 pounds of cheese per year on average” “The cheese glut is so massive (1.3 billion pounds in cold storage as of May 31) that on two separate occasions, in August and October of last year, the federal government announced it would bail out dairy farmers by purchasing $20 million worth of surplus for distribution to food pantries.” “With an entire ounce in the shell, the Quesalupa has about five times the cheese load of a basic Crunchy Taco.

As a child, I read most of Tom Clancy’s novels, including Red Storm Rising. Even though it’s been twenty years since I read the book, a phrase from the opening paragraph has stayed with me: singsong Azerbaijani accent. I don’t know what it is about the phrase that made it so inescapable, but whenever I think about it, I have flashbacks to my childhood and the hours I spent devouring Mr.

Thanks to The West Wing, and subsequently the Oxford English Dictionary, thing can now also mean “a genuine or established phenomenon or practice.” “Thing” now has a new definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, thanks to “The West Wing” from Quartz

Survived my wisdomteeth extraction 🎉

https://xkcd.com/1807/ I live in a large-enough apartment complex that it’s only a matter of time until someone runs around yelling some such thing.

I bought a Google Home, and it is–by far–the best speaker I own. As an audiophile (I have a bachelors in Audio Engineering), I’m fairly ashamed that I don’t have an audio system not tied to a consumer electronic. 😢

I knew it had been a few years since I switched to my own mailservers, but I was still surprised to find that it has been nearly four years. My first production MX went online on August 2, 2013. Since then, I’ve switched over my dozen or so domains and their few-hundred aliases without incident. It takes a significant amount of my attention, but I can’t see myself giving up the flexibility it affords me.

A bottle of champagne with lunch is a nice start. 🍾🥂

For a variety of reasons, I usually miss Morning Edition. Particularly since I no longer commute, I have difficulty finding time to listen to the entire two-hour show. On Wednesday, NPR introduces a podcast that might help. Up First will be a ten-minute recap of the day’s top stories, released weekdays at 6am, and hosted by the same three who bring us Morning Edition. I’m very excited about its potential to fill a gap in my morning updates.

I spent the weekend experimenting with new open-source projects that will either supplant hosted services, or improve my sysops experience. This is not an uncommon way for me to spend a weekend, as https://ethitter.com/2017/01/replacing-slack-ifttt-and-zapier/ and the whole of https://ethitter.com/category/vps-adventures/ demonstrate. Once they’ve “stuck,” I’ll post something at ethitter.com about these latest discoveries.

Any time I start thinking that I know what I’m doing as a sysadmin, I remind myself that sudo reboot is, too often, how I “fix” things.

I still often think about this sentence. https://t.co/T2LlTJHzZP — Bo Churñey 🇨🇦 (@bochurney) March 16, 2017

That feeling when you’ve been coding so long that words like succeed don’t seem like they’re spelled correctly.

Ventura breweries focus on their beers, while a rotating group of food trucks provide sustenance. Brilliant!

I love Google for many things, but nothing beats Excel. The new Office for Mac is unparalleled.

It’s hard not to laugh at some of the exploit attempts made against this VPS. Since it’s easy to tell that my site runs WordPress, those with nefarious intent probe for ways to access its configuration file. Fortunately, one of the security hardening options WordPress supports is moving wp-config.php above the web-accessible directory that holds the CMS itself. Alone this isn’t enough, but it’s nice knowing that unsavory individuals are consistently looking for things in the wrong places.

My fifth VPS will replace my personal Slack instance with Mattermost. The $120 annual charge for the underlying VPS is worth the additional $39.961to know that I can add as many users as I want. Since I only use Slack to alert myself, I’m excited for the possibilities Mattermost provides. Versus a Standard plan with Slack for one user, at $6.67 per month, or $80.04 per year.

I didn’t realize my foot was asleep, stood up too quickly, and nearly fell through the glass coffee table. That certainly would’ve livened up my evening. 😕

Bought a bottle of wine using Android Pay, because I left my wallet at home. That worked out well!

🎨Remember that each and every day is a canvas🖼 📷 https://t.co/5X6yEyol07 pic.twitter.com/Rvncgw6iyz — Visit Ventura (@VisitVentura) January 5, 2017

My preference for renting a home, instead of owning one, is well known, largely thanks to the fallacy that home ownership is an investment. The burden of maintenance is another strong dissuasion. Case in point, our water heater died today. Instead of having to buy a new unit, and pay extra for “emergency” installation, it’s my property manager’s responsibility to replace the unit by the end of the day.

Lots of popular people died this year, and an election outcome was not as many expected. As a result, people are blaming the year. And strangely, others are defending 2016, as if it’s capable of feeling or couldn’t survive without their support. Where’s the harm in blaming 2016? Who is hurt by this? If it helps people process a difficult period, what’s wrong with blaming a construct we’ll soon be free of?

Keri Russel had one humanizing storyline and The Americans did what it always does. I love it.

2016 can go to hell; I can’t think of a single positive thing that’s happened to me this year. In the fifteen months since we married, my husband has spent a few days per month–a week at most–at home. He’s been around so little in 2016 that he never spent two consecutive weekends in Ventura. As a fitting end to this wretched year, Chris will miss Christmas due to work obligations, just as he did last year.

About a year ago, we hired cleaners. I felt rather silly at the time, paying someone else to clean my apartment. At the same time, my husband spent the last 13 months working from Texas, and I didn’t want to squander the brief times we had together. Honestly, if you had only a few days a month with your significant other, wouldn’t you find ways to make the best use of that time?

It’s both entertaining and sad how few companies are prepared for a service provider’s outage, like those suffering through Slack’s downtime today. Automattic, fortunately, wasn’t so shortsighted, so we continue to function without significant disruption.

We haven’t checked our own mail in over a month, but we’ve been regularly checking a friend’s mail during that time. This is the unfortunate effect of using a PO box; with the busyness of the Christmas holiday, we really only receive mail for eleven months out of the year. I can’t think of a single other downside to relying on a post office box, though.

After a few weeks of temperatures cold enough that we closed our windows and turned on the heat, Ventura is finally warming up. It’s nice to have fresh air and a gentle breeze again, and the ambient noise that comes with open windows. I feel less cooped up.

I’m a huge fan of the growing “internet of things” movement, as I frequently write about on ethitter.com; that doesn’t mean I can’t laugh at the absurd things some manufacturers concoct. Internet of Shit is hilarious for this: https://twitter.com/internetofshit. The second account parodies Ice T’s character from Law & Order: SVU, Fin Tutuola, warning of “future drugs” and their crazy consequences for the nation’s youth: https://twitter.com/icetsvu.

How the tiny town of Roundup, Montana, became a hub in Amazon’s supply chain

People are nothing if not creative at making money. “I Dialed a Wrong Number and Stumbled Into International Phone Fraud”

A fascinating read about data leaks and what the NSA is working on to crack modern encryption: From The Intercept: “NYU Accidentally Exposed Military Code-breaking Computer Project to Entire Internet”

From The Boston Globe, how we got Kellyanne Conway: “George Conway is the man at the center of everything”

https://qz.com/970924/the-psychological-importance-of-wasting-time/ There will always be an endless list of chores to complete and work to do, and a culture of relentless productivity tells us to get to it right away and feel terribly guilty about any time wasted. But the truth is, a life spent dutifully responding to emails is a dull one indeed. And “wasted” time is, in fact, highly fulfilling and necessary.

Overall, the results are rather hilarious: http://lewisandquark.tumblr.com/tagged/recipes. They’re improving, too!

Donors all over America opened their wallets for his United States Navy Veterans Association. Politicians all over Washington posed for grip-and-grins with him. But not only was he not a legitimate fundraiser for military families—he wasn’t even Bobby Charles Thompson. A look inside the hunt to catch one of the country’s biggest con men. https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/03/19/the-strange-spectacular-con-of-bobby-charles-thompson/

It started as simple teenage rebellion but ended up tearing Syria apart, setting in motion events that continue to rock the Middle East — and the world. The boys behind the graffiti would become unlikely revolutionaries and reluctant refugees. Not all of them would survive the upheaval they helped unleash. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/the-graffiti-kids-who-sparked-the-syrian-war/article33123646/

He considered becoming a police officer after graduating from high school, but instead took a job as a syrup quality-control inspector at a Coca-Cola plant. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/-bro-i-m-going-rogue-the-wall-street-informant-who-double-crossed-the-fbi

Data from one insurance-company survey suggest that the average person misplaces up to nine objects a day, which means that, by the time we turn sixty, we will have lost up to two hundred thousand things. […] Granted, you’ll get many of those items back, but you’ll never get back the time you wasted looking for them. In the course of your life, you’ll spend roughly six solid months looking for missing objects….

Forbes published an interesting review of the government’s use of in-car technology in criminal investigations. It’s a nice reminder that that disabled satellite radio or navigation service might not be as inactive as one thought. http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/01/15/police-spying-on-car-conversations-location-siriusxm-gm-chevrolet-toyota-privacy/#650201b649b5

When I moved to Ventura in 2014, I recall two or three breweries in the city. The last two years changed that, and 2017 promises more. Just another reason I love living here. http://www.vcstar.com/story/life/columnists/lisa-mckinnon/2016/12/23/cafe-society-ventura-county-all-pok-2016/95614862/

A Canadian drunk driver confronted an excavator operator, and the operator won: In conversing with the driver, the operator observed signs of intoxication and as a result ‘prevented’ the driver from fleeing with the ‘bucket’ on the excavator… The photo that accompanies the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s press release is spectacular. 😂 http://www.rcmp.gc.ca/en/news/2016/22/q

VICE featured a story yesterday about two guys who bought a few of those reflective vests that construction and maintenance workers wear, and used them to get into random places they wouldn’t otherwise be allowed. I’m genuinely impressed with how effective the vests were. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/turns-out-wearing-a-hi-vis-vest-gets-you-into-everything-for-free

The Guardian reviewed a new study that shows that those in Western countries have no idea what percentage of their populations are Muslim. In every country examined, the population’s estimates were many times higher than reality. For example, respondents assumed that one in six individuals living in the US is Muslim, while in reality, it’s closer to one in 100. https://www.theguardian.com/society/datablog/2016/dec/13/europeans-massively-overestimate-muslim-population-poll-shows

In 1938, Ella Fitzgerald sang her first big hit, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” for a national audience on CBS Radio. Now, a global audience has access to this performance again — thanks to the discovery and restoration of the Savory Collection, a legendary private trove of nearly 1,000 recordings that haven’t been heard by the general public since the 1930s. The National Jazz Museum in Harlem acquired them in 2010, and today they’re beginning to make their way to a new generation of jazz fans.

Cyrus Farivar writes in Ars Technica about a California man’s misadventure with a laser pointer, and the devastating consequences of aiming it at an aircraft. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/a-three-second-laser-strike-cost-barry-bowser-everything/

As reported last week by Fortune, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case challenging where patent lawsuits are filed. As has been widely reported, notably by NPR’s This American Life, the individuals behind malicious patent lawsuits have found favorable venues, such as the Eastern District of Texas, in which to file their suits, even though it’s rare for the suit or those involved to have any connection to the area.

Better settle in for a lengthy cheese-eating session. According to a story from Vox, the amount of excess cheese in storage works out to 3 pounds per person in America, on top of the 36 pounds the typical American already consumes in a year. http://www.vox.com/2016/10/13/13268980/cheese-glut-united-states

I’m reminding myself of this today: Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. Oliver Wendell Holmes

Please replace this text with the error page you would like to serve to clients if your origin is offline. I encountered this message as I tried to access an archived article from a national newspaper. Given my job, I couldn’t help but chuckle; somebody missed a step on their setup checklist. I’ve definitely been there.

This scene, from “In This White House,” is one of my favorite.

Thanks to The West Wing, and subsequently the Oxford English Dictionary, thing can now also mean “a genuine or established phenomenon or practice.” “Thing” now has a new definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, thanks to “The West Wing” from Quartz

“Celestial Navigation” is one of my favorite episodes of The West Wing.

I’ve been playing a bit of Civilization VI lately, and the theme song, “Sogno di Volare,” easily gets stuck in my head, so here are two versions of it. The first video is of the same choir that recorded the official version.

All credit for this belongs to my colleague John Ragozzine.

I blame my husband for this. The Family Guy clip got stuck in his head, and I had to “help.” 😂

This scene, from “In This White House,” is one of my favorite.

RadioLab’s “Breaking News” episode was a really captivating look at emerging technologies that allow for video and audio manipulation. The episode is available at http://www.radiolab.org/story/breaking-news/. There’s a companion site, which includes the above video and several others, at http://futureoffakenews.com/videos.html.

“Celestial Navigation” is one of my favorite episodes of The West Wing.