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 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. pic.twitter.com/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.