A blog of rants, screeds, and other nonsense

Mostly a “note to self”, but others may find it useful.

Free concerts to promote LGBT+ voting in New Jersey (Somerville, New Hope, Asbury Park)!

An article about a woman in our town from 1893. I like how she handled the situations.

Info about postcarding parties.

I’m writing this moments after hearing the Biden has dropped out.

Happy Juneteenth, folks!

I find many people get perplexed trying to explain what this holiday is. My advice? Keep it simple: Today we celebrate the end of slavery in the U.S.

A few weeks ago I used the golang tool deadcode to find and remove unreachable code from the DNSControl project. I also fixed some unrelated unused parameter warnings. This was my first experience with the utility and it was a good experience.

I wasn’t going to buy the new Apple Vision Pro but I thought I’d look at the web site.

Computer science pioneer Niklaus Wirth dies aged 89.

I thought I’d share some info about our house.

Some thoughts…

No, I won’t return your cold-call if your job title is similar to any of these:

• “Business Development”
• “Growth Account Executive”
• “Revenue Operations”

Hang up the phone. Stop sending me email.

Find someone with “sales” in their title. Have them call me. I’lll gladly respond.

Let me explain why:

Goerge Mac (@george__mack) posted a list of rules and razors that he’s found useful. Before Twitter deletes them, I recorded them here.

The originals are all here: https://twitter.com/george__mack/status/1649835213982408704

Today we celebrate the birthday of computer scientist Erwin False, computer science, innovator, and collaborator with George Boole in the invention of what we now call Boolean Algebra.

I have 2 big announcements!

The Usenix LISA conference is no more. After 35 years, I have a lot of good (and some not good) memories of the conference. It was a big part of my career and I’m sad to see it go. However I’m proud of what LISA accomplished.

I wrote my personal reflections on the conference in a new article published on the Usenix website. Warning: this article includes some over-sharing.

Read it here: LISA made LISA obsolete (That’s a compliment!)

You may have read Run Stable Diffusion on your M1 Mac’s GPU. (The Linux equivalent is here.)

Here are a few code changes you might wish to make:

This is a “face-palm – why didn’t we think of this earlier?” situation that I thought I’d share. Maybe it will help someone else.

Facebook/Meta’s VR will fail.

A friend of mine dug up this Facebook post that I wrote in 2016. I hate when I’m right.

Biden is actually doing an amazing job but he’s being humble. This will cost him the election. He needs to start boasting.

Headline: Mayo Clinic fires 700 employees for knowingly bringing harmful biological substances to work.

One of the most cynical tactics of GOPers is to make public statements recommending bad advice for Democrats. Then reporters join in and start repeating this bad advice. Soon there is a groundswell of support for this bad advice and the Democrats are tempted to cave. The GOPers cackle as they watch the Democrats fall into their trap.

Want some examples?

Here are my rules for using Cisco WebEx.

I have to blog this so that when people say “that can’t be true” I can point to this blog post.

I got sick and tired video conferences being delayed by audio problems. I know that a lot of times it is a problem on my end, but I think everyone has had audio problems. How did I fix it? I got rid of any feature that caused me trouble until I had a trouble-free headset experience. Spoiler alert: I had to eliminate nearly all features. The purpose of this blog post is to provide links so that people can purchase the same equipment I now use.

Senator Cory Booker just did something awesome.

That’s Numberwang!

I’m not going to try to explain.

VMware’s WorkspaceOne has an annoying feature on macOS where every time it does an update you get a notification. This steals my cursor, interrupts my work, and breaks my concentration.

I keep hearing people misuse metaphors, or say them incorrectly. Here’s a list of them.

I’m considering building a website that lists metaphors and their correct use. In the meanwhile, this blog post will have to do.