A blog of rants, screeds, and other nonsense

What does “n.n.n.n.” do in Vim?

You’ve probably read about HBO’s ‘Integration Test’ Email. Just what is an “Integration test”?

Years ago a co-worker noticed something about our company’s disability policy.

I’m considering switching to Todoist. Here are my notes as I try to use the techniques in Time Management for System Administrators which are collectively called The Cycle.

I no longer fill out customer support surveys.

Do you WANT to get paid?

Looking for SRE’s with experience in the Microsoft stack!

This is my webpage for tracking teleco executives trying to ruin the internet.

Thanks to my MIL’s exhaustive genealogy research, I can now say with certainty that my house was built by Alexander Hamilton’s wife’s third cousin twice removed.

Dear Senator Joe Manchin,

Here’s my thinking…

To the person on Redit who called the Brexit plan obviously poorly concocted.

What is yak shaving?

An attempt to add a “January Exception” to the U.S. constitution failed yesterday as GOP leaders could not muster enough votes to pass their bill. The 44-to-56 vote was a major victory for constitutional originalism, law and order, and other concepts that the GOP used to believe in.

“I’m disappointed in the result.” said Joe Embez, “How could I be convicted of stealing from my employer when I don’t work there any more?” said Joe Embez, who’s embezzlement trial begins next week. Joe stole $5 million dollars from his employer before quitting five days later.

The other day a vendor added $6k of “training” to my quote. Here’s how insulting that is.

Politics in the U.S. is bimodal.

Copied from Facebook. Not written by me. I’ll have commentary later this week.

Dear friends of mine who support Trump:

Your “it was Antifa” claims have all been disproven, but it did buy you an additional 12-24 hours to come up with some other cover.

Good job! Your strategy worked! …but not for long!

I think I’ve identified the bug in PowerShell’s handling of NAPTR records.

I can’t figure out how to Add- or Remove- an NAPTR record using PowerShell’s DnsServer module. Can you?

Configuring my new Canon printer to scan to gmail was a bit tricky.

Why don’t (most) public schools teach statistics?

[NOTE: This is a rough draft of a rant.]

Is “Die Hard” a Christmas film? Who cares!

Die Hard is anti-American propaganda. It is full of lies that give people the impression that the U.S. government can’t do anything right. Anyone raised seeing that movie will grow up with misconceptions about the government that are harmful to our society.

When I read this acting advice by Lauren Gunderson it dawned on me how powerful it would be if every tech conference speaker applied it to their talks. Change her word “scene” to “slide” (or section) and it mostly fits.

Here’s an infographic from Kathryn M. Everson.

I didn’t write it, but I want to make it available outside of social media where it is hard to surface. (I hope she doesn’t mind.)

What I love about this is that it explains that real science is slow and takes time. Hollywood movies portray science as a series of overnight miracles; Star Trek shows Jordi inventing entire new categories of science by the end of a 60-minute episode. Real science takes years. Real science is boring 99.99 percent of the time, punctuated by amazing discoveries. Real scientists are underpaid and over-worked.

Having a youtube channel is unrelated to someone’s qualifications.

Here’s a meme that I collected from social media. I didn’t write it, but I thought I’d make it accessible here.

There are times when macOS mucks with DNS lookups. For example, a corporate VPN client might tell macOS that DNS lookups for certain domains (i.e. domains inside the company) are to be handled differently.

I fixed bug last night.

The bug was difficult to fix because the code was so complex. I wasn’t really able to fix it until I simplified the code. Once the code was simplified the bug was easy to fix. While doing this I found an anti-pattern that I now call “One loop trying too hard”.

Biden has a mandate.

Here are some of my favorite secrets about Google Docs, Google Sheets, Gmail, etc.