Jay @jay@social.targaryen.house
Dad, Academic Technologist, IT Leader, Lapsed Pastry Cook, Aspiring Bagpiper. Valar Dohaeris
Well, Valar Morghulis. Winter is here.
If you're looking for me, I'll be over at @jay
It's been a fun ride. Thanks to @wonderfall and all you Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters on social.targaryen.house for everything. Merci Beaucoup! Dracarys!
Hey friends it's your favorite Righteous Preacher of the Holy Word here to remind you Yet Again about Lashon Hara.
Lashon Hara is a despicable sin condemned by HaShem the god of the Jews. It is when you spread bad things about people which may be true but which have no useful or productive purpose to be brought up. The classic example is bringing up a mistake someone made a while back which they have since already apologized and atoned for, and have not made again. It hurts community and hinders learning
when you just say someone's name or are somehow affiliated with someone, and another person brings up something they did wrong some while back, ask yourself why? what is the useful purpose of bringing this up besides to say "this person is Bad" and is it the entire story? sometimes this is a useful interaction and sometimes it is not. use your best judgement. if someone routinely is a broker of pointless nasty gossip, we call them Ba'alei Lashon Hara, lords of the evil tongue.
Mastodon's userbase may lean older than tumblr or so but many people on here are still young and don't advertise it; and also no matter how old you are you can still be in a process of learning.
After someone has already been confronted, been held accountable, made up for their hata (sin, literally "going astray"), and we've all moved on without another incident, we should acknowledge that this person has learned from their mistake and bring it up again only if they transgress again
otherwise why do it
Why do students send their passwords in emails asking for help logging in? Why?
Briefly coming up for air out of this soupy sewer that is the #CanvasLMS REST API to ask the universe why, after all these years, constructing a non-trivial POST request with LWP still requires delving into the arcane world of HTTP::Request::Common.
DWIM my foot.
In related news, the next time I volunteer to do a code review, somebody remind me to make sure it wouldn't be faster to write the solution form scratch myself instead.
I suppose the best idea would be to get the librarians involved.
Much like the tool libraries that have been popping up, we could have public computer equipment libraries. Not a hackerspace (although they could certainly host one) but a place you could go sign out an oscilloscope for the week you need one, or some odd peripheral, or some educational system, or so.
On the other hand, glad to see my beloved pussycats doing something (albeit in the most stereotypically Detroit way passable).
Tomorrow's headline: "Yanks can hit, but they can't take a punch"? (@morganth@social.techncs.de?)
One of my favorite teachers spoke at great length during a commencement at which he was speaking about how earnestly he hoped each person there would always have a valid and well used library card.
I am sure many of them found the idea silly a decade later when the internet had entered all of their homes and minds, but the libraries are still the key, and the librarians keep the libraries, so it would behoove us to take good care of the librarians.
Aaaand...it's back to work and back to the internet.
I'm beginning to think I shouldn't go on vacation. As bad as the news cycle is, it's worse to get all the updates at once.
WTF, world?
NASA's Cassini is doing its final flybys before flying into Saturn's atmosphere and dying and it took this amazing shot of Earth between the icy rings of Saturn - https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/cassini-has-taken-another-spectacular-image-of-its-home-planet/
OMG. https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/naked-mole-rats-survive-in-low-oxygen-by-metabolizing-fructose-like-plants Naked mole-rats survive in low oxygen by metabolizing fructose like plants
genx: "lol means "laughing out loud"
genex: lol is its own word, with contextual meaning, not pronounced *audible laugh* but instead "loe-ll" or regional variations.
see also: the Loule.
a Loule is one laugh-second. most shitposts are in the 75-500 microLoule range, you should be aiming for three Loules at the minimum but the optimal values are between five and seven Loules.
in humans, an exposure to a 100 kiloLoule event generally is immediately followed by death
Holy smokes dealing with Windows path names in any normal scripting language (including, umm, the Windows Task Scheduler 😑 ) is a pain.
Great article on the obfuscation of responsibility for the #unitedairlines fiasco:
https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/002292.html
TL/DR : The people in TSA uniforms aren't employed by TSA, the people in police uniforms aren't Chicago PD, and the people in United Airlines uniforms aren't employed by United. So who's Mah Authoritah is a harried passenger supposed to respect?
Microsoft makes it so anyone who pwns your phone can pwn the rest of your stuff.
I realize people hate passwords, but the constant fetish for using other factors [with the exception of well-maintained keys] really does a lot more harm than good.
the flattening of the news:
Chicago Tribune frets that #facebook isn't surfacing its posts
On Medium, of course.
For how much stop drop and roll was ingrained into me as a child, I really thought I would catch on fire more times than I have.
