Being employed keeps me out of trouble. Keep me employed

“This is the beginning of the end,” Yoo said last week. “It’s already just a midsize business in San Antonio. This is not a company that’s on a trajectory of growth. They’re on a trajectory of death. It will not be around.”

Source: Rackspace ‘on trajectory of death,’ founder Richard Yoo says

I work at a small datacenter. We’re… having some issues with customer retention and customer acquisition cos everyone wants that cloud hotness, even if they’re going to pay through the nose for it. What are we to do??? If Rackspace, one of the first names you think of when you need colocation, what is a small datacenter business in Minnesota to do?

A lot of people keep saying to avoid the cloud and whatnot, but then they end up going with aws, google cloud, or azure. That’s not putting your money where your mouth is.

If they get hacked, you get hacked. This is proven. All of these platforms, in their efforts to make it easy to get onboarded make it super easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot with insecure defaults.

Right now they’re making money, sure… But what happens when they don’t? Looking at you, google. But the others aren’t that much better. Do your part and support small and local businesses that can, and will, lend you their expertise.

A king in waiting gives a king’s answer

One day in the pavilion at Karakorum he [Genghis Kahn] asked an officer of the Mongol guard what, in all the world, could bring the greatest happiness.“The open steppe, a clear day, and a swift horse under you,” responded the officer after a little thought, “and a falcon on your wrist to start up hares.”“Nay,” responded the Kahn, “to crush your enemies, to see them fall at your feet—to take their horses and goods and hear the lamentation of their women. That is best.”

Source: ‘Do You Want to Live Forever?’—John Milius’ ‘Conan the Barbarian’ • Cinephilia & Beyond

Reading this twitter thread brought me to that Cinephilia article. They used real blood.

Time for a rewatch!

Gonna be a hell of a rager, Thunderbird!

Over the past couple years I’ve been using Nextcloud as my file syncing solution with plenty of success— you just have to make sure to set it up properly. I’ve enabled a couple of extensions for it (they call them “apps”) but the one I truly rely on is Tasks, which enables a CalDAV compatible to-do list.

Now, over the past decade or so I’ve tried a myriad of to-do applications and a lot of them really fell down on their face:
– Google Tasks: They change their interface so often, at the whims of whomever is in charge of that bit of code over at google. It tries to be too smart for its own good. It’s a google application do you don’t actually know if it’ll stick around.
– Google Keep: Free-form management sure, but it gets extremely unwieldy once you try to have more than what can fit on your screen. It also tries to be smart. There also the potential for extinction.
todo.txt: This is meant for people who are on their desk computers all day every day. I’m not.
Remember the Milk. It’s a paid app. At this point I don’t even remember what the limitation was that turned me off it.
wiki.vim: Again, meant for desk use.
Notion: It’s just so slow.
– Evernote: They seem to care more about how your to-do list looks rather than crossing items off it. Also you have to pay for all the goodies.
Microsoft To Do: You need a Microsoft account and they push hard to get you to upgrade to full-on Office.
Org Mode: Emacs. Just… no.
– I’m not listing any apps on iOS cos Apple devices are toys. Yes iPhones take awesome pictures but that’s cos they’re toys for adults.
– Mozilla Thunderbird: No built-in sync with other Thunderbird instances. Given that Mozilla is putting all of its resources into Firefox…

I’ve probably tried using a myriad others but decided against them for one reason or another, be it compatibility with my operating systems of choice, UI/UX decisions made by the part of the developers, lack of sane defaults forcing me to change al of the configuration settings, etc etc. At some point you just give up. Now, the Tasks app on Nextcloud is plenty capable and so far it has been the only one that I’ve been able to stick with longer than two weeks cos it covers all the features I want, which I found quite surprising:
– Web-based interface for availability pretty much everywhere you have a browser and Internet access.
– Hierarchical tasks! (aka subtasks) with notes attached to everything so you can document what you did and how you did it.
– Compatibility with pretty much everything out there via CalDAV. It’s a bit of a pain depending on what you’re using (looking at you, DAVx and tasks.org.

This last point is what I have to poke fun at Thunderbird. For an application that is trying extremely hard to run your life, they don’t fully support CalDAV, namely, hierarchical tasks. Found this on their Bugzilla

\Thunderbird Bugzilla: Bug 194863: Subtask nesting and event triggers (hierarchical to-do): Opened 20 years ago This bug grew up into quite the young adult[/caption]
This bug has been open since February 25, 2003. I’m typing this in January 3, 2023. In less than two months this bug will be able to drink in the United States.

I like you Thunderbird but what the fuck lol.

Cocinando en tu cuarto? Dale

Whitehorn’s book rescued me as it did thousands, probably millions of others. She knew just what people like me wanted: “Cooking to Stay Alive,” the first part, and “Cooking to Impress,” the second. No escaping cooking to stay alive because restaurants were few and far between in the 60s and too expensive for anything but a very special occasion.

Source: Cooking in a Bedsitter – Rachel Laudan

Ojalá hubiese tenido este libro durante mis años rebotando en Mexico.

Soft

        <a href="https://www.flickr.com/people/nullrend/">nullrend</a> posted a photo:

Soft

Drops

        <a href="https://www.flickr.com/people/nullrend/">nullrend</a> posted a photo:

Drops

It’s now warm enough everything melts

nullrend 2022-12-04 02:19:19

thoughts-i-have-had-in-passing:

autistic-bashir:

autistic-bashir:

hilarious how on voyager they have this whole dramatic episode about how there’s a murderer on board and on ds9 it’s like “oh yeah i got my pants fixed by this guy who’s killed thirty people :]”

you’re telling me this guy doesn’t kill people for fun

Killing people for fun and having fun while you are killing people is a subtle but distinct difference.

Remember to always work people who have fun at their jobs and enjoy doing them.

nullrend 2022-12-03 22:46:06

foone:

pancakeke:

ok so there was normal stuff at the raffle but there was also like a dumb box on the floor that no one was paying attention to so I grabbed that and got 4 of these lol

oh damn! 48tb of storage? I’ve worked at two storage companies, but neither of them had raffle prices that good

I gotta get in on raffles goddamn

Fuck Kanye West

nullrend 2022-11-11 02:17:24

staff:

Hi! We’re introducing Important Blue Internet Checkmarks here on Tumblr. They’re a steal at $7.99—that’s cheaper than some other places, when you consider that you get not one but TWO checkmarks for your blog on web only (for now). Why, you ask? Why not? Nothing matters! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Get yours here!

This is being one hell of a ride

Well, now he’s truly done it. The melon husk bought twitter.

The writings were quick to arrive, particularly after the husk fired the A-levels first thing, and then dissolving the board of directors. Pretty sure all of that will result in lawsuits. Rich people don’t like not getting their golden parachutes.

The Verge posted:

What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Welcome to hell, Elon

The Intercept wrote:

This could have been the mission statement of pre-Musk Twitter. But now there’s one big difference: When the content moderation of Twitter remains largely the same, the sense of betrayal among Musk’s super-fans will explode with the force of a supernova. And they will scream at Musk about it nonstop — on Twitter.

By Buying Twitter, Elon Musk Has Created His Own Hilarious Nightmare.

The chaos started immediately, with the husk firing a lot of people willy-nilly all over the company, and the world. Then it started asking people to come back. The company is now also on the hook for breaking California labor laws, with a looming lawsuit and employment attorneys commenting on this.

Nine days on from the purchase, the chaos continues:

Scoop: all of Musk’s companies use MS Teams for comms, where new channels are private by default.

When software engineers from Tesla, Boring and SpaceX came in to Twitter a week ago, they created Slack channels to communicate amongst themselves.

Several channels were public

@GergelyOrosz

Twitter Co also has zero potential advertisement income coming in, due to the husk’s erratic management style and general assholery. Also, someone please tell @Jack to shut the hell up.

Ourselves don’t plan on switching platforms until they shut the servers off… but then again we came from IRC, which has greatly reduced in size and influence; we keep a foothold on a couple networks but we don’t see any kind of substitute for the glorious chaos of an open timeline. But we’ll see.

Dril predicted all this, by the way. A true prophet of our age.

Baristas see the worst of their guests.

Before he started working at the café, Devon rarely talked to any hipster or goth people, now he’d talked to more than he could count of his fingers; being a barista was similar to being a bartender in some ways.

Source: [WP] You are a barista in a 24 hour coffee shop. Every night at 3:33am a demon appears for the Dark Lord’s latte. : WritingPrompts

We’ve been both. We’ve been a barista, we’ve been a bartender.

And being a barista is far, far worse than being a bartender.

As a bartender people will come up to you and try to behave their best, hoping they will be able to get faster service.

As a barista we will deal with whatever bartender wrought. And all baristas will try to make the experience palatable, to that person who just left the clutches of a bartender, hours ago.

We would terrify

I’m not sure why that thing comes to my store, or where it takes that coffee, but I am sure it’s for someone or something else. I can recognize the bad temperament of an unpaid intern anywhere, and I can only hope whatever dark lord it serves is content with its beverage, for its sake and mine. I seem to be doing well so far.

Source: [WP] You are a barista in a 24 hour coffee shop. Every night at 3:33am a demon appears for the Dark Lord’s latte. : WritingPrompts

We have been of coffee service.

We will be of coffee service.