At least once a year I try to go on retreat for a couple of days to clear my head by becoming a hermit for a little while. I try to get off the grid far enough that I can walk around, explore, take pictures, and have a little time to hack around with stuff for the fun of it (usually tools I haven't had a chance to experiment with yet). Last September I randomly picked a direction and found myself somewhere in northern California for a while. It was nice to wander around in a new town and see …
A few weeks ago I realized in mid-act that I hadn't gotten around to writing something I'd intended to some years ago - how to upgrade Huginn if you're running it in a reasonably pedestrian (read: not using Docker) way. Additionally, I realized when I upgraded my exocortex at the time the process I had in my notes didn't work because some of the underlying assumptions had changed. So I'd better let folks know about that.
First off, newer releases of Huginn require newer versions of Ruby. Thanks to Andrew Cantino all those years ago introducing me to RVM this isn't …
Last year, one of my favorite bandswent on tour with two other old-time bands from my childhood that I never got to see live, Modern English and Soft Cell. Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to see Soft Cell because we got a little sidetracked, but we did get to see Modern English and, capping off the night, the Simple Minds. I sang myself hoarse because they played all of my favorites that night.
If you've been on the job hunt lately (and that's rather a lot of us) you've probably been doing some combination of sitting on Google/Teams/Zoom/whatever calls, and possibly sharing your screen so that the other end of the connection can see your desktop. For the most part this isn't a big deal but occasionally a curveball gets thrown. For me, it was trying to share my desktop a couple of weeks back for an interview. When it counted the most, it just wasn't happening... not with Firefox or Chrome. I hastily rescheduled for the next day and …
For the last couple of years Lyssa and I have gone back to DC to spend Thanksgiving with her family (my in-laws), and one of the things we do is see a hockey game while we're there. In 2024 it was Washington Capitals vs. New York Islanders and somehow (I don't quite know how) my brother in law managed to score box seats for the game.
As I write this, it's been about a month since my unemployment ran out. The upshot to this, I suppose, is that I don't have to spent each and every day scanning job boards, cranking out variants of my resume 1, and applying for jobs, because when you're on unemployment you have to track the positions you applied for, when, and what the end result was. 2 Unfortunately, this means that a certain amount of spray and pray is required. The job market being what it is today it amounted to sweet fuck all. I'm kind of glad that almost …
Getting laid off just before the holidays has given me time to think about some things that, somewhat paradoxically, don't have anything to do with looking for a new job, doing paperwork, or worrying about insurance. Specifically it's given me time to reflect upon a conversation I had some months ago about how people relate to computers has changed in the last thirty years or so.
I'd been in a discussion about computers, how technology has changed over time, and how people have changed in how they interact with technology over the same period of time. Specifically, it involved folks …
