Computers Hate Us Now, Because Capitalism

Posted on April 25, 2018 by Ian
NASA engineer Margaret Hamilton standing next to a stack of binders containing her program's results. The stack is as tall as she is.

These were the days! (Yes, I realize that’s code, not manuals. Pretend they are manuals.) Source.

So, computers kind of hate us these days. Well, hate is too strong a word. And it’s not actually the computer’s fault. So, I guess–

“Ian you’re doing that thing where you ramble instead of actually starting to talk about the topic.”

Right. So, recently a fellow by the name of @ajroach42 went on an interesting jag on Mastodon. They later turned it into a blog post, which you can view at http://ajroach42.com/observations-on-modern-computing-the-last-10-years-were-a-misstep/. The tl;dr version: computers are now less and less about empowering the user. Many things have gotten easier, but at the cost of only being able to do them a very certain way, and not understanding the underlying mechanisms by which they do them. Users are no longer empowered to learn and grow. Instead they have to follow the nice little track a given company (Facebook, Microsoft, etc) have dug for them, or their computer will simply not work to do what they need.

(Seriously though, please go read it, in spite of my tl;dr version. It’s well worth your time.) Continue reading →

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Week Wrap-up: 16 April 2018 – 22 April 2018

Posted on April 24, 2018 by Ian

Posted a little late!

This last week was pretty good! I mean, I didn’t sleep enough, at all, but other than that…

  • Started volunteering at the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library and had a good time my first two shifts. I’m looking forward to going back in on Tuesday.
  • Got to do some gardening work for my friend GG. I dug up an entire pool tarp that the previous owner had buried as a (very bad) weed barrier. Plastic may take 100 years to go away, but that doesn’t stop it from getting brittle and gross in a year or less. Geeze. It was very satisfying to get it all out, though.
  • Second week of my digital copyright class happened. I’ve been learning a lot that I’m hoping to take into my idea of republishing old out-of-print pulp books. The information on precise laws, including what constitutes a “due diligence” search for a rights holder, has been super useful. Not so fun is the intense pace of the class, but that’s how one-uniters go sometimes.
  • Went out for beers with a newly met person and had a good time. I haven’t been out for an evening like that in a while and it was refreshing.
  • Got back into Fallout 4.
  • Wrote my fanny off. I think I only missed one day of fiction writing this last week. Woo!
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Working Out is Hard, Walking is Not

Posted on April 20, 2018 by Ian

A close-up of two branch tips of an evergreen, with green needles sprouting from them. Sunlight comes in at a shallow angle from the left, creating a slight flare at the left of the frame.

I started going for walks in the morning as part of working out. I lift weights, but I wanted something to do on my off days. I’m not feeling up for the running grind right now, and I kept ducking out of doing yoga. Walking seemed like a good solution.

It’s been wonderful. Walking requires very little mental momentum to go do, so it’s hard to psyche myself out and dither too long like I often would with running. It’s also an activity I’m willing to do somewhat independent of the weather, since I can layer up or down in a way I can’t do with running. Also in case of wet conditions losing my footing will probably just mean an embarrassing pratfall and not an injury. Continue reading →

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So Bad It’s Practically A Crhyme

Posted on April 19, 2018 by Ian

I really needed to write a blog,
But, tired, my brain filled with fog,
So I took the easy way out,
Come on, don’t pout,
A bad limerick’s better than some rambling monologue!

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First Day Volunteering at WTBBL

Posted on April 17, 2018 by Ian

I started volunteering again for the first time in years and years today. I’ve picked up a couple of hours a week at the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library, which I figure is a good opportunity for me to learn more about actual librarianship, work to help an underserved community, and get a chance to give back to the community in general.

It was a very interesting first day. I was given a crash course in the technology side of the library, including tutorials on how to load audio books onto two different types of devices, and being shown some of the devices they’ve used over the past several decades. They used to lend out record albums of books! Now it’s a cartridge-based system, and as far as I can tell the from the quick glance at the internals I got, cartridges are basically USB drives in a durable, easy-to-orient case. The player is provided free to anyone that uses their services, and the shipping of cartridges is free, too. It’s really cool how much they can help without paying, especially given how much more elaborate their operation has to be to account for the fact that they’re lending books out all over the state. Continue reading →

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Falling Back Into Fallout 4

Posted on April 16, 2018 by Ian

Everyone, meet Elaine. Elaine, meet everyone.

I’ve been playing Fallout 4 again, as I mentioned yesterday. It’s my second crack at the game. The first time, I got frustrated with a combination of the keyboard controls, the main character being both a defined person and bland, and my propensity for endlessly running out of inventory space, because I’m talented like that. While I puet in 50 hours, I came away with an impression of the game as kind of mediocre.

Not exactly an auspicious start for a second playthrough. But I was craving another game, like Shadow of Mordor, that I’d started but never finished. Fallout 4 definitely fell into that for me. I could barely remember what I was doing the last time I played, except that it felt like the game was pulling me in a ton of different directions at once and I wasn’t doing very well at going in any of them.

So it was new character time. New game time. And new gameplay time. Yep, I modded the shit out of it. Continue reading →

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Week Wrap-up: 09 April 2018 – 15 April 2018

Posted on April 15, 2018 by Ian
A small bundle of dandelions growing in grass, right next to where the grass meets the sidewalk.

I saw some dandelions, that’s always nice.

This week was a week of ups and downs and a lot of cruising on depression autopilot. So that was fun.

  • I finished recovering from my cold, yay!
  • I missed every single workout slot, so that sucks.
  • I didn’t sleep enough pretty much any night this week, and spent the back half of it feeling super emotionally fragile as a result.
  • Depression punched me in the face for the majority of the week, which among other things means I’m going to miss a couple of (optional) deadlines.
    • I also missed out on doing a loooot of writing and blogging because of this badbrain storm. Phoo.
  • Found out I didn’t get the bookstore job. Which I expected, but still kinda sucked.
  • I saw Pacific Rim 2! It’s highly enjoyable, though I agree with my bf’s assessment that it’s not nearly as strong as the first one.
  • It rained constantly for like three days in a row, which sounded nice against the roof/windows but probably did nothing to help my mental state.
  • Did my taxes, found out my estimated taxes, unlike past years, did not add up to more than what I owed, but rather less. (I think I underestimated how much I was going to make this year, and/or went with the lower number (which wasn’t enough), like the instructions say to. :) So I got to pay the IRS a load more money. Which, luckily, I had the $, but the whole situation was a bit of a gut punch.
  • As I’ve finished Shadow of Mordor, I started on a new game. Well, an old (for me) game that I’m actually going to try and finish this time: Fallout 4! I modded the butts out of it, and there’s a few more i still want to add. (There’s one out there that adds a cover system, which after the first couple firefights sounds like a wonderful idea.)
    • I played a lot of FO4 this week. Depression = at least I can video game?
  • I also studied for an interview I have coming up in a couple weeks and continued to dust off my programming skills.
    • A Google Compute Engine/Kubernetes tutorial that was supposed to take me 90 minutes took me like four hours. But at least part of that was, I think, the instructions being out of date. (Long story short: resource allocation as described in the tutorial isn’t quite enough to get everything running you need to, so I had to fiddle with it, which made later parts of the tutorial require fiddling, and at one point I had to start everything over due to getting impatient about a very slow incremental-upgrade process that happened because I had an unrealized typo in my config file. Wheeee.)
    • I implemented a hash table in Java (by myself, not using the builtin functions). It was hard, and my hashing function kind of blows, but it worked! And that made me happy.
  • My new class started and has a bunch of reading! I’m scared! But hopefully I will manage.

And that’s been my week! How about yours? What did you get up to? Are you looking forward to anything coming up this next week?

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Computer Learnin’s: April 2018

Posted on April 9, 2018 by Ian

I’ve fallen behind on tracking my computer learning! But we’re back and better than ever, mostly in a dash to absorb as much knowledge as I can before an upcoming technical interview. Because of that, some of the infosec stuff is taking a backseat to brushing up on general coding skills and learning the tools of the team(s) I’ll be interviewing with.

09 April 2017

  • Studied Cracking the Coding Interview for like two hours. (I picked this one up last Thursday at the recommendation of the recruiter I’ve been talking to.) Got through the O-notation section, where I learned about some things that’ll trip me up and I need to review. (I got 9/12 right on the chapter-end quiz questions, though, so I’m feeling at least semi-competent if hardly amazing.) I’m now onto general interviewing strategies, and it looks like there’s a few things that’ll be handy to review and memorize. Like hash tables. Aka that thing I barely covered in undergrad. I suppose it’s never too late to learn!
  • Started training up on Google Compute Engine and Kubernetes (aka Google Container Engine). It was interesting manually deploying things in GCE and then using Kubernetes and seeing just how much faster it can go. It’s going to take me a bit to get a hang of the console commands, though. They’re pretty verbose, but I suppose that’s the downside of having one web-UI console that access everything in their container/cluster services. Excited to learn more, hope to finish the tutorial-thing I’m on by the end of tomorrow. Continue reading →
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Week Wrap-up: 02 April 2018 – 08 April 2018

Posted on April 8, 2018 by Ian
An image of a brown Children's Python sitting loosely-coiled on a piece of bark, head visibile, seemingly looking a the camera.

Melville, a very good and sweet boy.

A quick wrapup of what happened this week! I know you’re all very excited. Quivering with anticipation.

In no particular order:

  • Did a couple of interviews!
    • One was an initial discussion with Google. I’m now at the point where I need to schedule the more in-depth technical interview. I’m really nervous/intimidated, but I’m going to try my best! (And study. Because getting my coding skills dusted off will be important.)
    • Another was an interview at a local bookstore. I’ll find out how that went next week. I was sick during the interview, which I’m sure colored my perception of it, but I get the impression it went okay-but-not-great. So I didn’t embarrass myself, but one of the other candidates will probably get the gig? We’ll find out! (FWIW I would like to work there, I think it would be a v. good experience.)
  • Had a cold! This is a big part of why I was out of blogging for the back half of this last week. I’m finally on the mend, but I’m still shaking the tiredness that comes along with it.
  • Saw some friends.
  • Hung out with one of our snakes (Melville, pictured above) and he was very good. And the non-Jerry leopard gecko, Cardamom, who is a brave climber and very cute.
  • Picked up coding in Java again. Wrote some v. basic programs myself to help remind myself of the syntax, and solved an interview-style problem from an online site. Continue reading →
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New Podcast!

Posted on April 4, 2018 by Ian

Hey all! A quick plug for one of my other projects. My friend Katy and I started a new podcast called “Failed Taxonomy,” where we talk about media, our lives, and answer listener questions. Our first episode just went up yesterday, and you can check it out here: https://www.failedtaxonomy.com/2018/04/02/episode-1-artisanal-gender-feels/

Please give it a listen and subscribe if you like!

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