Routine Revelations

I don’t think Kansas City can afford to spot Tennessee a multi touchdown lead like they did last week because the Titans have a much better running game.

I am compelled to link to this blog post mostly because of the Newton MessagePad image that frames the post. NIce.

I told Google Home to remind me to do something in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes pass and I get a notification “ding”, so I ask Google what is my reminder. I have a couple of recurring reminders and its is really annoying that Google Home (or rather Assistant on Home) is not smart enough to know which reminder is the trigger for the notification. When I ask Google for my reminder it begins to read me all the reminders for the day when I only want to know the most recent one. Do Googlers even use this stuff?

This morning when I attempted to access my primary instance of River5 I observed an ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED message. This instance is hosted on Google Cloud and River5 has been running non-stop for over two years. It looks like there is a bug in urlfeed.toLowerCase() that causes a TypeError: Cannot read property ‘toLowerCase’ of undefined.

The interesting thing is that same error occurred on a second instance of River5 that is running a newer version of the code. I’ve restarted both instances, really no harm, no foul.

We got the second significant snow fall of the year overnight. Right now it is good snowball and heart attack snow.

Netflix doesn’t hire the best engineers. They create them.

I hired in to a company that believed this and had the culture to back it. Over time as leaders left and MBAs took over creating the best engineers was deemed too expensive and with that the culture deteriorated to the point where today it is worse than non existent. Corporate America lots of managers making lots of money running corporations and very few true leaders.

For me the money quote is:

When speaking to engineer leaders we bring up the story about the Netflix engineer above. We do this to emphasize the importance of the environment they are creating. “Creating,” being the operative word here. Environments don’t just happen, they are created through action.

Action… not talk.

Parsr, is a minimal-footprint document (image, pdf) cleaning, parsing and extraction toolchain which generates readily available, organized and usable data for data scientists and developers. Available as a Docker image. Looks like it could be a useful tool.

How can anybody “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” if they refuse to acknowledge and act under its authority?

Trump’s inability to do so is the prime reason why he should have never been elected nor should be re-elected. It’s simple really, either we live under the rule of law established by the Constitution, meaning we have a republic, or we don’t meaning we have a dictatorship.

Trump continues to think and act as though the President of the United States is a king or a dictator and can do anything he wants, like assassinating foreign leaders and therefore putting the country at risk of going to war. For me this is the primary reason why Trump should be convicted by the Senate, he simply does not care about the Constitution and that alone is the highest violation of his oath and is abuse of power. We should NOT have Presidents who refuse to acknowledge they are constrained by the Constitution, which frankly is the fundamental tenant of conservatism.

Currently reading: The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World by Dalai Lama, Desmond Tuto, Douglas Carlton Abrams 📚

PSA for today. Pitchers and catchers report to spring training in one month.

I think there is another side to the point of view about blogging that Dave is not addressing in his writing about journalism, which is that there are people who view blogging as the gig economy version of journalism. To these people and their audience blogging is a source of revenue, and I suspect this hijacking of blogging is actually what most journalists are threatened by.

I like how Dave Winer displaying pictures on Scripting News, centered and with a caption in smaller font below the picture.

It’s raining a lot right now, an unusual storm for the eleventh day of January. The sump pump is pumping water every thirty seconds and at the end of each pump the pipes rumble. It’s going to be a noisy weekend. (Aside, my worry is that the rain starts freezing resulting in a power outage the sump pump stops pumping. We do have a water powered backup but that has failed me before. Sump pumps were foreign to me until we moved in to this condo.)

Five year survival of pancreatic cancer has increased to 10%. It’s good that it has increased a percent the last few years, but it is no where near where we need it to be.

Last year, and still very relevant today!

Its all theater. Like taking off your shoes at the airport and it is time that people opened their eyes.

Two years ago I wrote about my ongoing search for the perfect to-do app, declaring I was giving Toodledo another go. This year I did not renew my Toodledo subscription and I’ve switched to Dynalist for my list management. Dynalist is an outlining app with task management features and I am finding it flexible enough to mold it into a process that works for me.

Giving Palm Its Just Due - Notes From The Cave

Remember when new phones were announced at CES? Hard to believe this was 11 years ago. Reading the article, I think it was a good analysis on my part. The functionality of Synergy has in most ways been integrated into iOS and Android, but ironically the wireless charging that Touchstone had is still not pervasive. My bottom line proved correct, Palm could not get developers to write apps, they were already occupied with iOS and Android. Palm would flounder until being eventually bought by my then employer, Hewlett Packard.

I stand by my opinion that WebOS is the best tablet operating system that I have ever used. If you think of it, ChromeOS is in many ways an iteration of WebOS except that it was keyboard first and thus still struggling in a tablet format.