You've probably seen this by now, but it has come to my attention that not everyone has!
Read the story of Jorts in two parts, here:
AITA for “perpetuating ethnic stereotypes” about Jorts?
UPDATE: aita for perpetuating stereotypes about Jorts?
( Behind the cut, a few of my favorite Jorts the Cat bits from the net since then. )
In the comments, add some of your favorite Jorts the Cat content?When Ceila scheduled her Moderna booster shot and texted me about it, her phone keyboard or speech-to-text rendered it as "Madonna booster". So that's what we've been calling it ever since. I'm going to get my Madonna booster this week. Yes I know it wouldn't make any difference to boost Madonna with Pfizer instead, but this happens to be what the nearest CVS is offerring.
Another installment in a long series of FedEx failures over many years...
According to tracking, my replacement macbook arrived at a FedEx facility in Seattle on Wednesday evening. However it was scheduled for delivery Friday by 1pm, not Thursday. Oh well, it's not an overnight or 2-day package, I guess that's fine.
Friday morning, their tracking was still staying that, but shortly after 1pm, I got an update notification that it was delayed and would be delivered Monday by 1pm. When I checked tracking, the new entry for that day was "not scheduled for delivery", whatever that means.
Monday morning, today, it still said it would be delivered today by 1pm, and later in the morning it said it was out for delivery. And then, another update that my package is delayed, and now their tracking system says it's because "the recipient's business is closed for a holiday". WTF? This is a residential apartment building, and although there is a business in the building directly next to our front door, it's a dentist's office that has been lit and obviously open since early morning.
First call to FedEx, customer service says they're going to transfer me to customer service. Second person takes my tracking number, and oops, suddenly I'm on their post-call automated survey asking me to rate the quality of service I got.
Second call to FedEx, this time I get a customer service person who doesn't need to transfer me. She tells me she'll send a message to have the driver come "back" (I say that in quotes because I don't think they ever came here in the first place) to "re"-attempt.
Early afternoon, another notification, and FedEx tracking now says the item was returned to their local facility at 1:24pm.
Third call to FexEx ends up similar to the first - I start talking to someone and before I can even give them my whole tracking number, I'm on the automated post-call survey.
Fourth call to FedEx, I get to talk to someone new, and she says she'll ask to have a driver deliver it. She promises I'll get an update within 15 minutes.
Hours later, fifth call to FedEx after not having received an update, and I get a customer service person who tells me they will not try to deliver today because it's not a priority item.
...
Although I try to remember to tell any business who's sending me something to not use FedEx, and try to choose non-FedEx shipping options when I order online, sometimes I don't have a choice :( Apparently Apple always ships with FedEx? They didn't ask me. FedEx is by far the worst at delivering packages, consistently, at several different places I've lived, on opposite coasts. Avoid them if you can.
Update: Tuesday, it was again marked "business closed". A few more calls caused them to open a "case" that unlike the previous day's case, was transferred to someone who actually called the local FedEx location a couple of times. They eventually tracked down that it was not even sent out that day at all, and that nobody could explain why it was scanned as "business closed". They promised to send out out the next day (that is, today). We'll see.
The department I work for is looking for software developers, cloud engineers, SREs, product managers, and probably a bunch of other roles I haven't thought of. If you may want to come here (virtually), let me know and we can talk about what it's like, and I could refer you.
I've been working at McGraw Hill since early 2020. A couple of years before that, it was basically an educational textbook company, with a software division on the side doing online education software. When I joined was right around the time that digital products were passing 50% of the company's revenue, and now it's getting closer to ed-tech company that still does a bit of textbook publishing on the side.
The digital products division, which I work for, is explanding a lot over the next year, and we have a lot of openings. It's a pretty nice place to work. It doesn't pay at the same tier as Google-Apple-Amazon-Facbook, but if you have the background and skills to work at one of those companies, this is a place where you can be an opinion leader and make a big difference, and with less effort. It's a more relaxed job, yet still exciting, and with great coworkers. It's exciting because the digital products leadership has been really good, and thoughtfully shifting the whole organization from its old traditional dev vs. ops vs. IT practices and software on dedicated servers in data centers, to a more cooperative developer+SRE way of working, with software running in containers on cloud, and etc. I've seen a lot of change in this direction in the past year and a half, including reorganizations, and it has been done much more smoothly and thoughtfully and well than I've seen at most organizations I've been at. It's also exciting because there's more to go, and I can shape or drive big parts of it - and so can anyone else here who wants to.
Tech-wise, it's mostly on AWS with some things still in older data centers, lots of javascript front ends, some mobile apps, many back end APIs and pipelines in a mix of Go, Java, Python, and a smattering of other things, newer services on either kubernetes or ECS or serverless (lambda), and a variety of acquisitions at different stages of integration.
A lot of these jobs are full remote. The main offices are in New York City and Columbus, OH. Engineering had been mainly in Seattle and Boston but they decided to close both of those offices and convert all the Seattle and Boston based employees to full remote, and my group also has people in Germany and Argentina and other faraway places. Most of my coworkers are near Boston, NYC, Columbus, or Seattle, but I think we're open to hiring from just about anywhere now.
I just got today, in the mail, my "paid in full" papers for a mortgage I refinanced (and thus paid off in full) in August 2019.
The group I'm in has a job opening for Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). This is to replace someone I worked with who left to join a company his friends recruited him to, so I will probably work with whoever takes this job.
Just copying this from Twitter and leaving it here...
https://twitter.com/lmansley/status/1425261951106617346
I posted elsewhere but forgot to post here too!
Know anyone who wants a small inexpensive room in Central Square near the T? My small bedroom is available again, but Ceila and I are here less than half the time, so whoever stays here would get the apartment to themselves a lot of the time. I posted on craigslist for $600/month with Internet included, though if it's someone I already know and trust I would go a bit lower.
I'm probably going to give it to one of the people who responded on craigslist very soon, unless someone I know (or their friend) is interested.
Earlier this week I intended to make a post this morning noting that it is now two weeks after Ceila and I got Moderna shot #2. That is still true, but it turns out today is also the day my father died. Both are things I have known were coming for about the same amount of time.
In April 2014 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We thought he had a year, or two. He got the Whipple operation, which can often give people a couple more years. He got 7.
He completely beat the cancer, and it never came back, but the whipple procedure has some damaging effects that hardly ever make themselves felt because so few people live this long after having it. Last year, one of those after-effects acted up in spring and into summer and we thought we'd lose him, but he cheated death again. I spent 4 months in Boston and returned to Seattle when it looked like they had it beaten and we'd got some more years. But another, related problem kicked in this April.
I learned about it shortly after Ceila and I got the first Moderna shot in early April. When we came back from that adventure, I wrote my parents to tell them about it, and that I'd come out to visit them after full immunity in late May. A few days later, they got in touch to tell me that late May might be too late, if the hospital couldn't figure out some treatment option. I flew out in April instead. The night before my flight is when we learned that there were no options, and this was it. When I arrived, we didn't know if he'd have a week, or a month, just that it was very unlikely to be much more than a month.
He stuck around for three more weeks of mostly coherent and able to hang out in the living room and have conversations. Many friends visited. Two sets of family from Israel visited. He made it to his 79th birthday, Friday. Monday evening, it still seemed like he might even make it to June, and we were still having conversations. Then on Tuesday night his condition took a dive, and he lasted less than two more days. He had reached his goals of getting to see everyone important to him in the last few weeks, and he did not want to linger.
...
A good friend just flew out of town yesterday to spend time with her mother who is on hospice care, also from pancreatic cancer.
A couple of rooms available one of my 3-bedroom apartments in Central Square, Cambridge, for the summer.
It's just a couple of blocks from Mass Ave and the T, but on a very quiet block. Shared laundry in the basement.
One of my tenants on the 2nd floor wants to stay for the summer, after their current lease ends on May 31st. I told her I'm happy to extend for 3 months, if she and whoever she finds to sublet will pay the full rent, so she's going to do it if she can find people to take the other two rooms (or one person to take both, or whatever arrangement). Currently, the other two rooms are paying $980/month, so it'll probably be approximately that.
If you know anyone interested, I can put them in touch with her.
(And if she can't find people and commit to extend soon, then the whole place is available June 1st, for 3k/month)
Ceila became eligible for making a vaccine appointment at the beginning of the month, while I'm still not eligible (to even make an appointment) - she has health conditions, something I pretty much entirely lack. Usually a good thing!
She searched, couldn't find any appointment slots near us in Seattle, so searched farther and farther out... and found one for April 8th! ... in Sequim, WA, 2.5-3 hours away by car, including a ferry ride (or 3 hours the long way, without the ferry).
I've been to Sequim once before, a long time ago, on my own - it's near Port Angeles and the northern section of Olympic National Park, which I've wanted to go to again with Ceila for the past few years but we hadn't done yet. Excellent excuse for a day trip, with her appointment in the late afteroon so plenty of time for a nice hike if we left early.
Riding a ferry was pretty cool, it's been probably more than two decades since the last time I was on a car ferry. Even better: We had to stop and wait for orcas! Ceila actually spotted them on our side of the ferry (we were parked by the edge) well before the announcement, so we got to watch them for a while. And since we'd been planning to hike, we had our good binoculars.
Near the end of the ferry ride we also saw a pair of pigeon guillemots appearing to kiss. Kind of turning around each other and touching beaks gently several times.
We did get the planned hike, from a lake up to a nice waterfall. And then her vaccination appointment, at the pharmacy inside a huge Safeway supermarket. And then, as I was getting groceries waiting for her to come out... she came and brought me back there to get a shot. They had a few no-shows earlier in the day, this was now the end of the day, and they had to use their extra doses before they expired, so I got one that was meant for someone that morning probably.
Now we both have appointments for Moderna shot #2 in Sequim in early May. I think we'll go out there the evening before and stay in a motel and have more time. It'll be the beginning of shorebird season! And perhaps more of Olympic will be open (a lot of it is closed for winter still).
Having almost finished the regular mushrooms, I put mushrooms on our shopping list. Ceila was the next to go to the store, and bought shiitake mushrooms, a bit different from what I expected. A few days later...
Me: "I've been using the shiitake mushrooms and found that there are a few foods that they don't go as well with as the regular mushrooms."
Her: "You mean they're not fungible?"
I got spam email with subject line "Deal" and message body just "I have a deal for you." Just that, nothing more. It's not a multipart message with an HTML version, it's just text/plain.
Maybe they're just fishing to see who responds. But spam with no typos or awkward grammar? Bold move!
Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff just got sworn in yesterday, after the inauguration, because the Georgia runoff election results only got certified on Tuesday.
Almost four years earlier, Jon Ossoff made his first run for elected office when he ran for Congress in Georgia's 6th district in a special election in spring 2017. I'd been planning to visit Audra in Georgia during that time so I extended the trip so we could spend a few days canvassing for him, and we got to meet him at a campaign office we were volunteering out of.
It was supposed to be a solidly Republican district but that's when the reaction to Trump really started showing, and to much surprise the race was competitive. He ended up losing by about 3 points to a Republican, who in turn got knocked out by Democrat Lucy McBath in 2018 - she got re-elected in 2020, so that district has shifted. Even though we didn't succeed in 2017, I hope Ossoff's efforts helped make that shift and that the time we spent contributed a bit to that. And now he's a US Senator!
Considering only their effectiveness at a) slowing the spread of covid-19 and b) protecting you from covid-19, in public and grocery stores and similar (that is, I'm not asking about bacteria, fungus, healthcare settings, etc.)...
If an N95 mask doesn't quite fit as tightly as it should, is it still significantly better than all surgical & cloth masks? Or does the imperfect make it likely not much better than a surgical mask?
I've seen it claimed that multi-layer cloth masks are better than actual approved surgical masks. I'm very skeptical. But is there some validity to this claim?
Is there any difference between US N95 masks and Chinese KN95 masks for this purpose? Other than the fact that I've never figured out how to actually fit a KN95 to my face :) But aside from the fit, are they effectively exactly the same thing (for this purpose)?
If you have helpful references or sources for answers to any of these questions, I'd like to read!
Until now, the US had a very long history of peaceful democratic transfers of power. That is very decidedly over. This violent coup attempt failing will not change the fact that this transfer of power will not have happened peacefully, even though we get the legitimately elected government at the end of it.
Maybe most of you already know this, but I somehow never thought of it until a couple of days ago.
Wiping off the inside of the microwave is so much easier, quicker, and more effective, if I microwave a bowl of water for a few minutes first! Hot steam gets into all the crud on all the sides and top and bottom, and a single wet soapy shop towel can get it alloff in like a minute.
Anyone more well-practiced at dreamwidth than I am know how to set mine such that people reading my posts, by default, will get a Subject: field on their comments that will copy the subject line from my post (but let them change it)? Livejournal did this by default, and I really really miss it - it's the one way in which I think dreamwidth is far inferior to LJ, and if it weren't for the Russian takeover, it would be the reason I'd stick with LJ. But there must be a way to customize things so that this happens for my posts, even if it's not set that way for other people's posts, right?
It's so frustrating that all comments get emailed to me as "Reply to your entry" or "Reply to your comment" or "Reply to a comment" with no indication of which post or comment it is. That's one of the main things that drove me away from using dreamwidth regularly the other times I tried to get into the habit, but hopefully there's a way to fix it.
Time to take another stab at seeing if some people will read and comment somewhere other than Facebook!
Almost a full year since the last time I posted here, but the harmfulness of Facebook's influence has been much more in the news in that year, and people are talking about it more, so maybe people are more ready to broaden their post&comment flavored social media now?
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