https://bsky.app/profile/c0s.bsky.social/post/3lia2z4ukcc2d

What I posted there:

What groups are you donating to to help counteract the harms of the Musk/Trump administration's extremism? In addition to my regular monthly donations (such as @aclu.org) I recently made extra donations to several including @propublica.org and miracoalition.org. What about you? Recommend any?

If you have a bluesky account, I'd appreciate responses there (even if you comment here also), so that it can be a useful thread for others to see over there.

A few weeks ago, I got an automated email from Bank of America, “Your foreign currency order has been picked up” and my first thought was, "what foreign currency order?"

Before I got around to calling them to figure it out, I remembered: Before a trip in Feb 2023, I ordered some foreign currency from Bank of America so I'd have some cash on arrival. But I did pick that up, before the trip, so was this really the same thing? Searched for old emails, found the notification I got when I ordered the currency, and the order number matches.

So these are the notifications I got from them:

Jan 31 2023 email: “We’ve received your foreign currency order and are working on it now”

Jan 31 2023 email: "Your foreign currency order is on its way"

Feb 3 2023 6am email: “Your foreign currency order is ready for pickup”

I had actually picked it up the previous afternoon, as the flight departed Feb 2nd in the evening.

May 13 2024 email: “Your foreign currency order has been picked up”

I'm looking for a new 27" (or maybe a bit bigger?) standard "4K" monitor (or maybe 5K if not too expensive?) and it's hard to figure out which ones I'd like from online reviews. So looking for comments from people who have monitors!

I want:

• Good color and brightness, but doesn't have to be amazing. Just, white should look white, colors should look reasonably accurate, and nicely bright.
• Solid stable stand that doesn't take up too much desk surface area, but stands on the desk - doesn't require attaching or clamping, and doesn't require any fiddly or tricky assembly.
• Built in speakers that sound decent.
• Easy controls for volume, brightness, and input source select, using buttons/knobs. Nothing requiring multilevel on-screen menus where I have to navigate up/down or left/right to select options, yuck! Volume, brightness, and input select should be EASY to do frequently. This is the hardest point to find information on when reading reviews.

Do you know a monitor to recommend, or can tell me how it does on those criteria?

Know anyone hiring SREs or systems/platform/ops sort of engineers, either remote, or hybrid and on the T in Boston?

I'm employed full time but would like to find something new.

Lots of experience with both Google Cloud and AWS, kubernetes, terraform, and could learn whatever. But I want to avoid Microsoft-y places. https://www.linkedin.com/in/oinbar/ has more of my work background.

Earlier this year we rented two parking spots on a private way near our house, because the parking area we had been using is being redevloped. It's two spots in front of a house whose landlord lives on the other side of town, rents out the house, and rents out the parking spots separately: I could see that one spot was being used, but the other was empty and had a semi-portable little "no parking" sign in the middle of it, and the house had a sign with the owner's number inviting people to call her if they want to rent.

When I called, I learned that one spot was available right away, and the other would be available on Sep 1st, so I said great I'll take one starting in June and the other when it becomes available. Filled out leases, paid her, and went and moved the "no parking" sign from the empty stop so I could put a car there. Dragging it off the spot, to the edge of the yard, was difficult; even though it's not attached to anything, its base is a small bucket filled with concrete that's very heavy.

Sometime later in the summer, I took the car out one morning to go to an appointment, and when I came back the sign was back in the middle of the spot. I had to stop in the middle of the private way, go drag the sign off to the edge again, and then park. I wrote the owner to ask if she knew why the sign had been moved into the spot, and she said she didn't.

Another time later in the summer... the same thing happened again. I was only out for a couple of hours in the morning, again, and came back to find the sign in the middle of the spot. Wrote the owner again, and again she didn't know who'd done it. But this time, she told me that when she saw the sign she thought I put it there. It turns out... the sign doesn't even belong to her.

I don't know why she thought it was mine, since it had been there long before I first called her to ask about these spots. My one guess was maybe the person who rented the other spot, knowing that only one spot was rented, had put it there to ensure the second spot was clear, to give them a bit more room to pull in or out? But surely they'd have noticed by now that our car was there consistently.

And then it happened a third time, after September 1st. We now have both spots in front of that house, both paid for, although the second car had been stored away at my stepmother's a couple of miles away for a few months, so we were still only parking one car.

This time, I asked the owner if she minded if I just took the sign away from the property entirely, since it wasn't hers. She didn't mind. I dragged it all the way around to the alley belonging to our house, which is around the corner, so you can't see where it is if you're on the private way. And that's it - nobody has ever contacted the owner about it, even though her phone number is still very clearly posted on the front of the house.

So where did this sign come from, and who might've been moving it into our parking spot multiple times - any guesses? Not that I expect to ever know the answer.

Giving up on trying to convert my existing spare cash account to a joint account at the place where it is now - they seem completely unable to do it. So I need to find a new high yield savings account to move that money into.

Looked around on the web and found so many options! (here are some of them) Digging a little bit deeper, some more things I found out:

• Some (most?) don't support Zelle for transfers in or out.
• Interest rates vary by more than 1% between various institutions, but none of the ones I asked were able to give me their interest rate _history_ for more than a few months.
• Wealthfront, being a deposit broker rather than a bank, doesn't have a routing number for ACH apparently?
• Some have long hold times or really frustrating phone system menus.

What are your experiences with high yield savings accounts (something that pays >3% interest today)? Which bank(s) or institution(s) do or have you had such accounts with in recent years?

1. (If you have a joint account) Was it easy to open a joint account? Is it easy to set up separate login access for both of you to their web portal?
2. How has their interest rate been, compared to others, over time? Currently I see some offering 3.5% and some offering 4.5%, but maybe some of the ones offering high rates now were lower than others before.
3. What is their phone support like? Do they make it easy to find the phone number, easy to get through to a person when you call, and have weekend and evening hours?
4. Do they have Zelle?
5. Do you get a routing number and account number for ACH transfers?
6. Is it easy to link to multiple other banks/accounts and choose which ones to transfer money to or from?

I'm not planning to use this account for transactions other than periodically transferring money in, and sometimes transferring money out.

In the past five days,

• Twitter banned the @elonjet account, as well as the personal account of its creator/maintainer.
• The ElonJetTracker subreddit was started, and gained 200K subscribers in the next 4 days.
• News articles about the @elonjet suspension got discussed on twitter, and some journalists talked about it on twitter and linked to some articles about the issue.
• Twitter suspended the accounts of various journalists who had talked about this, including ones from CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. The UN and EU condemned twitter's banning of journalists.
• Suspended journalists got together on a twitter group voice chat thing called "spaces", invited Elon Musk, and asked him a bunch of questions. He evaded answering many and told them they had all doxxed him. and left.
• Twitter, realizing that suspended accounts can use spaces, disabled the feature shortly after he got off the call, and for the next several days.
• Elon Musk posted a twitter poll asking when the journalists should be reinstanted and most voters wanted it done soon. He cancelled it and posted a new poll, but again a majority wanted the journalists reinstated quickly.
• Twitter reinstated several of the journalists' accounts.
• Without announcing it, twitter quietly started treating links to mastodon content as malware, blocking people from posting such links.
• ... but since mastodon is not one company or domain, links to lots of smaller mastodon servers continued to work.
• Twitter banned the account @joinmastodon, which promoted moving to mastodon from twitter.
• A super-sloppy article on mediaite claimed twitter banned mastodon's founder, "John Mastodon", apparently misreading "@joinmastodon" and making assumptions. They later corrected that bit of their article, but too late - "John Mastodon" is now a meme. And their stupid article still says "competing social media company Mastodon" so they still don't realize it's not a company.
• Twitter suddenly announced a new policy, no promotion of or linking to any of the social media services they listed (a list which included both Facebook and Trump's Truth Social, but did not include tiktok ... huh.) No linking to them in your profile either, and no using link shorteners or descriptions of URLs to get around the ban.
• Elon Musk posted a poll asking whether he should step down as head of twitter. Majority say yes.
• The next day after their social media promotion ban, twitter cancelled the policy, and instead posted a poll from an official twitter account asking whether they should have such a policy. No overwhelmingly wins.

What's next?

Tomorrow, October 29th, is the last day to register to vote in MA for this year's general election.

You can check your status, register, or update your address, at https://www.sec.state.ma.us/OVR/

If you're reading my journal and you're in Massachusetts you probably already registered, but maybe you moved and don't remember if you updated yet? Regardless, re-post that link for your friends and other online communities.

We have some important ballot questions this year! Converting the state's flat income tax to something a little more progressive, to fund infrastructure and education and transportation. Protecting the new law that allows the state to give everyone eligible a drivers' license without checking immigration status.

MIT's campus, which had been open to the public, locked down at the start of the pandemic. A few days ago, they floated a proposal to make that mostly permanent, and turn their open campus into a closed campus long term.

Reaction from both MIT students and people in the community has been dismayed and upset. Here's one rather measured take that still gets across some of what would be lost if this change really happens.

Some MIT students started an open letter to get MIT to reconsider, and they welcome people from the community adding their names. Please sign on? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eIexQaGZ1EHSNub7Tjv3SvyGAs2CM8RzEAyv1FIxh9o

Need advice on using moving companies or container/pod companies for moving cross country! Also recommendations if any of you have had good or bad experiences with some.

Our move is a bit unusual. We're going to vacate our Seattle apartment in a couple of months and move a bunch of the stuff (though not all) to Cambridge, where we already have a fully furnished and supplied house. We've been living partly in both locations for several years, and we're going to Cambridge full time. Which means two things that make this a bit different from a "typical" cross country move:

1 - We're selling or giving away a significant portion of our Seattle furniture, though we do want to send a few pieces back to Cambridge. So in terms of furniture, this will probably be much less weight and volume than a regular apartment, even a 1-bedroom.

2 - Not only do we not need the stuff to arrive quickly - we've spent whole months in Cambridge without any of our Seattle stuff, we have what we need there already - but it would actually be better if we could be sure it doesn't arrive in under 3 weeks. That's because we want to drive our Seattle car to Cambridge, and want to make a nice road trip of it, so we don't want to have a tight deadline about when we have to be in Cambridge to receive our stuff.

Neither of us have done a cross country move before. I've read stuff online about how to avoid scams, and about the differences between full service movers and containers, but there's a lot that's not clear, and most of the "how to move cross country" articles online spend most of their time on things that aren't relevant to our move.

Examples of some of the sorts of questions I still have:

• Do shipped containers come in sizes that we could place on a residential street in Cambridge, and do we arrange that with the city or do those companies do it (and are they reliable at it)?
• Are there any full service movers who are willing to commit to delivering our stuff more than two weeks later - or ideally more than three? Or do we have to go with a container if we want that?
• With a container, can they select and hire movers to pack and load on one side, and unload on the other? How do we find companies that know how to select movers who are good at packing for cross-country shipping, which I gather is different than packing a moving van for the same city?
• Full service movers offer insurance for anything they pack. But what about if we use a container and they (or we?) hire separate movers to pack and load - how does insurance work in that case?

And, of course, what companies should we consider? Ones that people have had good experiences with.

While we don't want to spend a lot more money than necessary if it doesn't provide value, we're totally willing to spend more money if it makes things better. Finding the cheapest option isn't the top priority for us. And we're not considering driving a truck ourselves, we want to drive the car, which doesn't have a lot of space.

Edit: I forgot to ask earlier - several articles I read said that some warning signs of a bad or scammy mover are a) they won't accept credit cards for payment, and b) they require a large deposit up front, instead of asking for the bulk of the money after the move is done. So I'm curious, if you have direct experience with cross county moves, whether you know if your mover accepted credit cards for all payments? And did you have to pay a deposit up front, and if so, approximately what proportion of the total it was?