I often tell people “I’m doing what I can with what I got.” as both a response to compliments and requests for effort.
What I got can be a lot, but I am one person battling neurodivergence, depression, and the shredding maw of capitalism in a system hijacked by christo-fascist lunatics.
That’s the dream. After years I finally got serious about learning/implementing VLANs and have begun to isolate everything out/properly firewall them. Most of the smart home stuff is already Z-Wave/Zigbee, but the few devices that aren’t are mostly already migrated onto a dedicated IOT network, as is the hubs, where only devices that have business talking to each other can even see one another.
I have yet to play with tailscale, but it’s on the list.
I like smart home stuff. I hate my privacy being invaded. It’s a very thin line to walk.
A company recently released a product that promises to be Matter compatible. By the time the product arrived, they edited their product description to say it worked with Matter if you bought their always online hub, created an account, let their hub talk to the internet, and then installed their internet-connected plugin to Home Assistant. (So it’s not that HA talks to these devices, or that it talks to their hub. It logs into the company’s servers to get the current state of the device.)
I wrote a review outlining this. An AI bot sent me a message offering me additional products from this company. (Ha!) And included the line “We strictly adhere to data protection regulations” … in the U.S?
Laughably misleading.
I like it. I would not go back.
But I have a nice home office, don’t live alone, and found office culture and colleagues to be disruptive.
I have ADHD. My job tends to be wide but not necessarily deep. A “quick question” can cause me to lose my train of thought, cause me to get disordered while trying to figure what the hell I was doing, get shut down by the frustration, and lose hours in ‘wait mode’ for the next interruption because it took me so long to enter a flow state that I’m fearful I’ll get interrupted again.
Being able to shut my office door, silence notifications, and focus with music playing in the background has been incredible for me.
I have (had?) an arms length friend that is prone to making bad choices.
He aspires to be a decent guy, but struggles with making the right choices. He made some pretty bad choices last year.
Cheated on his wife with a coworker that was, er, not someone I’d trust. Got caught. Coworker then got pregnant. A few months later he called me to ask if he could crash in our guest bedroom for ‘no more than three days’ while he cut things off with the coworker and worked on reconciling with the wife. While he was still that coworker’s supervisor and baby daddy, unbeknownst to his supervisors.
Seeing nothing but red flags there, I offered to pay for a hotel room for him for a week, and he never took me up on the offer. My wife’s eyebrows were almost at the ceiling when we got off the phone. She very much appreciated not inviting that mess into our lives. I haven’t heard from him since.
The house numbers on my block always skip one.
For example, if my block number was the 10th block, on the odd side of the street, the house numbers are 101, 105, 109, 1013, 1017. And on the even side, they’re 100, 104, 108, 1012, 1016. (Sub dividing houses is common here, maybe they wanted extra addressing space?)
Sometime last year, I caught an Amazon driver stalking through the back yard, as he tried to find one of those in-between addresses. Sadly he didn’t just leave the boxes at the map pin.
I’m in IT, but not that kind of IT.
Last week I afflicted myself with the Location Services are turned off bug by installing the 23H2 update to duplicate an issue a user in my work area was having.
When I called desktop support, we could not replicate the issue after he remoted in.
He closed the Remote Desktop connection, and the issue reoccurred.
He remoted in. The popup vanished as soon as he connected. We couldn’t replicate the issue.
He seemed dubious now. He disconnected. It occurred. I got a screenshot. He reconnected. We looked at the remote connection settings. Remote connections were set to override location. Disabled that.
Issue presented. We both had a good laugh.
You don’t even have to reference an article from a year ands half ago.
He literally suggested last week that he would cancel the midterms.
Being sleep deprived and not having seen the first one or having read the linked article before commenting, I can only assume the sequel is the one in which he finally saves that woman from Jerry Seinfeld.
I actually rebalanced my 401k tonight and dumped all my bond holdings and most domestic stocks just an hour or so ago. (I did keep the index funds, though.)
Swapping most of the allocations over to foreign stocks (showing about 35% yearly returns, vs the still good 14% I was netting before). I also threw a small chunk into a gold commodity index fund, which is showing 150% growth in the last year. Risky, but what am I going to do? Live long enough to grow old? In this economy?
Her name is Juniper! We mostly call her June Bug, though.
I’m not sure if I’m sharing the link the right way, but here’s Juniper and her big brother.
Work took a meta turn today.
Someone reached out to ask if I was really in all the meetings I’m booked for, only to give up and schedule their meeting for sometime in February because I didn’t respond in a very timely fashion … because I was in a meeting.
We recently adopted a kitten that was fostered before she could be adopted out by the local animal shelter.
To say that she’s the best, most lovely, and well adjusted cat is an understatement. We have two dogs and a year old one orange brain cell cat (who is also very sweet, but he comes on strong).
She walked into our lives utterly fearlessly. She purrs so loudly at the slightest affection. She wrestles with our other cat, who is 10x her size. She’s getting confident with the dogs - she’s currently sleeping between my wife and our velcro heeler, touching both of them.
We’re really grateful for her, and for the love and care that was given to her. Although we adopted her from a local shelter, we know the people that fostered her, so we know she was found eating trash with her littermates in a neighbor’s yard. She was just a street kitten with no mom before she got scooped up and shown all the love, which we see every day.
It’s hard, sometimes unforgiving work, but not unnoticed, and not without impact. Thank you for caring.
I completely missed the water and the curtain because I was distracted that she kind of looks pregnant and focused on trying to figure out the meaning with that.
When I was younger my grandmother died of cancer. She wanted to pass at home and we lived with her.
For months she just declined, until she was bed-bound in the living room, having carers and family members feed her, clean her after she pooped on herself, sometimes randomly screaming in pain, having nightmares, and was largely incoherent. In the last week she didn’t have the strength to eat and her doctors told us to just stop feeding her. She had a death rattle that lasted for days and echoed through the house every time she breathed, until finally something just gave out.
It was not dignified. It was not peaceful. It was deeply traumatizing. I wish we could cut her suffering short somehow – for us as much as her.
I know touch.wang is a real domain.
It’s a pie chart that shows how much of its belly looks like a hole!
Yup. Apparently the Clintons testified in front of Congress yesterday regarding the Epstein files. That’s not high on the list headlines today.