Go back to the Garden of Eden with a bucket, grab all the apples, then head back.

We’re engaged. Will be getting married as soon as my deposit check for half the expenses clears.

That and your citizenship papers, in case of Papiere, Bitte. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I feel so honored. Got one of these today.

Traditionally, there have been a few classes of companies in the U.S: C Corp, S Corp, LLC (Limited Liability Company) aka partnerships, and Closed. Most companies in the U.S. are organized as one of these, with their responsibility toward shareholders, who want to see their money grow.

If you wanted to work for a company that didn’t necessarily have infinite growth as its mission, the only option was to find a Non-Profit, but they may not have the kind of funding to spend on legal visas.

In the last few years, two other types of companies have emerged. They’re similar, but legally different: B-corp (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)), and PBC or Public Benefit Corporation (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation).

These can be for-profit, but have to have a stated mission in their charter to provide a benefit of some sort to the public.

The links above point at some examples, but you may want to do your own research. Those companies may have the resources to pick up your visa, and may better align with the values you’re looking for.

Ideally, and when able, your best bet would be to start your own business and set it up just the way you want.

Comcast/Xfinity. Installed home security equipment I told them wouldn’t work, then once it turned out it didn’t, they charged me $1000+ for the equipment that they took back, but somehow misplaced. Two years of calls later, they finally ground me down. It’s the one company I refuse to call for my elderly mother when she has trouble with them.

BofA is a close second. Emptied out my little kid’s saving account with fees (even though they said it was a free account when we opened it, so we didn’t bother checking the statements). Hit us up for multiple overdraft fees, then offered to return only three months’ worth of just the fees.

They can all burn in hell.

Losing the all-important male stripper customer base.

Obligatory:

Years ago. Was visiting a client on-site. Meeting ran late and had to race home. Popped into a ‘natural’ food store to get something. Grabbed a package of pre-made ‘fresh’ shrimp spring rolls out of one of those open coolers. Ate in the car.

A 1.5 hour drive turned into a four hour nightmare with all the unplanned stops.

Never again.

Friend of mine used to volunteer for the local chapter of a well-known national non-profit. He tried to explain all the technical benefits of setting up a website, yada yada. The board didn’t care and were bored.

He finally set up a small demo on his own. Just a few screens. Ran a small test. Presented static screenshots, along with charts and stats on viewership and engagements. Had mockups of donation pages, volunteer signup screens, newsletters, etc. That was when people saw the value and got interested.

Nobody cares about decentralized social networks, the technology, or how terrible the other outlets are. For a municipality, you may want to focus on maintaining multiple channels of communications and ways to reach and engage the most users. You could then fold the fediverse into it as one more channel. Something they should keep an eye on. They’ll need a way to post the same content to all those channels with the least effort. Something easy that a trained intern or clerk can do.

Guarantee there will be questions of cost of setup, maintenance, and risks. May want to have some answers and slides ready.

Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker.”

There’s also a 50-year anniversary, 12-part, 99% Invisible series diving into it. Looking forward to listening to those alongside each section.

“Given a list of strings, print the contents of the list to the screen.”

print(stringlist)

or if you want to get fancy:

print(", ".join(stringlist))

When do I start? I feel like I nailed it.

/s

Interviewed at two big, well-known tech companies. Had done a lot of mobile dev work at the time, but really wanted to switch to connected hardware and told the recruiters.

Showed up for the first on-site interview. Guy walks in. Explains the actual first interviewer couldn’t make it so he was a last-minute stand-in. Goes: “So, it says here you are intererested in mobile. That’s good. My team is looking for someone like that.”

I explained it was actually the other way round. What proceeded was an awkward hour of bullshit questions about train schedulers and sorting algorithms. Repeat five times that day. Every. Single. One.

Second company a few weeks later. Same thing. Except this time, 2/3 of the way through, a manager in HW group walks in. Grouses why he was asked to talk to someone, checks notes, about mobile. We had the greatest conversation after I set him straight. He wanted me to come back and do another loop just with his group. Except a week later, they announced a hiring freeze and I never heard back.

In retrospect, it was a good thing. I would not have been a good fit.

Membership in the local art museum.

Can go any time and just sit, absorb, and clear the head.

Going from a Candybar phone to an iPhone.

If you use github pages, you can create, deploy, and host static websites for free. Only cost, if you want your own URL, is for a custom DNS name.

You can use their default Jekyll static rendering engine, and create the content using Markdown. And with github actions, all you need to update the content is create markdown, then push the change to the same repo. After a few minutes, the new content shows up.

https://pages.github.com/

Hugo can also be used, but it takes a few extra steps: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/

You can also find ‘themes’ to customize the look and feel of the site, specific to the site generation tool.

If you want a lot of extra features, Docusaurus is pretty much as good as it gets, and you can set it up to push out to GH pages: https://docusaurus.io/docs/deployment

Don’t believe in ‘retirement.’ Already have plans to transition into full-time writing.

https://youtu.be/tANavEbnKsU

Finland edition, where it apparently started. Action starts at 4:20m in.

Good, wholesome fun.

• Loading dishwashers properly requires an official government license and a test.
• Putting a flat plate in front of a bowl means a year of hard labor.
• Loading any of the good kitchen knives is an automatic 10 years.

How great-grandpa caught syphilis? Towards the end, doctors said a lot of his ailments were because of that one, little issue. You can speculate, but…

An old, dear friend and his family are in town to drop off his daughter at graduate school. Reconnected with him back in April when I visited his side of the country. Looking forward to having them over and introducing them to my own family.