deathmtn

Wait, now that we've updated, are you going to break on a link?

Can you handle a cool link, meta tag?

I kinda resent doing things for specific platforms, but I'm trying to support Slack unfurls for my bots and weblogs.

Sometimes I start a long-running command, and I'm afraid to keep looking at that Terminal tab because I feel like I'm going irrationally hit Ctrl+C for no reason. It's like a fear that you have a homicidal urge that could burst for at any moment!

(I have actually hit Ctrl+C on something that had been running for hours, but it was because I want to copy some output from the command that I had selected.)

One of those things that's really simple but took me an hour to find: If you want to redirect a request in nginx when a page is not found to an external site, including the path and whatever other things are in the uri, it's just:
error_page 404 https://other-site.com/$request_uri;
It was right there in the official nginx docs, but I unconsciously look elsewhere first because of previous experiences finding them really abstruse.

10-4-4-4-4-4 yesterday. Ankle is getting better, but not enough for burpees.

This list of bridges is so good.

Yet the real-life Bach was very different from this cardboard figure. In fact, he provides a striking case study in how prickly dissidents in the history of classical music get transformed into conformist establishment figures by posterity.

I did not know any of this.

We spent a lot of time counting the guy's change today. He did have enough to get a new Lego set. But I guess we didn't explain that you do have to give up the money to get the goods. When it came time to pay up, he found it to be a surprise.

He thought that money worked like a reward system, rather than as a medium of exchange. He thought that the way that buying things worked was that you accumulated money and then received prizes based on the amount of money you accumulated, but you never ever actually lost money.

(This is how our sticker system works. Every n stickers, you get something, but the stickers are never taken away.)

I am finally at a point at which I'm not trying to make Big Things Happen, which I think I've been at for most of a month, and it feels great.

 59     count += dictToAdd[term];
 60     if (isNaN(count)) {
>61       debugger;
 62     }
 63     dict[term] = count;
debug> repl
Press Ctrl + C to leave debug repl
> count
'function Object() { [native code] }1'
> term
'constructor'
>

I guess I really should be using maps instead of objects at this point.

I had a fairly routine weekend, Family stuff + D&D Saturday night. The guy has been his normal five-year-old self: At times exuberant, at times conveniently self-absorbed in his projects, but tiringly disrespectful with giddiness toward the end of each day.

But I'm wiped! Maybe it was the Friday traveling as mild as it was? Aging?? A scalp fungus that drains energy from me each day??

Could be anything!

According to his brother, an Amazon human resources representative informed him at the hospital that Billy had lain on the floor for 20 minutes before receiving treatment from Amazon’s internal safety responders.

“How can you not see a 6ft 3in man laying on the ground and not help him within 20 minutes? A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera and came down to talk to him about it,” Edward Foister said.

Amazon said it had responded to Foister’s collapse “within minutes”.

Well, 20 minutes is "minutes," I guess.

An Amazon worker on the same shift told the Guardian: “Bill was on the floor for quite some time and nobody knew that time until cameras were reviewed, but in 20 minutes a worker in a nearby department saw him lying on the floor and then began radio callouts for 911. It really is unbelievable how Bill was laying there for 20 minutes and nobody nearby saw until an Amnesty worker with a radio came by.”
…
“After the incident, everyone was forced to go back to work. No time to decompress. Basically watch a man pass away and then get told to go back to work, everyone, and act like it’s fine,” said another Amazon worker on the shift.

I mean, this is what you expect from Amazon — mercilessly whipping the poor so someone can get a package a day earlier than they might from a competitor that respects basic human rights. But at the same time, let's not forget that this is what we expect from Amazon.

I just got this email from ParkMobile:

From: ParkMobile Notifications alerts@parkmobileglobal.com
To: Jim
Subject: Parkmobile Account Changed Notification
Date: Saturday, October 19, 2019 12:45 PM

The following account changes were made:

Vehicle XXXXXX XX added to account.
Marked vehicle XXXXXX XX as primary for user
added primary credit card

If you did not make or authorize these changes to your account, please contact Parkmobile Member Services by email at helpdesk@parkmobileglobal.com.

So, I sent an email to that address to the effect of "no, I didn't make or authorize these changes!" Here was the reply:

From: ParkMobile Support helpdesk@parkmobileglobal.com
To: Jim
Subject: Looking for help?
Date: Saturday, October 19, 2019 12:47 PM

Thank you for contacting us, however we no longer accept support requests via email. Please visit our Help Center at https://support.parkmobile.io/hc/en-us to search for your answer or to create a support request by providing your information and details of your request. We will assist you as soon as possible.

Thank you,
ParkMobile Member Services

--------------------------------
This email is a service from Parkmobile Support.

Good coordinatin', corporate organizations!

I went to a workshop in NY yesterday, and a coworker (that I've never actually worked with, he works in New York) happened to be at my table — with a flip phone!

I asked him about it, and he's been on a flip phone for two months. He does have a smartphone because we have to have a smartphone at work in order to log in to various internal services, but he doesn't carry it with him.

He's found that he's more aware of his surroundings and less generally distracted. This jibes with my accidental experiment without a smartphone, which started last Saturday and ended Thursday, when I got a loaner phone from work. It's easy to experience but hard to explain, but it feels good to not always have a second option, which is the case when you have a smartphone.

I probably won't get a cellphone, but I did think of a way to continue to be "smartphone-less" like my coworker. I'm just not going to install anything that is filled with potentially infinite content. e.g. Email, RSS, and social media (though I've already been off that for a year, but you get the point), Slacks that have a lot of content. None of the stuff that you look to when you're slightly uncomfortable or bored. I'll save that for the computer, which has the following limitations:

A) I have to be at specific locations to use it
B) I have usually have something compelling to do at it

Of course, there is a mobile web browser on the smartphone, a window to all of the infinitely scrolling escapist holes. This is a big potential problem; I'm counting on a lot of it requiring logins to dissuade me from using web app version of the escapist holes.

Grind Guitarist Takafumi Matsubara Battled Hand Paralysis and Came Back Stronger Than Ever

But just as Longhena was released, Matsubara was struck down by a catastrophic health emergency. “It happened suddenly,” he recalls via email from Japan. “Dizziness and nausea…I went to the hospital soon. The doctor said, ‘cerebral infarction.’ Fortunately it was light. But my three fingers and throat did not work. My irregular life and fickle eating caused it.” He had suffered a serious infection and inflammation in his brain, which cost him the use of three fingers on his left hand, including total paralysis of his middle finger. At the time, no one, Matsubara included, thought he would ever play guitar again.

He has been through a lot. But the power of grindcore got him through!

Indeed, Matsubara seems overwhelmed by the love the global grindcore and underground metal scene has shown him. He recently completed a US tour, and has a new band, Retortion Terror. “To tell the truth, I have not realized what I did and what I do now,” he says. “I’m just a salary man who likes tortoiseshell cats and karate. The great musicians gave me special presents. I’m the happiest guitarist in the world.”

Aren't we all!

I'm enjoying his solo album, partly because I know it's part of a heartwarming story. But that's OK! I've been reading lately how titles influence the perceptions of paintings, which is interesting, but again, no art is separate from the world around it, so that effect is fine.

Hey, I attempted to explain Russell's Paradox, a really nifty thought experiment about sets. It's math, but accessible to the layman.

Dad remote tech support session last night. It took 30 minutes to get screen sharing to work. I think next time, I'll have him FaceTime with the phone pointed at the computer until we get screen sharing working. Describing UI elements is total hell.

10-4-3-4-2-3, no burpees while the ankle is recovering.

👀 Bot is live!

I've really enjoyed not having a phone for the last couple days! I have a sprained ankle, and it's nice to not have to both deal with limping and with looking at my phone. Not having an extra thing to do at all times (no matter how enjoyable the extra thing might be) is extra refreshing.

I've been trying to think of ways to not have a phone, but I do need to communicate with my family in emergencies, and I do have to have a phone for work. The best I could come up with is to have a watch that does the texting and calling, but does not do all the crazy stuff a phone can do.

Annoyed (as I am) about Facebook’s insistence on continuing to allow untruthful political ads to run on the platform, Warren placed an untruthful ad herself to see what happened (and, clearly, to annoy Mark Zuckerberg.

In a series of tweets on Saturday, Ms. Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, said she had deliberately made an ad with lies because Facebook had previously allowed politicians to place ads with false claims. “We decided to see just how far it goes,” Ms. Warren wrote, calling Facebook a “disinformation-for-profit machine” and adding that Mr. Zuckerberg should be held accountable.

🔥