frandroid

Hey it only took me a year to setup the adjustable desk I bought! Yay me! Now to do my taxes...

Back when The Onion bought InfoWars, there was this whole thing about how "Onion owner Global Tetrahedron buys InfoWars for undisclosed sum", and this seemed like a fun mock company name to describe the Onion owners. Except... That's actually the name of the company. It turns out that The Onion itself was bought mostly by Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson, and is run by Collins, former disinformation reporter at NBC. The idea of buying The Onion was floated by Collins on Twitter, Lawson got interested, and they eventually bought it off the hedge fund (!!) which was the owner at that time. They brought the print edition back, they have a subscriber base even though the content is all free, and the whole purchase thing was done in collaboration with the paper's union. Lawson was basically interested in keeping The Onion alive and is not interested in doing a flip at some point. (He said he hopes he still owns The Onion when he dies.) It's really good media news overall. You can hear them discuss this with Nilay Patel on Decoder, The Verge's "how does this [tech] company actually work" podcast.

It's been a while since I've highlighted an episode from the Pirate History podcast, but here we go: Episode 269 - Scurvy Schoolmasters

Do you remember when I was posting about Pirate Utopias, and being rather upset that some of the core trade that the pirates at Salé engaged in was slave-trading and kidnapping? One of the early incarnations of Libertalia, another "Pirate Republic" in Mauritius, decided to ally itself with a local tribe, marry their women, and all benefited thanks to the trade that they were doing, mostly in cattle meat for other pirates to stock provisions. Eventually they started selling weapons to only that tribe, and the pirates and the tribe started raiding one of their rival tribes. First they were capturing cattle, but eventually they decided to capture their women, and enslaved them in a bordello for the use of the local pirates and other visiting pirates. So we're once again very far from progressive anarchist fantasies of piracy. The slaves eventually manage to make something good out of the situation but I won't spoil the episode further...

I was kind of tired when I was listening to the episode and can't recall why it's called that, sorry.

Did you know that "primer" is pronounced differently if you're talking about a book or a coat of paint??!

This is so annoying to me because people misuse/misspell the cognates premier/premiere all the time, and I thought I had primer down too...

So I think Canadaland was hit hard by Jesse's Zionist convulsions.

The first thing I noticed was that CL had joined the Acast network. It's basically a podcast advertising network. CL never had one of these before. I also just heard Jesse do an Audible recommendation. Audible has an affiliate network which is available to most podcasters I think, and I think CL had done Audible ads before, but it's literally been years since I heard an Audible plug on CL. The program seems to have generally lost favour with most podcasters, probably because other affiliate programs pay better.

Then I noticed that many of CL's old collaborators moved away: Mattea Roach went to CBC, Karyn Pugliese stepped down from her role as inaugural (and last, it seems) editor in chief, Jonathan Goldsbie is ostensibly on an 8 month Massey fellowship but that basically ended the Wag the Doug podcast. Justin Ling was an occasional collaborator who had been slated to take Goldsbie's Thursday slot but basically left after Brown forced edits/re-recording on an episode about Palestine (though not to actually censor things, but it just rubbed the wrong way).

As she was the most left person on CL, I was kind of upset that Émilie Nicolas kept with Brown. She even recorded a fairly earnest crowdfunding ad for the December campaign, highlighting how she felt that her interview with a Palestinian person was the highlight of her career. (I don't even remember the interview so I've requeued it--trying to recall if it really was that good?) But as the year ended, Nicolas announced that her show was over, in a fairly terse last episode. I personally think that her listenership declined and Brown ended her show due to both that and declining revenues.

She was never a challenge-the-interviewee type of person, but I was quite upset when she interviewed Michel Cormier, a respected former foreign correspondent at Radio-Canada/CBC who later was its director of information (he's retired now). She never asked him a single question about Israel/Palestine coverage in the middle of this genocide. I thought that was an immense miss. As a retired person, I'm sure he could have handled a couple questions about that.

So anyway. These are all symptoms...

"MORALITÉ: groupons-nous et demain la branlette internationale sera le genre humain!"

(I don't know how well automated translation will work on this quote or the whole post, but anyway: Branlettes du monde.... (NSFW in case you didn't catch the drift already)

Currently reading: I've restarted reading Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples from the beginning, because it had been so long since I had started it and barely remembered anything. Good thing I did because even re-reading the material, not very much is coming back to mind. I must had been reading it too fast last time. There are a few things I'm not grasping but I'm too lazy/sick/reading in bed to bother researching. Hopefully I can keep up.

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I think I'm on day 8 of this throat infection. I went to the walk-in clinic and the doc said it was viral, so no antibiotics for me. I think it's getting slightly better today. We'll see tomorrow, as it seems to be going better and worse all the time.

My boss has had another COVID infection. He had skipped the latest vaccine booster. I seriously worry for him. He has kids so they bring every virus back from school. He had RSV a while ago. I'm going to bet on him getting the norovirus by spring.

So I just had a Kati roll (think Indian taco bell-style burrito) which was warmed up in the microwave in a "crisping sleeve". I had no idea that you could get food to become crispy in the microwave. Game changer!

I have three gift subscriptions for Margaret Killjoy's substack, if anyone's interested.

Content notice: I'm talking about how much I love my work situation, where I'm fairly spoiled with the things that matter in life. My partner gets weirdly jealous about it so I thought I'd prefix with this CN, for others who don't like to read about how some jobs are actually good. :P

We're getting the Holidays off, from Dec. 23rd to January 3rd. We had the same thing at my previous startup last year. We're "on call", esp. the 30th and 31st which are big deadlines for our customers, but still. We aren't pushing major changes so nothing should collapse.

Now since that wasn't specified in my contract, I don't know how that works out with the vacation allowance I negotiated. (My previous company had it written in there so it was clearer. They were more experienced at the small startup game.) But my manager/former roommate says "no one's counting" and "I don't care, take the time you need". :)

It's kind of interesting because many times he's asked me if I like the work, and I would say I like 80% of it. But I'm getting a bit annoyed of being asked that question? Like it's happened half a dozen times at least, what's going on? So if he asks again, I'll tell him that I would watch paint dry with him, because he's very competent and he's chill. Those are the things I care for in a boss and co-workers. That's what makes me productive. That's what I care about. I had that last year, lost it, and I'm happy that I found it again.

Another thing that's interesting. At previous companies, we had daily stand-up meetings. For those who don't know, a stand-up meeting is a meeting which happens early during the workday where everyone on your direct team (hopefully not more than 7 people in a meeting, otherwise you should split the meeting). Everyone takes turns giving their updates: 1) What are you're working on, 2) what's blocking you 3) what you're going to work on next. If you can help your coworkers on something they're working or blocked on, that's a good time to speak up. This is a standard practice for modern software development teams, part of what's called SCRUM or generally Agile methodologies. It's called a stand-up meeting because you're supposed to meet stand up; it discourages people from blathering on and on, no one wants to stand for more than a few minutes. If someone goes on for too long they're going to get told to wrap it up. At the Star we had an actual 1-minute timer to get people to keep it short, because we had a meeting of 10+ people. But of course in our remote work era, no one's standing up anymore.

My manager is basically anti-meeting and has told everyone else outside the dev team to send him meeting notes, he's not going to attend meetings. He does sometimes, but he got burnt out on them during the pandemic and just pushes back on them. So he's not too keen on regularly scheduled meetings. He wants us devs to keep him regularly apprised of what we're doing and ask him (and each other) for help if we're stuck. I'm a bit of a lone ranger, so eventually he got sick of my isolation and scheduled me a daily 16h30 meeting. A couple of my coworkers are in Calgary so they start later than me, and my boss himself has morning duties to deal with, so I rarely hear from anyone in the morning. Anyway, I basically just have a daily 1:1 with him, and it's pretty productive. Eventually the goal is to wean myself from the scheduled meeting but I'm not there yet. :) Oh yeah: we also have no ticketing system for tasks. The daily 1:1 is also for getting direction on what to work on next. My manager is my human JIRA. And sometimes he changes his mind on the fly. So you gotta roll with that. But as much as I thing Kanban is the ideal state, I'm fine with this, with the right person, which he is.

Now I don't want to sugarcoat it. In spite of all of this I've had tons of anxiety about the work, imposter syndrome, getting stuck on the most stupid problems and taking the long way around to resolve them, in particular not asking for help quickly enough, because I'm a Stubborn Man. But it's much better to deal with that in a supportive environment. Which my previous jobs were, but this is even better, I think.

Also, after my previous stint working on a lot of back-end development 2 jobs ago, I thought I was done with the back-end, I initially was happy to go back to React at my last job, but I'm really enjoying this Lambda stuff. It's basically re-branded micro-service architecture, and I'm sold. I'm also writing tests for the first time in my life. Just integration stuff for now, so no stupid mocking problems, but still. It's helping a lot. Unit testing is not the most useful thing for Lambda, and you need more integration testing than in a monolith architecture, so integration it is, for now.

(Back in early 2020 my 2-jobs-ago work had paid for all of us to actually go to the Amazon office (which was conveniently in the next tower over) to get a course about Lambda architecture, but they taught it to us without any framework. Like we were composing the architecture by hand, creating permissions and creating resources manually and stuff. Talk about turning people off! No one in my then-office ever touched the stuff again. A few years later now, AWS has this SAM framework which is getting pretty mature, or you can use the CDK if you feel you need to get programmatic about it. Or a mixture of the two. We're currently using the Serverless Framework, the granddaddy of this stuff, but we might switch to SAM, we'll take the decision in the next few days.)

I'm going to keep my old AWS tag on this post, but my opinion of this whole stack/type of work has greatly improved. :)