Work

I’ve been job hunting for nearly a year and I was resigned to the vagaries of the interview process. Close to 16 interviews later, I was inured to every possible rejection note under the sun. We don’t quite know what to do with you. You’re too slow. It’s us, not you. The position just got filled. While we don’t want you, we assure you, someone else will. I understand it’s a process, that everyone goes through, but I somehow still held hope that someone would inject some humanity into what seems to be a pretty inhumane process. And Scrollstack was exactly it. While I still haven’t asked the powers that be, why I got in, their process of treating people humanely is what attracted me to them. They wanted me on, and I’ve joined up as a Software Developer. ...

Am using my rickety old laptop as my daily driver these days, because … reasons. And now, that I run PyCharm alongside Emacs, alongside Chrome in its various incarnations, the poor old thing crashes, freezes and stutters a lot. A cursory inspection told me that while I had plenty of CPU firepower, I was constantly running out of ram (8gb) and swap (1 gb partition). Too broke to add more ram to the system right now (don’t even know if this thing will support 8 gb modules to push it up to 16). So the only way to go, was to somehow increase the swap on my system. This is the checklist for curious / researching Jason in the future. ...

Did I not just write about this, the other day with Emacs? I did, but Pycharm seems to have the same affliction. Pycharm, just like Emacs, stubbornly refuses to accept my Compose key combinations. Which means … you guessed it, no ‘,”,“ or ’ punctuation and all the other affordances, Compose gives me. Considering that I need both, Pycharm as well as Emacs in my life, it behooved me, that I go solve this too. ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on October 22nd, 2021 You really ought to subscribe :) via NASA Johnson on Flickr Welcome to the October work letter! :) As usual, click the headers to wander off to the orginal articles. Over at Ars Technica, Researchers think a planet lost its original atmosphere, and built a new one In general, we don’t currently have the technology to image exoplanets unless they’re very large, very young, and a considerable distance from the star they orbit. Yet we can still get some sense of what’s in their atmosphere. To do that, we need to observe a planet that transits across the line of sight between Earth and its star. During a transit, a small percentage of the star’s light will travel through the planet’s atmosphere on its way to Earth, interacting with the molecules present there. ...

I want to leave VS Code behind me and move to using Emacs for mostly everything I write in the long haul. Emacs is the editor I use to putter around for any text editing I need to do, but most of my long form writing and coding were done in VS Code. And the more I use it (VS Code, not Emacs), the more uncomfortable I get, no matter how nice and shiny it is. ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on September 17th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) via Michelle Scott on Pixabay Welcome folks, to the September work letter! :) As usual, click the headers to wander off to the orginal articles. A Bear? Where? Over There — Strapping a giant teddy bear to a car in the name of highway safety You’re adapting my what? When activated, adaptive cruise control uses forward-looking radar to maintain a specific distance to a vehicle in the lane ahead, slowing down or speeding up (to a maximum of whatever speed cruise control was set to) as necessary. Lane-keeping systems use forward-looking cameras to detect the lane markings on a road to keep the vehicle between them, and when both are active together, the vehicle will do a pretty good facsimile of driving itself, albeit with extremely limited situational awareness. ...