weekends are for leisure

Roderick on self-hatred

The route to thinking about, caring for, and contributing to, the happiness of other people, is found by first loving oneself. Continuous, inward-facing self-hatred helps no one.

That’s my paraphrase of John’s sentiment from Roderick on the Line episode 60, at about 1:08:00. He points specifically to the northwest during the grunge era. But that form of self-reflection continues to this day inside of chronic self-deprecants, of which I have too often been one. Recovering.

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John Hartford - Austin Minor Sympathy

John Hartford’s Austin Minor Sympathy. Commence relaxing zone-out session.

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Japan's incredible shrinking building

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Guessing you’d have to construct the skyscraper with this capability initially, with a “cap” at the top that can be lowered as each level below it is dismantled. Very cool.

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Thank You, Liz Lemon, for Being You

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“She’s the type who can yell at her male boss and put him in his place, she’s the type who goes to bat for her friends, she’s the type who goofs around by pretending that a toy train is her robot penis and will wolf down entire sandwich in front of a TSA agent so she doesn’t have to throw it away before going through security.”

Blerg.

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Felt this earthquake yesterday evening

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Came home before 5pm and plopped down on the futon. A few moments later felt the futon bouncing very slightly and heard the “ticking” of picture frames re-positioning against the acrylic wall paint. Thought it was activity at the nearby construction site, but they had all gone home for the day. Very cool!

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Don't trust your assumptions about yourself

Don’t trust your assumptions about yourself, and don’t apply them to others. They’re probably wrong.

– calinet6 on the Hacker News post, A (Short) Rant About Working Remotely

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Apple's calendar file (iCal) with US Holidays

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Perfect for importing into Google Calendar. Shhh, don’t tell! Landing page is here.

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Problems Solved in 2012

Wherein I recap the things I’ve done and learned this year as a software developer (mainly at work). I’ve fixed many bugs and uttered many curses. Through it all I’ve constantly strived to make the code a better place.

Amazon Web Services

  • Video encoding instances Launch/Start when there’s a backlog, and Stop/Terminate when there’s not.
  • Said goodbye to Amazon SQS for job queues, and hello to Redis. Hello consistency and speed.
  • Learned that one must always specify timeouts for AWS calls. Especially for SimpleDB.

Node.js

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On Venting

Everybody needs somebody to … kvetch to.

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S&I 100

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It’s an “index of top non-profits creating a social impact”. Quite helpful if you want to ensure your charitable donation does the most good.

Saw it mentioned on Nightly Business Report last night.

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