updating the site, hope to be done soon #blogging

4 years ago, as #Covid19 was just beginning to crest across the world, I started a new postiion as Senior Python Engineer at YouGov. I enjoyed my work immensely and got to help build some truly interesting things (more on that later 😁).

Sadly, Aug 01, 2024 was my last day at YouGov. I worked with the great people in the Research Platforms department for 4 years, helping to build and improve the systems that connect our amazing Panel to the research surveys that guide many organizations' product and political decision-making.

I worked with a great crew and especially want to say thank you to Allan Crooks and Clayton Butler, and the teams they led, for their leadership, and their inspiration adn guidance.

There are too many other folks to list, but I hope they know how much I enjoyed working together to do good things.

So now I'm looking for a new position focusing on #python #webservices #backendsystems, and/or #dataengineering. In addition to getting deep into technical solutions, I really enjoy working across teams to fully understand use cases, stakeholders' pain points, and help define solutions that have the best ROI possible.

Check out my resumé at https://monkinetic.blog/resume.

I've started Malcolm Harris' Palo Alto and it is... a really heavy read.

A story of #colonization #greed #exploitation #slavery, and #genocide ... and I'm only a few chapters in.

More later.

Was pointed to this standard test of executive function (or at least one's experience of it) called the ESQ-R, the "Executive Skills Questionnaire, Revised". Always one to see what these self-reporting tools say about by neurodivergence, I took the test here.

No idea as to the test's ultimate validity but this tracks:

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Went to the theater last night with my girlfriend(😁 👋), like a real adult.

Except it was a shockingly hilarious parody puppet show version of The princess Bride (By S. Morgenstern) by the All Puppet Players, complete with alcohol, musical numbers, 4th wall breaking, flubs, ad-libs and improv.

And I will never hear the lines "I'm going to do him left handed... if I use my right it's over too quickly!" the same again (Vizzini the puppet: "We didn't change those lines -- at all!!)

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Guess it's time to revisit the blog engine here. I wrote Goldfrog a few years ago and it's been chugging along on this Digital Ocean instance fairly well, but at the time I had in mind a two-way sync between gitlab, where I maintain a separate repository of my archived content, and the filesystem/db in Goldfrog.

It worked, sort of, for a while, but the deployment on DO is NOT simple to remember, uses Ansible and code from 2 different git repos to set up or update the server, and was just 3 times more clever than it should have been.

I also implemented a flexible/configurable POSSE feature that is supposed to send updates to my mastodon account but ... isn't right now? And the logging setup on the site is abysmal.

I still like parts of my system. If I did it again, I'd still want:

• My custom posting UI that works like the ancient Radio Userland sites did: post form at the top of the home page list of posts:

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And my version in Goldfrog:

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• A small web app - not a static site generator
• Content stored ultimately as markdown files so they can be stored in git or similar
• Content indexed in sqlite for searching. serving various archive pages (tags, etc)

UPDATE: As long as I'm dreaming, I wish it was easier to run a small web app like this off a container. I probably could with Digital Ocean's app platform, I haven't looked into it lately, and I'd still have to solve the "index in a sqlite db file" problem.

Sometimes #lifeisshit

sometimes #lifeisgreat

sometimes it's great in the midst of the shit

Posting in your own site means #Facebook #instagram or #YouTube can’t decide if your writing is worth monetizing or not.

When you've managed to make it too hot for cacti to survive, you've broken the desert #climatechange #cacti #heatwave

Cacti need to cool down at night or through rain and mist. If that does not happen they sustain internal damage. Plants now suffering from prolonged, excessive heat may take months or years to die, Hernandez said.

[Love love love these "ancient future"](https://www.karlaknight.org/33-spaceships-for-another-planet-2017-19-/1 #paintings by Karla Night, and I am so there for Jason Kottke's description:

Hilma af Klint as the production designer for Wes Anderson's Stargate

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via kottke

This is a little picture of what #climatechange means: Sitting on my back porch in Arizona this morning at 5:45am, enjoying only the second summer monsoon rain this season. Sipping a coffee in a damp wind, with the temperature at 82ºF (28ºC).

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I realized that -- after nearly a month of temperatures over 110ºF (43ºC), a record-breaking length of time even in Arizona -- I had forgotten what 82º felt like. This is not typical, normal, or a cyclic phase.

This is a permanent, ongoing, man-made problem.

Fedi/Mastodon programmers... with the #MastodonAPI, and given a url to a post on any instance (assuming I have access to the toot from my account), how might I get my instance to fetch it and give me a "local" ID that is suitable for passing as the "inReplyToID" in a toot payload?

Wondering if I need to:

• perform a search (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/search/)
• find the relevant status in the results
• use the ID for the status

Would that be the "local" ID #MastodonAPI #fediverse #programming #blogging #indieweb

Dammit I started a branch on Goldfrog to play with the #micropub api, and now that it's in pieces on the editor floor, I have 3 more features I want to add #indieweb #blogging

(One is adding the ability for a note or post here to be a reply to another post on Mastodon.)

Yehuda Rothschild republished (with permission) a presentation (Archive.org link) by Lara A Jacobs, Mvskoke citizen and Native scientist, on settler colonialism - what is it, what is colonization, what happened when settlers (in North America) arrived.

The whole thing is excellent, and I hope there's a video version, or one is done one day.

Some particular points I want to mention/synthesize:

Colonization is not a historical event, but a continuous process that requires ongoing support through social and legal systems and institutional violence.

Colonization doesn't just mean moving in and kicking out indiginous people, though it definitely means that. It's also continued occupation of their "lands, waters, and environments", the forced breakup of families and communities through unjust and cruel laws and foster systems, the intentional obliteration of native peoples' languages, cultural practices, and value systems (often through forced fostering and the original residential homes).

We (the White European Settlers) operated -- and still operate -- under a value system and ideologies that are manifestly destructive (the following is quoted):

• Conquer and defeat their surroundings
• Biases against undeveloped areas
• Associated uncivilized areas with evil
• Commodity-based utilitarianism (e.g., extractive practices)
• Extraction of 'natural resources' (e.g., forest products, marine fisheries, mining, etc.)
• Capitalism

All of these in direct opposition to the beliefs, ideologies, and practices of Native cultures and communities, which had been existing largely in balance with their environments for many thousands of years before settlers arrived.

There is much much more in the slides that were shared and I'm grateful to Lara and Yehuda both for making these available.

Nothing's wrong, GameRant.

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And it's your #tracking I'm blocking, not #advertising (well, ok, it's that too)

I recently learned about a small town in Alabama that has not held a public election for more than sixty years. The town is Newbern, Alabama. While nearly eighty-five percent of the town residents are Black, before 2020 the town never had a Black mayor.

An unbelievable and yet completely believable story of voter suppression in the deep south

Guy Nave, Jr gives a well-written and succint history of voting rights for former enslaved Black people in the south, then tells the story describing the incredible "hand-me-down" white mayorship in the majority-Black town.

"We've never had an election out here. We don't have ballots and machines to do it." Stokes became mayor in 2008, when he inherited the position from Haywood Stokes Jr. Their ancestor, Peter P. Stokes, served in the Confederate Army and “owned” enslaved Black people when Newbern was a cotton plantation town.

And now for something different from NovaColor: Understanding the Color Gray and Its Shades

I use NovaColor acrylics for my artwork, and love their occasional articles on the theory and history of pigments #art #painting #arthistory

Been wanting to re-focus on the ol' blog here, and a friend told me about https://shutupwrite.com/ -- there's a local event tomorrow night so going to go hang out and work on some longer posts with a bunch of other writers #writing #blogging #community

"[T]he problem is, if you let them get away with it, it gets worse and worse and worse."

Small town newpaper doing the good work in small town America.

Corporate media, please go back to #journalism 101.