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An Album Some Days
[May 11, 2021]It was getting a little noisy around here, so I made some changes. An Album a Day posts won’t show up individually on the home page or in the RSS feed any more, I’d rather do more of a weekly recap post. Also I switched the blog feed to have titles and (if they exist) descriptions with a read more link, not the full post. I was looking for something I wrote the other day and had a hard time finding it which is not great!
PermalinkString Cleaning
[May 1, 2021]After fixing up my old Squier Stratocaster last Summer, it became my go to guitar when I sat down to play over my other Strat, a 2000 Lone Star. I started to wonder why, since the Lone Star is (or should be) the nicer of the two. I sat down and looked it over and tried to figure out what was wrong, and this is what I came up with. Note that “at some point below” could have been any point in the last 20 years:
- At some point I’d lost the spring in the tremolo, which caused it to either flop around or stay locked into position.
- At some point I’d switched it to higher gauge strings, or messed with the action and it was annoyingly high.
- At some point I’d wanted to have it push more from the guitar itself, the pickups were screwed up close to the strings.
- It hadn’t been cleaned in a while, or lubricated. If you touched the tremolo the G-string would make sound like a train derailing.
Aside: when I bought this guitar I was debating between it and an Ibanez Jem. Looking back at the advertising for it, I wonder what part of it I found appealing. 🤔
I pulled the strings, cleaned and lubricated everything, installed locking tuners and a spring for the tremolo, and dropped the pickups down to lower than they were when I got it. I don’t love the Texas Special pickup in the neck but I do oddly love it in the middle, and I’m too lazy to muck around with changing just the neck pickup out.
Locking tuners. Why didn’t I do this years ago.Of course, if you really want to test tuning stability, you give your guitar to your five year old and let her do her best Hendrix impersonation.
Permalink⎋ Mac Dev Survey 2021 — The Results @ git-tower.com
[Apr 28, 2021]I think I’m most surprised by how popular Things and Notion are in their respective categories. That's not to say I think it's undeserved, they're both great, especially the latter, I’d love to work somewhere that has replaced Confluence with Notion.
Check it outThrowback Thursday
[Apr 15, 2021]Picked up some more boxes of “stuff” from my parents house while visiting for Easter. Among the piles, CDs for web browsers for both the Dreamcast and Playstation 2. Funny to think that 20 years ago “going online” was still a thing you had to do on a console, instead of the constant state of modern consoles.
And among a box of floppy disks, one of my early forays into web development! I dumped this entire floppy here. It says the site was generated by Arachnophilia which amazingly still sort of exists. My email address
@earthdome.comdefinitely does not!
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Working Conditions
[Apr 10, 2021]Three days in the office, two days at home is the ideal combo in my mind, and every time I write about remote work I come across more evidence that lots of people want something roughly similar, but so much of the talk is about all-or-nothing scenarios that most people will hate https://t.co/eRmii4NJ5Z
— Amanda Mull (@amandamull) April 1, 2021I’ve always been an office employee, and over time I’ve seen almost every combination of working schedules. My ranked list:
- 2 days in office, 3 days at home.
- 3 days in office, 2 days at home.
- 5 days at home.
- 4 days in office, 1 day at home.
- 4 days, 10 hours, all in office.
- 5 days, 8 hours, all in office.
This order has a few caveats: I have almost always had a “long” commute (it’s likely average by American standards but it’s long to me). 1-3 are pretty arbitrarily arranged and mostly based on the jobs I had those schedules at and how often other people were in the office. If 4x10 became 4x8 it would probably immediately jump to the #1 spot — there’s no substitute for an entire day back to yourself, but 10 hours of knowledge work is too much to expect from a brain on any given day.
I've been running a personal experiment on this lately.
— madalyn (@madalynrose) April 8, 2021
I bought a chess timer and start it when I sit down at my desk in the morning. I toggle timers for breaks (scheduled or necessary). I stop counting time when I'm too fried to go on for the day.
~5 hr work ~1 hr not on avg pic.twitter.com/ir5vmnObzD4x8 versus 4x10 and the pandemic schedules which tended to drift into “never in the office but always available” brings up a lot of other questions about availability of time versus actionable time. There were dedicated marketing campaigns for 24/7 office work pre-pandemic, and I don’t think anything has gotten better in that regard.
One of the most important lessons I learned in my working career was from my first job. I was a contractor but I worked with a bunch of IAM machinists, and at shift change, down to the exact minute, they’d be pushing the doors open and running for their cars. Granted, they couldn’t take their work home — some of them worked with tools the size of small house, but that mentality of “the work day is done” has stuck with me.
PermalinkOpening Day
[Apr 1, 2021]I don’t follow the Red Sox nearly as closely as I used to, but I at least knew today was opening day. Or, was supposed to be, I saw it was cancelled. The last time I was at Fenway for opening day was 2009, and the weather was about the same, low 40s and rain / something that looks like snow but lands as rain. It was the middle of three events at Fenway that were each so miserably cold that I gave up on going for at least five years.
In a completely unrelated mental thread I referenced Adium today, and remembered that for a long time I had the Red Sox Adium duck in my dock, which made me wistful for a bunch of things, but maybe more non-square dock icons than anything.
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⎋ If Your Tech Interview is Three Tech Interviews in a Trench Coat and I Do Five is It Additive or Exponential @ laurieontech.com
[Mar 29, 2021]
Check it outTiming is everything. A company may contact you to interview just as you're about to accept an offer. You may find an amazing role that would be perfect for past you, or future you, but not current you. It's frustrating, but it's good to recognize that a lot of job searching is out of your control.
