SysAdmin1138 @sysadmin1138@octodon.social

ARG. The US government may shut down. It should never shut down, and threatening one should never be considered a weapon to use.

The Republicans know damned well that if the Dems manage it, the large majority of the political damage will fall ON THE DEMOCRATS. The same way the majority of the political fallout fell ON THE REPUBLICANS the last times we had a shutdown.

Its like people don't learn.

Supergirl has introduced a character named Braniac. Guess we found the big bad for the back half of the B season.

Hello, San Francisco. I'll be in you for a couple days. Company New Years party Saturday is the reason for the visit.

It's come to light that Muller will likely want to sit Trump in front of a Grand Jury to answer questions, so there is a lot of crystal-ball reading about how that could happen.

What I want to know is what happens when Trump says "No" to a subpoena and gets held in contempt. Then what? For Bill Clinton that would be impeachable. This guy? He just might get away with it.

My mouse has decided to double-click when I single-click sometimes. The impacts are both comical and highly annoying.

The sort of tired that means baseline politeness is an effort. Please do not mind the dead-eye stare, I don't have enough awake to waste on eye-musculature.

Sleep is for the week.

It doesn't help that BoyCat spent the last two hours romping all over the house.

Mailgun uses an analogy to credit-ratings for this, and it works pretty well. Get nasty credit, you CAN start over! However, you're only allowed small transactions until you can prove you're trustworthy enough to be allowed big ones.

Spent part of my afternoon explaining reputation markets as they pertain to spam-binning decisions. The marketer I was speaking to was clearly looking for an exploit in the system.

What I want to be doing: Revising the novel.

What I should be doing: Looking up CFPs for conferences to see if I can get any accepts this year and continue my industry visibility.

In the ongoing effort to keep impostor-syndrome from winning, I'll do the thing I should be doing.

Browsers other than Chrome exist. Sometimes people forget that.

One round bird. The cardinals are HUGE but camera shy.
https://octodon.social/media/XlKSzhbOOkIvMfOiYk4

Since Wednesday when the cold began, I've been watching the birds at our feeder get rounder and rounder.

This morning most are so round their belly-feathers are scraping the ground when they walk.

That thing where you're putting plot-seeds in the opening chapters of book 1 to germinate in book 3.

A book on Scandinavian Humor had a cold-scale based on obscenities used to describe it. From 1 to 3.

1: **** it's cold out.
2a: **** **** it's **** cold out.
2b: **** it's cold out. *****
3: ***** **** it's colder than a **** **** out there. ****

Most of the US is plunging into 2-obscenity cold in the coming days, with 3-obscentiy cold at night.

Have a blog-post defending discrete job titles over one big class of 'engineer'.

http://sysadmin1138.net/mt/blog/2017/12/in-defense-of-job-titles.shtml

Job-titles in StartupLand tend to be flat. You don't get jr/sr/lead/principal engineers. It's all... engineers. "We don't make value judgments about who is better than who."

Except.

What are those engineers paid. If there is any kind of spread of compensation between those 'equal' engineers, a value judgment had been made. It's just not visible to most people. "Fairness."

There is a kind of cold that happens when the moisture from car-exhaust freezes on the back bumper. It was that cold this morning. Haven't seen that in years, and it could have been a few more years but you can't always pick.

Home at last.

Tomorrow is the second and last driving-too-damned-long day. Then I'll be home in my own bed, with my relieved cats.