…a well-placed wood screw. Thankfully, it happened only a mile away from home. Looks like I’ll be dropping by Two Broke Spokes for a new tube and tire.
Category: It Happened to Me
While reorganizing my files, I found these photos of me with the accordion in various situations and decided to post them here, just for fun.
The one above is from the karaoke competition at the 2015 edition of the GIANT Conference, a great UX conference in Charleston. I’m doing Young MC’s Bust a Move, and won an Apple TV as a result. I still have it, too!
The photo below is from a party held at Social Game Universe’s offices on Toronto’s King Street West when I found a unicorn mask and decided to try it on:
Here’s a couple of pictures from a 2004 meetup with technology journalists Amber Mac and Leo Laporte:
For a brief, shining moment, I was in an earlier version Lindi Ortega’s band:
These photos are from two DEF CON conferences, DEF CON 8 and DEF CON 9:
These final photos are from Year One of the accordion — the year when I first took the accordion out into the world, yielding some surprising results:
- Do people in the U.S., who are notorious for not being able to locate other countries on a map, know Switzerland is land-locked and therefore wouldn’t have a navy?
- Is it “military grade” lube? (And you know what “military grade” really means, right?)
- Would anyone think that just as Swiss Army knives are like the ones issued to Swiss soldiers, Swiss Navy lube would be like the goop issued to Switzerland’s — ahem — able seamen?
However, a Trump/MAGA cap? Twice:
- The parking lot at the Publix at Dale Mabry and South Village, sometime around September/October 2016: I’m getting groceries at our then-regular grocery store (this is when we lived in Carrollwood) when a MAGA-capped guy in truck with Trump stickers throws an empty beer can at me, missing by a mile. “Go back to where you came from,” he yells, to which I reply “Learn to throw like a man!” as I pull out my phone. He drives off.
- Charlotte Douglas International airport, October 2016: I’m traveling to my new job at the company formerly known as SMARTRAC, and a guy in line at Carolina Pit BBQ in a MAGA cap yells something I can’t quite hear at me. I walk toward him, asking in my best radio voice, “Would you mind repeating that?” As I close in, it become apparent that I’m a head taller — he bought into the stereotype that Asian men are meek and short — and he starts high-tailing it in the opposite direction, presumably towards his gate. He loses his place in line, I take it, and enjoy some barbecue.
This sort of courage/cowardice is consistent with a couple of contradictory mindsets:
- The fascist mindset that the enemy is both very strong and very weak at the same time.
- The fact that for all their apparent brazen behavior, at their core, bullies are craven cowards.
Categories
Blast from the past
I’m posting this circa 2008 photo for no other reason than my looking damned good in it.
I’ve been doing interviews with a number of companies in the quest for my next gig, and since we’re still in a pandemic, they’ve all been online. I’ve done enough of them to get to the point where I’ve figured a system and setup that works well for me. The photo above shows me, just after this afternoon’s interview, complete with handy annotations.
Here’s a quick run-down of the setup:
- Primary laptop: The “Star Trek” screen, a.k.a. the one that the video chat lives on. It’s hooked up to two other monitors, where:
- One is open to a Google doc containing questions that I want to ask.
- The other is open to a Google doc of the research notes I wrote about the company interviewing me, their tech, their developer site, and their API. I actually found some typos in the docs and a bug in their sample code, and let them know about it.
- Secondary laptop: This one displays notes about my experience, and the particular story that I want to tell to this prospective employer. In case you’re wondering, my current answer to “Tell me about yourself” is something along the lines of “I’m equal parts Tony Stark, Alton Brown, and Weird Al.”
- Backup laptop: In case some technical issue with the videochat arises on the primary laptop, I switch to the backup laptop. I could switch to the secondary laptop for the video chat, but using that means that I lose a key screen of notes, and I don’t want to throw off my carefully orchestrated set of information that I can get at a glance.
- Jupyter Notebook loaded on all laptops: If I have to demonstrate working code, Jupyter Notebooks let me do it easily, and with Markdown annotations, too!
- Funky shirt and “Zoom mullet”: Gotta look good.
- Podcasting microphone: And sound good, too. I have a “radio voice” — might as well let ’em hear it.
- Not in the photo, but within arm’s reach:
- A whiteboard (and dry-erase markers in many colors), because sometimes it helps to draw a picture, and
- the accordion. I have a rep to maintain.
I’ll let you know what happened as soon as I find out.
I’ve managed to not put on the “Quarantine Fifteen” by doing a 10K bike ride at least five days a week since March. In fact, I’ve lost a little weight over the past couple of months. I’m fortunate to be in a fantastic neighborhood for cycling — lots of tree-lined streets with interesting houses to look at, the Hillsborough River cutting an inverted “U” through the area, and parks all over the place.
The 2020 Saharan dust cloud has also made the weather a little drier than usual. Normally, during this time of year, we get either hurricanes, or the typical tropical “rainy season” weather where the day starts sunny, followed by a torrential rainstorm in the early afternoon, followed by sun. More than our fair share of days has been mostly sunny. It’s made for some pretty good cycling.
These photos are from a place I’ve written about before: Lake Roberta. I took them from its east side, looking west.
I think it’s a bad idea to ride with headphones on, but I sometimes like listening to podcasts while I bike. So I do the next best thing: I pop my phone in my backpack’s “iPod pouch” and just play it through the phone’s speaker.
I’m currently listening to Over the Road, a podcast where host “Long Haul Paul” Marhoefer, a trucker who’s also a musician and a great storyteller, tells the stories of his fellow long haul truckers, highlighting their experiences and explaining how they’re coping in a world that’s changing as a result of new technologies, new regulations, and changes in the way people live.