Last Week
Life
I was supposed to teach a Girl Develop It class but it got cancelled.
The National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) has a regional MO/KS chapter, and we held our annual awards for aspirations in computing ceremony. I helped with some of the planning for it. We got to give out 30 awards to high school girls. It’s always great to hear about the ambitions these young women have, and I only hope they can keep doing great work out in the tech world!
And I’m about to catsit for a few days, which always makes me happy since I don’t get as many cat cuddles since my cat died.
Work
We have a part of our system that’s complicated and everyone hates. One of my coworkers used part of the Symfony (PHP) framework to build a generator to make it easier. I found a bug in it, and fixed it. Also did one new feature ticket and started a second.
Entertainment
- Caught up with more of The Daily Show and @midnight
- SNL was brilliant, and the NYT wrote about it
Published
- Last Week (1/30/2017)
Talks
None this week.
On the Internet
- I feel like I need a separate “Cool Stuff in Space and Science!” section. First, a thought piece on if there are aliens, why they likely won’t think the same as we do. Or possibly even perceive us at all.
- Then, why small animals and insects perceive the world in slow motion while we perceive it much faster.
- And take a look at how cats perceive the world. Rather interesting!
- A friend and I were talking about styles, and she described hers as “Toddler Grandma Style”. I asked her about it and she sent me this. Basically women are expected to have certain standards except toddlers and grandmothers, so her style incorporates these into it because she doesn’t care what people think.
- On a familiar thought but the other side of it, someone who works for the Obamacare phone line talk about what it’s like to work there, and how they get lots of very deep and sad questions, and they can’t really answer them. They talk about the experiences and what they do to answer them.
- Nate Taylor wrote a wonderful post called “Thank You”. He thanks many people that helped him get the career spot that he’s at now. It’s also a great look at how there are many people that help you get there, whether just a small conversation once to people who have worked with you nearly daily to get you there.
- A conversation at work made this video of the many times Riker (Star Trek) sits down in a chair by lifting his leg over the back of the chair instead of just sitting like most people. It also led to this article on “The Ubiquitous Roving Plants of the Starship Enterprise.” And I’ll admit… I never noticed just how many houseplants there were on this starship. Maybe a bulk discount sale from Costco?
- If you didn’t catch the news from GitLab in the past week, they experienced some data loss. They had 5 different kinds of backups going, and all 5 failed. (They had local, off-site, and cloud backups.) As I also experienced some backup issues recently, I’m wanting to write a guide for proper backing up and encrypting of data. See it as a blog post soon!
- A friend was talking about how she is using Trello on her job hunt, and linked this post. It’s a really good idea, and started using a similar pattern to apply to conferences. (It’s basically the same idea, right?)