Notices by Don Romano (alt) (thor@noagendasocial.com), page 21

So we know that our activities have an effect on the environment. I've also seen what oil spills can do to the Norwegian coast line. Nature isn't fighting back. Rather, it's collapsing under the pressure of 7.6 billion people and counting, a bizarrely large population figure more apt for a tiny insect than a large mammal.

Global warming and mass extinction are fairly depressing to think about. I think I buy that they're happening, because we've known about this stuff long before it was politicised. I saw an old newspaper article about the greenhouse effect that, with that characteristic optimism of the 1960s, said that it would open new shipping routes in the Arctic. There was also that whole thing where we banned CFC gases once we realised it was tearing a hole in the ozone layer.

We'll see tropical species and diseases invade regions further and further north, but instead of stopping this development, we'll simply throw more and more technology at the problem to make it go away. It'll be business as usual, and no, our descendants won't be upset, because they'll only know this new existence, and the old one will be something they'll only learn about in the history lessons at school.

The Planetary Defense Conference gathers to discuss how one would go about deflecting the orbit of an incoming asteroid.

Meanwhile, the train wreck of global warming and mass extinction unfolds in slow motion before our eyes, too slowly to really jolt us into action.

We didn't evolve to deal with such slow threats.

What's going to happen is that those of us who can afford the luxury will gradually adapt to an increasingly barren Earth, and we'll consider that the new normal.

@jack I guess onboarding is usually used about the end-user, but in this context, I mean getting a new developer up to speed. If you have containers and scripts for that, you save a lot of time, especially when you have a low number of developers who need to jump around multiple projects all the time.

@jack This company was started back when "the IT department" meant dudes in T-shirts in the back room, fuelled by coffee and junk food, and servers were physical things, not virtual machines. They use VMs and Puppet these days, but insist on running them on their own infrastructure.

@jack I guess the thing I feel is missing here is professionalism. The developers who work here are the type who don't mind that. It doesn't matter if it's ugly as long as it works.

@jack He's a former developer who has transitioned into a project management position. Says his skills are rusty, and yes, they are, but not *that* rusty. The CEO also has IT experience, but it's further back in time, so yes, you can't really say that idiots run the company, and that's good I suppose, but it gets a bit chaotic, since there isn't really any desire to improve things. The next guy just piles his hacks on top of the previous guy's hacks.

Basically, their developer on-boarding process is non-existent. I don't think they have a continuous integration system either. I haven't seen any Jenkins servers since I started this job.

The main problem, as I see it, is that there is no single person who is in charge of development at the company. There are just a bunch of developers who improvise everything. The only aspect of IT that's properly organised is the Operations department.

It took the project manager half a day of sitting next to me with his laptop while I watched him to figure out the steps to set up a local development environment for a project I've been assigned to.

Every developer has to improvise his own local instance of the project. The project manager basically made a Vagrantfile for the project on the fly using PuPHPet.

I've seen vastly superior workflows at other companies, and this was frustrating to watch.

I need to get up earlier again. The difference between walking the stretch from Skøyen to Fredensborgveien before and after 7 o'clock is huge. Before 7, it's cool and quiet. After, it's hot and noisy.

@blaha @AdamAtSea Definitely a low defense spender, yes.

Do they make little air compressors? It's kind of stupid to buy gas on expensive disposable cans just to blow dust out of things, isn't it? I don't want a workshop compressor sitting around the apartment, though. I just want a small electrical device with a straw on it that can supply short bursts of air.

If you're a bit mad and you're seeing an eccentric shrink, you're both nutty professors, aren't you...

@Ricardus I'm not sure my work would withstand the scrutiny of a professional.

@Ricardus And since when am I a "solid engineer"? XD

@Ricardus As far as I'm concerned, the difference between the two is just how seriously you take it. Do you stroke the T's and dot the I's?

Listening to women talk about how men are without being able to interject is rather aggravating.

The was this talk show on BBC World Service and they were going on about how women are more organised than men.

No, you aren't. You just care to organise what men don't, and vice versa. Men don't care to organise housework, family activities and social events, for example. As far as the man is concerned, there is nothing to organise, and why can't the wife just relax a little, etc.

I mean, if we literally are toasting the planet and killing off most of its species, and this isn't just speculation or exaggeration, then we should really drop everything else we're doing to focus on that first.