Notices by Thor, the Norseman has moved! (thor@snabeltann.no), page 8

Gotta love a song whose lyrics start with "They call me Big Mama 'cause I weigh 300 pounds": https://youtu.be/qYSv3qyGJFA
#blues

@moonman I don't speak German very well, but I'm fairly sure they'd turn that into a compound word: Eine Kleine Middelklassemusik.

Writing an article or a book might not be so different from writing a horoscope column. One must create a sense of personal connection with the readers without actually having specific knowledge about them. You must be generic in a way that still feels specific. The key to that is probably to understand what you and the readers have in common; to have working knowledge of human universals that don't feel universal to the reader.

It's always very hard to predict what toots are going to strike a chord with people, but I'm detecting a trend: If you share a somewhat generic and value-neutral observation that hits the nail on the head in terms of the zeitgeist, there's a good chance it'll get boosted widely. You have to give it just enough personal flavour to be appealing, but not so personal that people are alienated. I suspect that this is the same art that authors and journalists need to master to have mass appeal.

@xj9 Didn't know what it was until I looked it up, so no. I hear about these mesh networks from time to time, but it's unclear to me what possible niche they can fill.

@simba I used mostly cartridge based systems, but I remember trying to play those data cassettes back on my boombox and thinking that they sounded similar to low baud rate modems. During the time I grew up, 14.4 and 28.8 kbaud modems was where it was at, but during one of the modem bans dad enacted, I snuck an old 2400 baud ISA card he had lying around into the family computer, and those cassettes reminded me of that. I wasn't far off. Data cassette decks are basically modems.

@simba I can distinctly remember having a computer with a 3.5" 200 MB hard drive and having some trouble imagining how I would ever fill it. A full installation of Windows 3.11 came on 10 diskettes with a capacity of 1.37 MB each. CD-ROMs seemed huge when they first came out. Most of us didn't have hard drives at the time that could hold 650 MB of data. An older system I used before that had a 5.25" 65 MB drive.

We live in a mad world now where things that happen on computers actually influence billions of people and get reported on in the media, and everyone carries a powerful Internet connected computer in their pocket at all times. We live in a world where presidents are on Twitter and where Mark Zuckerberg is held accountable for an election result. All of this was completely unimaginable to IT people only a few years ago.

I think that being a computer programmer has desensitised me to phrases like "millions of users", even in the context of social media scandals, because a million records in a database really isn't that much data. A personal computer can handle millions of records with no trouble. A million records can fit on a USB stick. Even a smartphone could handle it. There are billions of people on the planet. Big data gives you a skewed perspective on the value of human lives.

I didn't know that Cambridge Analytica's algorithms were used by Donald Trump's campaign to influence the election via Facebook content targeted toward vulnerable individuals. I had assumed that Cambridge Analytica had only collected data about millions of Facebook users for the purpose of statistical analysis on behalf of commercial clients and I didn't quite understand what the big hoo-haa was about until now.

Mermaid show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrP0Mqj9U_c

I run my own email server on a DigitalOcean instance in Amsterdam. I back my files up via rsync to a Time4VPS instance in Lithuania. I use Serif Affinity instead of Photoshop. I haven't shaken my reliance on Apple, because macOS, iOS, iCloud, Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X are just too good, but at least with Apple, I'm the customer and not the product. I have shared documents on Dropbox and Google Drive that need a new home. Maybe OwnCloud, but it doesn't seem to have live document editing.

@B4x4 huejay, the library I'm using for control, is a bit flaky, and I think I'm going to start using the REST API on the Hue Bridge directly instead.

Having some trouble adapting to my new job. I did fine during the months that they rented me out to a customer on site, because they had clear requirements and a software stack I was comfortable with. Back at the office, things aren't so rosy. They don't want to administrate any servers, so they run everything on Amazon AWS. Their databases are JSON files on S3. Also, the tasks that are assigned to me tend to leave me stuck in analysis paralysis for one reason or another.

The logic in my light scheduler for Philips Hue is getting more intricate.

Toast is still a thing in Norway, where every sandwich has butter instead of mayonnaise. Thus, toast can't merely be a delivery vehicle for butter. I mean, I've tried to soak toast in butter and I personally don't care for it.

Fra en ungdomsspalte: "Det er ikke alle som har noen de kjenner i en sånn bransje, og på et jobbmarked skal en stilling baseres på erfaring og kunnskaper, ikke bekjentskap."

Åh, kjære barnet mitt, du har ikke mistet uskylden ennå...