• 4 Posts
  • 232 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 15th, 2023

help-circle
  • I’ve never had to wait long in New Orleans or DC except for odd circumstances but those places essentially have predetermined elections.

    • During the pandemic in New Orleans, they made the Smoothie King Center the main early voting location. That took a couple of hours but in normal years, I vote at a fire department and it just takes a few minutes.

    • In 2008 in DC, I lived near the White House and my polling place was an historic AME church that was a spot on the Underground Railroad. Every global news channel with staff in DC — so all of them — was trying to interview people. So, I’m not sure that was the voting system’s fault so much as global media asking everyone for a sound bite. (I got interviewed by Japan’s NHK but I didn’t make the cut. If I want to get on Japanese TV, I guess I’ll have to go on a game show.)

    But I’ve never lived in a competitive state or district. DC doesn’t have real representation in Congress and Louisiana’s 2nd district is drawn for Voting Rights Act compliance reasons so it’s also not typically competitive. (Louisiana also elects state/local officials in non-presidential years so it’s rarely got much on the ballot besides President and maybe an amendment or two. This year, we voted on whether offshore wind farms would participate in the coastal wetlands restoration program like offshore oil rigs.)



  • I would rather cook because I like the taste much, much more. Almost all frozen stuff is just flavorless to me so I end up having to doctor it up anyway. It’s easier for me to just start from scratch unless it’s something that’s a giant pain.

    I also worked as a cook when I was young so the effort/time is probably a bit less for me since I can do the food prep stuff quickly and without much mental effort. When I chop vegetables, my brain basically does it on autopilot.




  • The open source project is fine. It’s in no way perfect but it powers a shocking percentage of the world’s web sites. It’s showing its age, is bloated, and has constant security issues but if you know how to use it, it gets the job done.

    Lately, the CEO of Wordpress.com — who also heads the Wordpress.org foundation for the open source project — went after a popular hosting service claiming they were basically making billions and contributing nothing to the open source project. But from the outside, he went about it in a very aggressive and seemingly irrational way.



  • As a practical matter, this is less concerning to me than data breaches like the Equifax one where my social security number and everything else were compromised. I can think of ways 23 And Me data can be misused but, aside from police (who could get the data anyway), most of them are kind of theoretical or contingent on technological developments.

    Like, 23 And Me data going to the highest bidder is obviously disturbing but I’m not sure it’s an immediate danger in the same way as all our SSN’s being sold on the dark web. I’d rather nationalize credit reporting agencies than the unprofitable ancestry report company.



  • Which was basically a coincidence of one close election night and the TV networks trying to act objective. Parties don’t have official colors in the U.S. and every network was using red, white, and blue for their maps. To use red for Democrats would have implied a connection to communism and white was obviously for states without results yet. So, they all, independently, chose blue for Democrats, red for Republicans, and white for states whose polls hadn’t closed.



  • I’m big into (responsible) nature tourism and I believe Mountain gorillas are the most rare. Black rhinos are also pretty critically endangered but there’s successful breeding programs at zoos for them so I would think they’re less threatened.

    I went to the Galapagos once and some of the islands have some very rare species. But their habitat is protected and isolated so it’s not like endangered species that are threatened by habitat loss or war or whatever.


  • These things go in cycles. I remember when “Fedora Core” — they dropped the “Core” part of the name — was the cool new distro. I remember when Ubuntu was the cool new distro. Just ignore it and play around with distros until you find one you like.

    In my opinion, new users should use a very popular distro so they have documentation and message boards. After a few years, you get your legs under you. At that point, start distro hopping using weird desktop environments. Then, someday, you get a lot of experience and use a very popular distro because software is a tool and you don’t care. (If something has buzz, I throw it in a VM and go “Huh, that’s interesting.”)

    It’s sort of like how the target audience for Nike Air Monarchs is people buying their first pair of Nike Airs and dads who aren’t trying to hear the word “colorway” and just want some shoes.


  • Probably Janelle Monae - Archandroid. I love Afrofutrist funk like (Parliament-Funkadelic). It appeals to my 2 identities as a space nerd and the funkiest of the funky. Archandroid was sort of the peak of her sticking close to that genre. (Her three early works called the Metropolis Saga — Metropolis, an EP, Archandroid, and The Electric Lady — form a whole story.) The albums have multiple Suites like classical works so the themes change even within the albums. But Archandroid is my favorite part. And you can totally nerd out on it forever and still find new things.



  • This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.

    Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.

    Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.

    A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.




  • I got a relatively inexpensive espresso machine for like $100 with the main downside being it’s not very tall (so putting a mug under it is out). It’s been perfectly fine for like 8 years, though. I’m sure for $500+, I’d get a slightly better espresso but I’ve found buying good coffee beans and grinding them fresh — basically getting the other steps right — makes more of a difference than the machine.

    I imagine the expensive machines are more foolproof or consistent or flexible? But it was just me making espresso before work basically every day. It didn’t take long for me to get the timing and stuff down. (I have a De’Longhi one, for the curious, but I don’t necessarily want to steer anyone to that particular brand since it’s been so long. The brand might be owned by some Private Equity firm or something called like “Guangzhou Plastic Manufacturing Concern” and the quality parts were replaced by lead pipes with arsenic in them.)