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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • Dozens of the people I’ve known personally and most of this was in the 90s and early 2000s. I was part of the “smoke free” class of 2000 and the anti-smoking education started in Kindergarten for us. Imagine dozens of 5 year olds crying as their teachers explained with songs and videos how the adults in our lives were all going to die horrible deaths and it was up to us kids to educate them and help them quit. In school, at least twice a year. Yet by the time we reached the workforce, smoking was still a big part of the working culture and I watched pretty much everyone I knew with a full time job take up smoking at one point or another.








  • Get checked out for sleep apnea! Being bored at work is normal but not being able to stay awake for an 8 hour shift means you are absolutely not getting proper rest when you are sleeping.

    While you wait for your appointment, you can try resetting your sleep pattern by taking a solid 5mg dose of melatonin 60 minutes before bedtime for a week and ensuring you have 9-10 hours before you need to be up. I was in bed for 8 hours every night and got a rude surprise when I got a Fitbit for sleep tracking and found out I was only getting 6 hours of sleep in those 8 hours after you subtracted all the time it took me to fall asleep and any night-time wakings. Turns out I wake up 4-5 times a night and don’t remember it in the morning. Rolling bedtime back 90 minutes felt like a chore but it was worth it to feel good every day.

    Working full days does suck so I tend to try to give myself 2-3 things to look forward to during my shift to split it into 3-4 time blocks. Sometimes they are little candies like Lifesavers or Jolly Ranchers, or 10 min bathroom break with phone game, reading something interesting in Lemmy, taking a walk down to say Hi to someone elsewhere in the building, any little activity that feels like something I want to do, that’s not strictly in my job description. Depending on your job you can even plan 6 of them and give yourself something for every hour that not first and last.





  • About a week from setting up Button #1 “Go For A Walk” and us pressing it before we go for walks to my 5yo rescue mutt pressing it himself when prompted “Do you want to go for a walk?” After about a month he was always hitting the button before we went out but often would come bother us in his old ways (nosing under our hands, whining, pawing at our feet) before he would hit the button to get our attention first.

    We added “Puzzle” in month 2 because he only gets treats when he solves a “puzzle” (mix of dog puzzle toys and treat stuffed Kong). That one caught on immediately.

    We thought he was getting them mixed up because he would give us all the signs we used to interpret as wanting to go out like a yawn and stretch, hit both buttons, and then stand next to the puzzle basket like we were dumb. We moved the two buttons really far apart.

    The reality is he wants puzzles because he’s bored far more often then he ever really wanted to walk, he’s down from 4 walks a day to 2 once we started to trust that he really knew what he was telling us.

    We added a “Food” button but he never used consistently because he understands the meal names “breakfast”, “lunch”, “dinner” better then the word “food” for mealtimes. We serve meals at the same time every day anyway so we eventually took the button back up because he never used it.





  • As a librarian this is an awesome idea but unlikely to work out long term for a couple of reasons relating to the libraries.

    1. Patrons will absolutely freak out if the computer they sit down at doesn’t look like the Windows machine they are expecting. Even the time-keeping software we use makes people uncomfortable and it’s just a countdown clock for the 30 minutes they signed up for. I’ve had a very expensive Mac desktop for art and music software go totally unused for years because most patrons want a Windows computer to check their Hotmail. Librarian sobs

    2. Unless the library 'technologist" or IT team is already really into Linux in their off time AND paid well enough to bring that experience with them to the office, the people tasked with keeping it running will fail within 6 months and revert it back to something they can fix fast. Generally there’s one IT department that’s handing the libraries and other government run service offices and they will not take the time to do anything out of the ordinary.

    Maybe for a subset of computers in a large library like the stand-up quick access stations or catalog lookup computers near the books. Linux can and does a lot of good keeping these one-use stations going despite the fact the run on 1998 Dell Potatoes.


  • This was what I remember about the US restrooms before the auto-flush mechanisms came. 30-50% of the stalls in a ladies room would be unflushed and people would occasionally take their chances flushing it with their foot to get an unflushed one back in use if there was a line. Nice places had someone walk through the bathroom and flush everything, refill the paper towels and wipe down the sinks occasionally. Really nice places had people stationed in the bathroom full-time but they often expected $1-5 in tip for handing you a paper towel. Fuck, I’m only 40 but I’m old.