Maggie Smith of The Slowdown podcast on the Make Me Smart podcast called writing like a message in bottle. It’s putting thoughts out into the world without really knowing who will read it. Without knowing who or how it will affect others. I’ve had this blog since 2000. That’s over a quarter century of messages. Thousands…
I have a Google saved search on certain work related keywords that populate RSS feeds I then read in Inoreader. One called “Student finance chief outlines Georgia Match, Promise Scholarship and HOPE administration” caught my eye because I work on some Georgia Match stuff. This article reads like a beat reporter attended the session and…
This sat in my drafts for a couple years. ===== I had a flippant reply to this tweet. And then I spiraled thinking about it. By the end of ice ages, humanity hunted large mammals like mammoths to extinction. We also eliminated giant sloths, sabertooth tigers, among others. Hunting these creatures required cooperation, coordination, planning,…
Your friendly reminder to minimize the WordPress plugins you deploy to what you actually need. BleepingComputer has an article: A critical-severity vulnerability in the Advanced Custom Fields: Extended (ACF Extended) plugin for WordPress can be exploited remotely by unauthenticated attackers to obtain administrative permissions. ACF Extended, currently active on 100,000 websites, is a specialized plugin…
I tend to overcommunicate to my supervisors and teammates. I’d rather they get something they already knew from me, than they get blindsided. That’s played well with several of my bosses and shadow bosses. They often tell me, “thanks, I already know about it.” For my side, that brings relief instead of discouragement. When they…
It’s amusing to me that I helped some colleagues get OpenJDK installed. They were trying to do the for all users install and hitting up against the requirement that they don’t have administrator access to install software on their computers. So, I noticed the for me only option and got them to try it. I…
When seeking assistance, the questions we ask inform the thinking of the machines or people giving answers. My initial work experience involved helping people research information. How to find books. How to search the internet or databases. One of the most important skills we taught was to locate salient terms as they influence the answers…
Just curious how one knows that one is allergic to a new drug in a commercial. You have to take it to find out you are allergic, right? The subsequent list of symptoms as reasons not to take it. Do those mean one is allergic? Not to my understanding. It’s reasonable if one knows one…