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And so it begins As I write this, it’s 5pm on St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not wearing green. I’m sitting at home in our spare bedroom, with a 24" monitor ahead of me, and Amazon Basics® Keyboard instead of my beloved CODE Keyboard, and the world aflame. I agree with this tweet: Basically, the news since last week has been Through-the-Looking-Glass bad. A Quick rundown for posterity: Starting mid February, the stock market is down a third from its highs. February 19th, the Dow closed at 29,386. Today, it closed 21,237. Earlier today, it was under 20,000, briefly. Trillions of dollars of market value have been erased in six weeks. Yeterday in particular, the Dow lost 12% of its value, or about 3000 points. In one day. ...

So, on the advice of @QuinnyPig on Twitter, I’ve started listening to “The Phoenix Project” on Audible. In overview, this is a narrative allegory of an IT project gone wrong. I’m up through Chapter 5 as I write this and I’d like to posit a couple things the protagonist is doing wrong. This is one of those books that managers, CIOs, CTOs, and directors will read and treat as Holy Writ, so some perspective seems an order. ...

Step right up, folks, it’s YEEEEEHAAW election time in Texas. Unlike the saner May primary in Kentucky, I’m now part of Super Tuesday, along with 13 other states. Cutting to the chase, I intend to vote ‘Uncomitted’ on my Republican Presidential ballot, and I plan to abstain from voting for Cornyn or John Carter. I’m an MJ Hegar Republican, you see. Anyway, I’m writing today to go over the 10 (yes, TEN) ballot propositions before me. ...

“It seems like I should write something about coronavirus,” I thought to myself. I’m sitting in a very empty Amazon office in Austin, Texas on a Saturday. I’m trying to make-up for a day I took off on Wednesday to shuttle Grace to a Primary Care doctor who promptly told me to take her to Dell Children’s Hospital for possible appendicitis. I knew it wasn’t appendicitis, but meh. I needed some time away from work. There’s been a swizzle of what Amazon calls “Product,” meaning two new “Managers” came on my project. Now we have: ...

I’ve grown remarkably tired of some things recently. Podcasts I have a favorite podcast application: Overcast. For the past 12+ years, I’ve listened to podcasts galore. My family/friends have come to loathe subjects I begin with “I was listening to a podcast the other day and…” Yeah, not anymore. I’ve dropped several podcasts and been selective with many more, and there’s been a general theme. The Improv Comic Problem This all began when I started listening to the NSFW (NSFL?) podcast Why Won’t You Date Me? from Stitcher. I like @nicolebyer’s manic personality. I like things of the genre “dating horror stories” in that voyeuristic “Glad I don’t have to do that anymore” sort of way. Heck, I even like getting that coastal, entertainment-industry perspective, because God knows, that’s now how it is in Texas. ...

Today is my daughter’s 13th birthday. Thirteen years ago, I watched my wife attempt to deliver our child naturally via the Bradley method, then I watched my daughter get stuck at -2 station, her head caught on my wife’s pelvis, and I watched a sex-addicted doctor cut her open and finally bring my daughter into the world. My account of that day What I left out, of course, was how utterly unprepared I was to be a father. Overwhelmed with emotion, between that 11pm and 11:30pm timestamp, I stood in the room where my wife had tried to push out our daughter, and I cried. I stood there and sobbed. I know now, those were sobs of crushing anxiety cresting into relief. They were both going to be okay. ...

Looks like this will be a series. Welcome to Imperial America Looks like the sham “trial” ends today. Really the question was whether it ends now or ends in acquittal after whatever witnesses were called. They needed 66 votes to convict and remove the president. They never had them. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose voters.” I don’t care particularly whether you have an ironic (D) or (R) next to your name, at this point neither party represents “Democracy” nor “Republic” in any form. ...

Wait….what? So, I’ve been gambling quite a bit lately. I’ve won and lost thousands of dollars on both blackjack and craps, and I want to write about it. ::blink:: Blackjack? CRAPS? Keep your pants on. I’ve been playing two particular iOS apps, learning about two popular casino games. There is but one conclusion: If you Play long enough….you lose. So if some of you read my post Regression to the Mean and thought: “Hmm….he seems to care A LOT about what the odds on dice are…”. Bingo. Er…“Winner, Seven!” ...

Meta This chapter alone is SDE Mentoring 101. Many of my mentees through the years have struggled in these areas, and improvement is often following these principles, whether by design or by accident. This is a “soft” skills chapter, yes. Later ones get much more technical. However, most tech ICs (and managers) don’t struggle with technology; we struggle learning these lessons ad-hoc, through experience. – Harold, 08 January 2020 Foreward & Preface They don’t talk down to you. They don’t assume you are an expert. … They take you as you are–programmers who just want to be better. ...

Why is the world going to hell, Harold? It seems a right of passage for people of a certain age–typically over 40–to look around them and ask certain questions: “What’s with kids these days?” “Why aren’t things like they used to be?” “Why is no one moral anymore?” “Does NO ONE have any work ethic?” This isn’t exaclty, new. Listen to this modern voice: The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. ...

So, Kives Out. This is one odd film. On the surface, it’s an old-fashioned Whodunnit? reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s works. In this take, we open to find the Patriarch of a WASP-y family of trust fund babies dead, apparently at his own hand. His nurse Marta (Ana de Armas) discovers him, and it seems simple enough. Oh wait…the guy is famous for writing detective novels, and all his kids and grandkids have a reason to kill him. And someone engaged the services of Benoit Blan (Daniel Craig) to “help” the dimwitted local police. ...

What happened in 2019? I like to do year-in-review posts every year or after specific milestones, like changing jobs or having big projects finish. So, if 2018 was a triumph, 2019 was its hangover. Family Both my parents are still alive, and are ornery as ever. Throughout most of 2019, our relationship with our son was estranged, most acutely when we flew up to Kentucky in May to see him graduate Franklin County High School when he refused to see us before, during, or after graduation. ...

(Image credit: Whit Bazemore, 2017 MotoGP @ Circuit of Americas) I love this picture. I’ve asked how to buy it, after seeing it on AutoExtremist. Peter M says he has no idea if there’s a print. So, I deep copied it just to save it. His eyes.

Well, that didn’t take long. So earlier, I mentioned trying to make the deployment workflow easier. Yeah, Hugo already did that. The steps go: install the AWS CLI Do aws configure with your bucket details, locally. follow the steps to setup. Here’s what I had to do in my config.yaml order: [".jpg$","$.gif$"] targets: - name: "aws" URL: s3://www.devharryc.com?region=us-east-1 matchers: - pattern: "^.+\\.(js|css|svg|ttf)$" cacheControl: "max-age=31536000, no-transform, public" gzip: true - pattern: "^.+\\.(png|jpg)$" cacheControl: "max-age=31536000, no-transform, public" gzip: false - pattern: "^.+\\.(html|xml|json)$" gzip: true do hugo deploy Hugo Deploy takes care of doing a smart diff/deploy so you don’t breach yours S3 free tier.

What is this? So, a confession: I’ve never owned a domain. Figured it was time that changed. For the past 15 years, I’ve lived (sort of) at https://harvid.blogspot.com, but it’s been an uneasy relationship. Blogger is creaky, predating social media, then it tried having a relationship with it (via Google+ comments), and then it reverted back. In the interim, AWS was born. Wordpress happened. Then, site generators like Jekyll came about. Most of all, Markdown happened, making HTML-publishing as simple as typing in vim (I’m typing this in atom right now, in fact.) ...

Roland Emmerich is famous for blowing things up. He started small enough, just destroying the Whitehouse and several notable monuments He got a bit more ambitious, destroying: New York (Godzilla) Colonial America (The Patriot) New York…again (The Day After Tomorrow), along with most of the Northern Hemisphere The entire SURFACE OF THE EARTH (2012) Where do you go after you basically bring about the Apocalypse? Do you weep, for there are no more lands left to conquer? ...

So, my wife staged–in love--a bit of an intervention this morning. You need to keep your hair trimmed. You need to shave everyday. You need to care if your clothes are wrinkled and if you have food on them. Avoid wearing clothes that smell. In other words, it’d be better if you acted like an adult. So, first, she’s absolutely right. I’ve let myself go–significantly–since I’ve moved to Texas. When I got here, I was 240 lbs, and swimming 1/4 mile a day in the pool. I was comfortably in XL sized clothes, without vanity sizing. I was also 37, and I had more hair and less grey hair. I got regular haircuts and kept my buzz between 1/8" to 1/4". You know…tidy. ...

As I write this, the White House is refusing to cooperate with an impeachment investigation. Allegedly, the President used the force and weight of the United States…to help find dirt on a prospective 2020 election opponent, Joe Biden. The calculus is thus: The House has the votes to impeach him. In the senate, 20 non-Democrats need to vote to remove him from office. There’s ZERO evidence that even if ‘removed’ from office, Trump would actually leave. He does, after all, command the military. The courts are impotent to actually DO anything, since they rely upon the Executive to…execute. It seems we’re heading for a constitutional crisis here in America, since the founders never imagined: ...

We once were a nation that tolerated “intolerable” people, that balanced inhumanity with contrition and restoration of the contrite. All fall short. We abided Daniel Webster AND John C. Calhoun, Billy Graham and Larry Flynt, MLK and George Wallace, the Black Panthers and the KKK. Did we particularly WANT TO? Of course not. Why, then? Because tolerance of ideas is the price of freedom. I see that freedom ending soon. Emotion is truth. Outrage becomes mandate. Thoughts must not become a crime. ...

Hackathon (n) 1. a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, and others, often including domain experts, collaborate intensively on software projects. The goal of a hackathon is to create usable software or hardware with the goal of creating a functioning product by the end of the event. I posit Hackathons are Crap. They are useless distractions from Actual Work® that have none of the intended outcomes for anyone involved. ...