One of the prime rules of storytelling is that the hero has to have a flaw.
Superman is super. He can’t lose. That’s why the writers introduced Kryptonite. Captain America is a super-soldier, but is still mortal. Thor is a god, but can lose his hammer and his powers.
The problem with Superhero movies is that they all got so much power they became invincible, and boring.
Good, classic storytelling beats VFX 10/10.
Years ago. Was visiting a client on-site. Meeting ran late and had to race home. Popped into a ‘natural’ food store to get something. Grabbed a package of pre-made ‘fresh’ shrimp spring rolls out of one of those open coolers. Ate in the car.
A 1.5 hour drive turned into a four hour nightmare with all the unplanned stops.
Never again.
Friend of mine used to volunteer for the local chapter of a well-known national non-profit. He tried to explain all the technical benefits of setting up a website, yada yada. The board didn’t care and were bored.
He finally set up a small demo on his own. Just a few screens. Ran a small test. Presented static screenshots, along with charts and stats on viewership and engagements. Had mockups of donation pages, volunteer signup screens, newsletters, etc. That was when people saw the value and got interested.
Nobody cares about decentralized social networks, the technology, or how terrible the other outlets are. For a municipality, you may want to focus on maintaining multiple channels of communications and ways to reach and engage the most users. You could then fold the fediverse into it as one more channel. Something they should keep an eye on. They’ll need a way to post the same content to all those channels with the least effort. Something easy that a trained intern or clerk can do.
Guarantee there will be questions of cost of setup, maintenance, and risks. May want to have some answers and slides ready.
Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker.”
There’s also a 50-year anniversary, 12-part, 99% Invisible series diving into it. Looking forward to listening to those alongside each section.
Obviously, you’re not a golfer.
Reading that was a rollercoaster of horror and confusion, ending in relief.
Totally agree.
Builders care about the nuts and bolts of a building. Most people just care about whether they can get a decent hot shower, how cold it gets inside at night, or whether the smoke alarm goes off every time they fry onions.
The killer feature of decentralization, I suspect, does not lie in a singular interaction with a user, but (as Mike notes) in harnessing the power of the distributed group to do something amazing.
“Given a list of strings, print the contents of the list to the screen.”
print(stringlist)
or if you want to get fancy:
print(", ".join(stringlist))
When do I start? I feel like I nailed it.
/s
Interviewed at two big, well-known tech companies. Had done a lot of mobile dev work at the time, but really wanted to switch to connected hardware and told the recruiters.
Showed up for the first on-site interview. Guy walks in. Explains the actual first interviewer couldn’t make it so he was a last-minute stand-in. Goes: “So, it says here you are intererested in mobile. That’s good. My team is looking for someone like that.”
I explained it was actually the other way round. What proceeded was an awkward hour of bullshit questions about train schedulers and sorting algorithms. Repeat five times that day. Every. Single. One.
Second company a few weeks later. Same thing. Except this time, 2/3 of the way through, a manager in HW group walks in. Grouses why he was asked to talk to someone, checks notes, about mobile. We had the greatest conversation after I set him straight. He wanted me to come back and do another loop just with his group. Except a week later, they announced a hiring freeze and I never heard back.
In retrospect, it was a good thing. I would not have been a good fit.
Many pumps come with built-in timers so you can turn them off when sleeping. You can also connect them to smarthome switches and set a routine to turn them on and off only when needed or via remote apps, wireless switches, or voice control (Alexa, turn pump on.)
We found the cost savings to be non-trivial. Main reason I put one in was because we had a teenager who started the shower running, then went away and got distracted. This solved the problem. And with a smarthome controller, it also reduced costs.
Also, those under-sink instant heaters do exist, but they’re only good for a single faucet. They won’t work with showers and baths.
That’s why I put ‘timed’ in there. You can program when they shut off so it just goes back to the way it was before. Like when sleeping or out of the house.
A more fine-grain solution is to get a non-timer (cheaper) version of the pump, and one of those Alexa, Google, or Homekit compatible power switches, then not only can you set the time through a smart home routine, but can override them whenever walking out or coming back.
If using a traditional water heater, you’re heating the whole tank all the time. And with a tankless but no pump, you’re running gallons of clean water down the drain, waiting for it to get warm. It’s all a tradeoff, but this, at least, only heats the water circulating inside your pipes and only during the hours you set.
If you have a tankless water heater, and have to run the tap for a really long while to get hot water, look into timed recirculating pumps. It’ll save you a ton of money and make you kick yourself for not doing it sooner.
Day I got married.
Next would be the time the bartender offered me the half pint of beer for free while he went to change the keg.
Friend of mine used to drink quadruple espressos at Starbucks every day, then go back to work. I was talking to him last week and told him about remembering the time he called me from the Starbucks and his name was called with the quadruple order. He laughed and said he actually bumped it up to quintuple at one point.
Then he sold his house and moved to another state, living out in the woods. Asked him how he managed without a Starbucks nearby. He said he now does Keurig espresso shots every morning. But it was getting expensive, since he had to press 10 pods in one sitting!
Moral of the story: he’s perfectly functional and productive. Go nuts!
Only time there is because Google links to an answer there. Other than that, nope.
There’s a divey bar 10m away where people have been watching results the last few years. Might head down there. Pretty sure it’ll be packed.
Alternative is to crawl into bed and wait till January.
Edit: we have a lot of local races (Mayor, City Council, propositions) on the line. Might hit the bar just to watch those and just ignore the national stuff.