Name collisions. A few years ago, they hired someone at my company with the same first and last name. And since I had the default email addr, hilarity ensused.
A few highlights:
For his interview with the CFO, they scheduled it with me. I happened to be in SF that day and the company was pretty open about things - I actually thought the interview was for me (wow, me and the CFO, cool!) but I couldn’t make it because I was out on a sailboat for a team-building thing. So, I told them that I was going to be out on the bay on a boat and asked them to reschedule... and they did. Sorry!
After he started, I got all of his expenses showing up in my Concur account. Turns out he stayed at the Four Seasons a lot.
Once, I got emailed a Google Sheet with the comp and stock packages for his entire org (he was head of the Commerce org). I looked at it briefly, confused, before figuring out what it was. I let HR know, and they were nice about it.
I had the default email address, so I received tons of wrong emails, both internally and externally—offers to be the CEO of Nike, for example. Someone once joked that I should have replied with a condition: $15k just to talk!
Most people were cool about it, but there was this one woman. After sending me a bunch of documents (which I forwarded to the other Nathan and explained the mix-up), she replied with a threatening email, telling me I’d be in trouble if I looked at any of it. I told her, "Well, then you should be more careful about who you send it to." Then, I forwarded it all to him. Seriously, fuck that.
He and I met once—nice guy. He used to be the CEO of Ticketmaster. Once, he made a bet on a basketball game, and someone sent me the $100 he won. He told me to keep it.
Anthony: Honestly, I’m kind of shocked you didn’t swap addresses—or that they didn’t move you both to entirely new ones.
Nathan: Yeah, I tried to get nathan@.... That would’ve worked for me, but IT wouldn’t do it because it once belonged to some other Tweep.
Oh, I did set up an alias, nathanhubard—and guess what? All I got was still stuff meant for him.
I also used n8@ for a while, but after he left, it finally died down a bit.
August: This is a great story!
My favorite datacenter disaster story (that I was a critical actor in) was the AIS datacenter in San Diego - in short, a $0.25 bolt sheared off at a junction for the utility water supply fill for the cooling system system, after years of cavitation induced vibrations at a joint, and the roof turned into a swimming pool. Nobody knew this was happening as the gutters were fully enclosed, so it just filled and filled. Only when the leak became larger than the utility supply did the cooling system vapor lock, emergency stop, and the whole DC heat-soaked in minutes at 140F in the aisles (recorded by my recently installed temp meters). I was on call that night and saw the alarm of 78F, 90F, then 99F, and got in the car to head over there. It was 2am and the lone security guard had opened all the utility doors. I didn't even have to badge in to walk over to my row. I did notice the sound of rushing water as I passed the downspouts but there was a restaurant nearby with a water feature so, in their defense, it did mask it quite well.
I've got a 1968 Toyota FJ40 that I've been slowly restoring for about 12 years now. Recently, I noticed how faded the
Turn Signal Lens
Running Light Lens
Butter Beans & Kale
Transcribing a recipe for posterity. I keep telling people this tastes like bacon, and it does!
Butter Beans & Kale
Need
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- ¼ tsp ccrushed red pepper flakes
- 15oz can butter beans, rinsed & drained & patted dry
- 2 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
- 1 ½ cups kale, tough stems removed, torn into bite sized pieces
- sea salt & ground pepper
- 1 tsbp fresh lemon juice
- fresh parm for serving
Make
- Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium heat.
- Add red pepper and cook for 30 seconds, stirring often. Add beans, cook 4-5 minutes then flip and cook additional 4-5 minutes.
- Stir in garlic, kale, salt & pepper to taste.
- Cook until kale wilts ~2 minutes.
- Mix in lemon juicce, cook 1 minute longer & all is evenly coated.
Setting up the Vortex Race 3 for Mac
Every year or so, my Vortex Race 3 keyboard seems to reset itsself. Not sure if it's me, or a combo of how my various docks interact w/it, but I find myself stuck on the default layout and having to research how to set it up for a Mac again. For posterity and anyone else having this issue, here's my steps to a Mac user's minimal maintenance setup on the Race 3:
Keys look like this:
[ L1 ][ L2 ][ L3 ][ Space ][ R1 ][ R2 ][ R3 ]
We're going to reset it, swap to a programmable layer, switch to windows mode (it's the least problematic) and then swap the alt and command keys (L2/L3). That's it.
- Reset everything by pressing
L3+R1for 5 seconds. Left LED will blink white color while you're holding the keys. Release them after it stopeed blinking. - Get into one of the programmable layers (
R2+RShift) – red is fine. - Put the keyboard in Windows Mode (
R2+W), it's the least problematic one. - Go into programming mode:
Fn+R3right LED should light up white. - Then hit the
L2thenL3, thenPn(LED shines white) to finish first move. - Then hit the
L3thenL2, thenPn(LED shines white) to finish 2nd move. R2+R3to get out of programming mode (LED goes off).
References:
- arogulin for the cheatsheet, modified for my use case.
- Race3 Manual
- POK3R Manual (for programming)
Date/Time SublimeText Plugin
I keep a daily log in a markdown doc and have been manually typing the day and time in for a few months now. My editor is SublimeText, which supports python plugins so I figured this could be done pretty easily. Here's what I came up with after a few minutes:
- In Sublime Text, go to "Tools" > "Developer" > "New Plugin...".
- Replace the default code with the following Python script:
import sublime import sublime_plugin from datetime import datetime, timezone class InsertDateTimeCommand(sublime_plugin.TextCommand): def run(self, edit, date_or_time): if date_or_time == "date": content = self.generate_date_string() elif date_or_time == "time": content = self.generate_time_string() else: return self.insert_content(edit, content) def generate_date_string(self): now = datetime.now() formatted_date = now.strftime("%A %Y-%m-%d") return f"{formatted_date}\n{'=' * len(formatted_date)}" def generate_time_string(self): now = datetime.now(timezone.utc) local_time = now.astimezone() utc_time = now.strftime("%H:%M:%S UTC") local_time_str = local_time.strftime("%I:%M:%S %p %Z") return f"{local_time_str} ({utc_time})" def insert_content(self, edit, content): for region in self.view.sel(): self.view.insert(edit, region.begin(), content + '\n')
Save the file with somethign like
insert_date_time.pyin your Sublime Text "Packages" directory.Now, you can create a key binding to trigger this command. Go to "Preferences" > "Key Bindings" and add a binding similar to the following:
[ { "keys": ["ctrl+shift+d"], "command": "insert_date_time", "args": {"date_or_time": "date"} }, { "keys": ["ctrl+shift+t"], "command": "insert_date_time", "args": {"date_or_time": "time"} } ]
Now, when you press ctrl+shift+d, it will insert the current date, and pressing ctrl+shift+t will insert the current time along with UTC time.
Looks like this:
Thursday 2023-12-07
===================
And this:
12:38:05 PM CST (18:38:05 UTC)
Awk Associative Arrays Rule!
Awk associative arrays rule!
file.dat:
foo 234
bar 43
baz 109
bar 823
foo 283
baz 23
awk '{a[$1] += $2} END {for (i in a) print i,a[i]}' file.dat
output:
baz 132
foo 517
bar 866
Now, do this on a file with 100,000 lines.
2019 Total Lunar Eclipse
The Total Lunar Eclipse this past weekend was amazing! I had set up some new photography gear to take pictures and was really looking forward to some great shots. I set up my camera gear, which was a Fuji X-T2 mated to an older Canon FD300mmF4L mounted on an Omegon Mini Track LX2. The Mini Track is a mechanical wind-up motorized equatorial mount for astrophotography.
Unfortunately, the cloud cover was huge. I got a few early shots just after the partial started and then the clouds took over. It wasn't until 2 hours later I noticed a break in the clouds headed our way.
YES!
And there it was! So pretty! Really incredible, and am I seeing purple? Definitely my favorite shot of the 100 or so I took.
The clouds were clear for a few moments, so I dragged both my sleeping kids out of their warm bed into the 20 degree night to show them the sky. Neither of them cared and only wanted to go back inside. Youth!
Clouds started to come back in so I got a few wide angle shots to capture the beauty of the night sky during the total.
I also shot some bracketed exposures and spent a few hours aligning and processing to produce this detailed image.
I took a ton of shots. I think the mini track really helped as I didn't have to worry about lengthy exposure times with the longer lens. And I didn't have to move the camera every couple minutes. It's going to be a great addition to my astrophotography setup.
My gallery of shots here.