Keep Your Head on a Swivel: How Serbian Hackers Hijacked my Site Being a one-man administrative team for my digital presence has its perks. There is no bureaucratic logjam (aside from the Wife Acceptance Factor) when new stuff needs to be delivered. Nobody argues with me about what Linux flavor is the best, or whether I should (god forbid) switch over to
The Singularity is Never Human intelligence is just, well, one of those things man. In the early days of toolmaking, we largely produced things that could do stuff that our nails and teeth accomplished. Rocks, then the improved obsidian adze, could cut stuff for us. Fire could make things more digestible, again, taking some
How to DevOp 3: My Saga Begins Part 5: You're a slob, I'm a slob. 3 parts in and you're still going strong. Congratulations, young (now old?) reader. If you're just coming in at this point, please feel free to read part 1 and part 2 of this series.
Intermission: the who, what, and why of Automation If you've read any of my How to DevOp series (part 1 and part 2 available here), you've probably learned things about how IT careers progress; first slowly, then faster, and then slow again. What I did not address is exactly what you change into when
How to DevOp 2: Gaining Traction Thanks for getting this far! If this is the first part of my series on my experiences between being a fresh BA grad to a decently successful DevOps engineer, you can read part 1 here. If you've already read part 1, let's not tarry. There'
How to DevOp 1: Starting Off Part Zero: Introduction Long-form writing is a largely dead art, and that's why I take to it with such joy. While it's somewhat self-indulgent and self-flagellating at once, there's something about the craft that makes you think and reflect in a way that talking
Being Judicious with your Robot Buddy “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” ~ Orange Catholic Bible "Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night." ~ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Bot Test Looking at Walter, he didn't seem like much. Just a rusted box with a studded head. But his head wasn't a head; it was a steel frame that protected him from moisture and apparently nothing else. "How've you been?" I asked him.
There is no Cert for Comms “We are currently clean on OPSEC” ~Unknown “Stop trying to make fetch happen.” ~ Regina George Part 1: Yap Playing well with others is a core competency. As my child advances through preschool, I’m beginning to hear noise about the other kids (never mine!) and their tendencies to bite, poke,
Tales of Horror: On the worst Job that I’ve ever Taken I augmented this post from a Reddit comment that I made earlier today in /r/experiencedDevs; in case you’re a subscriber and this whole spiel sounds familiar, it’s the same story. It happened to me. I would sooner be broken on the wheel than plagiarize something that actually
Imperial DevOps "The entire Russian empire is ruled by ten thousand clerks!" ~Tsar Alexander II, final words Why did I choose this life? Well, for starters, I was born into it. Then, a lot happened. I walked, grew up, ran, swam, got spat on, turned on a computer, learned to
The Miracle What follows is mostly fiction. But also some fun. Enjoy it at your own risk. Rigbault dragged the body up the hill. Or what was left of it. Eldridge had been reduced significantly since his latest battle with the Dragon. Now, the Dragon was not a dragon per se. He
The Speed of Sight Why write less? Strunk & White always said to make sure you eliminate every unnecessary word. And I agree; the purpose of communicating should be clarity first and foremost. It's not an easy standard to maintain; first, you've got to gather all the grain (your thoughts)
[Audience Laughter|Audible Gasp] Just had a scare. Which is appropriate, Halloween being proximate to this time of year. Trying to upgrade the platform for this website, it became unresponsive. Pages did not load. The site was unresponsive. There were issues with dependency versioning. And so on and so forth. Thankfully at the end
Opera Magni My Latin is not good, which is why I gave this article its title. But maybe it's useful to be able to write great works. I choose to be humble here and say that such things are above me. But maybe this can be used as a sort
On Gaza The princes are prostrate, crying 'Peace!' [...] Plundered is Canaan with every evil; Carried off is Ashkelon; Seized upon is Gezer; Yanoam is undone; Israel is laid waste-its grain spoiled; kHarru has become a widow of Egypt. All lands together are pacified. Everyone who was restless has been bound.
Freaky times on the Frontier You may not be aware of this, but as I write this, the site has been down for the past sixteen hours. During some general reorganization of the Hartr.Net domain, I decided to relegate the blog portion to the blog. prefix instead of leaving it as the base domain.
Zoned pt. 2 We woke up, hours later, outside The Camp. The Camp is usually the first thing we see when we go into the ZEL zone-space. It used to be a boy scout camp named after what had at some point been a local Indian tribe. I'm not sure whether
Zoned Preface: this is (obviously) a work of fiction. Unless something has vastly changed about the world at large, there aren't alien-spawned zones of demarcation across the Earth's surface. I plan to add onto it over time. As you may be able to guess, this is largely
One Awesome Year Firstly I have to say to check out Lara's Website where you can check out her art and everything else she finds interesting. Here is a recent picture of my wife and I at her wonderful wedding. The festivities took place out on the west side, not far
State of Affairs; 2022 "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." ~Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities First of all, fuck Dickens. Aside from giving us Elizabeth G's† brilliance, sometimes I wonder about his ability to influence civilization. But that's beyond me.
New Post on tmux in our Linux Learning Series But hey, they're not charging me by the letter, so I'll share it here: Terminal multiplexing gives you wings, especially when you're sshing into another server. To run it, try: tmux new -s mysession This will create a new session, where you can use
Updates on Life, the Universe, and the Restaurant you find at its inevitable End. I was bummed the other day. Watching The Hitchhiker's Guide from 2006 made my brain burn with expired tropes, as well inspiring heartache from the passing of both Alan Rickman and Douglas Adams. The book itself was one of the unifying elements I had with my father--a bizarre
This Parrot is Deceased It's never easy to change, but sometimes we have to. I've decided, probably for the 9th time in the past 18 years, to try learning Python again. I can already do some silly manipulation, get the drift of arrays, and can print out relevant data points.
Goals & Goal Realms in 2019, I started seeing a therapist. I did because, in my wife's words, I was getting out of control. She wasn't wrong. I had been abusing myself. Getting into fits of rage over nothing. I hated my job, feeling like everything that I attempted was
