whereistanya

whereistanya, 6 months ago to random

Annual PSA: if you get seasonal depression, it's about time to get your SAD light out of wherever you put it last March and set it up on your desk.

Do it now before winter-brain kicks in and it's ten times harder to go up in the attic or whatever.

whereistanya, 7 months ago to brooklyn

Not actually ideal.

#flooding #brooklyn

whereistanya, 3 months ago to random

Ms 11 invented a game where she and I insult each other using #bird names. "Go do your homework, you meadow pipit!" "I already finished it, you red winged blackbird!" "Hey, American wigeon, dinner's on the table" "Listen up, you scarlet tanager, you kinglet, you roseate spoonbill!" And so on. It's the best.

Today I caught her doing research on ebird.org 😂

whereistanya, 2 months ago to random

I link to this paragraph by Eva Parish at least once a week.

"One of the best writing tips I've ever gotten was to avoid using demonstrative pronouns. Instead of saying “this” or “that,” you should add a noun to spell out exactly what you’re referring to, even if you’ve just mentioned it. "

https://evaparish.com/blog/how-i-edit#repeat

whereistanya, 9 months ago to Albuquerque

Also, honestly still processing the fact that these little dinosaurs just roam around like they're no big deal. Meep meep.

#Albuquerque #roadrunner #birding

whereistanya, 8 months ago to random

In other news, J bought a label maker and it's going predictably.

whereistanya, 8 months ago to random

A roadrunner just walked through my garden. It looked over and it was like "hey" and I was like "hey" and it went back to its walk and I went back to my meeting. Also a Cooper's hawk keeps sitting up on the trees behind the wall and screaming at things. And there are huge blue dragonflies and huge yellow butterflies and tiny green-brown lizards.

#NewMexico is delivering so far. I like it here.

whereistanya, 8 months ago to random

I'm fascinated by the phenomenon where someone is pushing to add a formal process for something because they don't want to talk to the one person who's doing the thing wrong. Signing the whole industry up for a conflict management course.

whereistanya, 8 months ago to random

"Content" has become the thing you scroll past while looking for actual information. I'm over it.

whereistanya, 10 months ago to random

I like this idea of "README driven development", where you start by writing the documentation and then make the code changes to make the docs true.

Learning from @mikemcquaid at #StaffPlusLondon

whereistanya, 9 months ago to random

I'm ready for a search engine that only indexes pages that were written by humans.

whereistanya, 9 months ago to random

I forgot to say: the Staff Engineer's Path audiobook has been re-recorded and is once again available from wherever you like to buy audiobooks.

https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781663730343-the-staff-engineer-s-path

I personally recommend https://libro.fm because you can support your local bookshop with the purchase. But it's available from the various megacorps too.

whereistanya, 22 days ago to random

pharmacist: "do you have a rewards card?"
me: "no I only offer my data for mining by my credit card company, their 479 partners, your payment processor, whoever's running your security cameras, and the 30 apps on my phone that, despite my best efforts, are recording that I'm in a pharmacy right now"

(I didn't, I just said no thank you.)

whereistanya, 8 months ago to random

Yesterday I nearly bought a thermometer but realised just in time that it comes with an app. Oh hell no. I would like a much much stupider thermometer, please.

Hashtag not all software people or whatever, but I think it's funny that software people often hate software the most.

whereistanya, 11 months ago to random

Also, while I'm talking about #StaffPlusLondon:

Anyone here going? Can you help me with live-posting?

I almost died trying to host and post during #StaffPlus New York, and this one's a two day conference so I should probably pace myself 😅

whereistanya, 7 months ago to random

If a car alarm is still going off after 30 minutes you should be allowed steal the car.

whereistanya, 7 months ago to random

I'm trying out pixelfed for birding pictures. Does anyone else use it? It's another fediverse app, but sort of instagram-shaped instead of twitter-shaped.

I was trying to understand how people use it and how it's different from mastodon. The best comment I've found is that mastodon is a stream that's intended to just be of the moment (esp if you don't enable search) and pixelfed is more like you're building a photo album over time. Is that how other people think of it?

whereistanya, 7 months ago to Birding

Accidental good #birding at the #Albuquerque #BalloonFiesta when a pair of white-faced ibises showed up. I've never seen an #ibis in the US before!

Ibis in flight with several balloons in the background.
Glossy greenish bird with a long beak against a sky full of balloons.

whereistanya, 3 months ago to random

Duolingo is amazing to me. I'm sure real classes are more effective, but they take time I would never spend. Being able to do a few lessons on my phone every day doesn't feel like it should work, but it builds up.

I got to section 5 of the Spanish course a few weeks ago and wondered if I could read familiar books yet. So I got El Café de las Leyendas, the translation of Legends and Lattes. It works! Slow and I have to look up a lot of words, but it feels really neat to get to this milestone.

whereistanya, 8 months ago to random

Some kind of Darmock and Jalad at Tanagra thing where you respond to messages with just the chatgpt prompt you would have used to write the response 🤔

whereistanya, 3 months ago to random

Doing tech support for a family friend.

Login to icloud on your iphone with an appleid which is a gmail address and then into your windows account on your laptop and that's also a gmail address but ofc with a different password, and Chrome on your iPhone and Chrome on your laptop talk to each other in ways you don't expect, but anyway your iPhone opens Safari half the time and Windows will convince you to use Edge if it kills you both so good luck finding where you opened gmail GODSPEED.

whereistanya, 9 months ago to random

Describing someone in a peer review as "a safe pair of hands", which made me realise people here might not have seen this great article from @emauton

https://emauton.org/2022/12/24/a-safe-pair-of-hands/

whereistanya, 8 months ago to random

If you sent me a mail and I didn't reply to it it's because my email backlog is currently so long that I'm considering faking my own death to escape it.

whereistanya, 11 months ago to random

Merlin: There's an American goldfinch in your back yard! And, wow, and an Eastern phoebe! And a house finch and a red winged blackbird, all at the same time! And also a killdeer, somehow? And ...

(It's a single mockingbird doing the full repertoire.)

#birding

whereistanya, 1 month ago to random

I've learned that you can get through a lot of phone trees by just saying "Human. Human. Human. HUMAN. HUMAN." until the robot gives up and connects you. It's still not reliable but I have a higher hit rate than trying six different paths through the tree, all of which get to dead ends.

I fucking hate robot answering trees.