gchat-zalice

Other Places I Post

I have two other LJs: cosmusic, coslinks


See what links I've been reading on del.icio.us (coslinks),
 and what links I've been posting on reddit (cos).
Update: I abandoned delicious in 2016 after they'd been deterioriating for a few years, and I now post links on pinboard instead.

Photos: Some from the 90s on my old web site, newer ones on Flickr (cospics) and most recent (pretty much anything since 2006) on Facebook
Videos: YouTube (youcos)

Where are you? Fill out my LJ poll.

gchat-zalice

DNS registrar recommendations?

Looking for a place to transfer my domain registrations to.

Years ago I transferred most of my domain registrations to Google Domains, because I had already transferred my DNS zones from my own nameservers to Google Cloud DNS, and it's been convenient to have the domain registrations in the same system. But Google Domains is moving everyone to Squarespace and shutting their domain registration service down, so I will no longer have that advantage, and might as well look around. I could stay with Squarespace, but no particular reason to.

Google Domains charges $12/year/domain for all of my .com, .org, and .net domains; most other places seem to charge more like $24+/year. Friends and coworkers have suggested a couple of places that don't charge more than Google - namecheap and porkbun.

If you have any domains, what do you use and recommend, and why?

I'm not looking for other services, like hosting my email, or web sites, or primary DNS. Just domain registration. It's okay if the same company provides those other services, but if they expect most of their users to combine a domain registration with other stuff like that, that may be a drawback because their user interface may make it easy to accidentally have it take over my primary DNS without me intending to, or just be annoying to deal with.
gchat-zalice

Crossposting no longer working, come to Dreamwidth

[Re-posting this as a reminder, since I haven't posted here since I first posted this over a year ago]

When I moved from LJ to dreamwidth after LJ adopted rules against political and "activist" speech (probably forced to do so by the Russian government), I set it up to crosspost automatically so everything I posted on dreamwidth came here too. That worked for years. But in the past few months, it stopped working, because LJ stopped cooperating with dreamwidth and is no longer letting dreamwidth post here. More complete explanation at https://dw-maintenance.dreamwidth.…

As a result, my last few posts have been on dreamwidth only, except for one or two that I separately sent to LJ as well. I'm not going to continue doing that, so I guess this means goodbye to LJ for me. If you want to read my posts, and you're still here on LJ, come on over to dreamwidth.org.

My journal there is https://cos.dreamwidth.org/ which I'm sure doesn't surprise anyone.
gchat-zalice

Crossposting no longer working, come to Dreamwidth

When I moved from LJ to dreamwidth after LJ adopted rules against political and "activist" speech (probably forced to do so by the Russian government), I set it up to crosspost automatically so everything I posted on dreamwidth came here too. That worked for years. But in the past few months, it stopped working, because LJ stopped cooperating with dreamwidth and is no longer letting dreamwidth post here. More complete explanation at https://dw-maintenance.dreamwidth.…

As a result, my last few posts have been on dreamwidth only, except for one or two that I separately sent to LJ as well. I'm not going to continue doing that, so I guess this means goodbye to LJ for me. If you want to read my posts, and you're still here on LJ, come on over to dreamwidth.org.

My journal there is https://cos.dreamwidth.org/ which I'm sure doesn't surprise anyone.
gchat-zalice

SIFT

This twitter thread describes a very good method for dealing with and sharing online information about breaking news, very relevant now with the invasion of Ukraine but it's relevant all the time: https://twitter.com/holden/status/…

S - Stop, and consider whether you know what you're seeing/reading and what you know about it.

I - Investigate the source, with an eye towards a) is it a source likely to know about what they're reporting, and b) does this source have incentives to check themselves and get things right?

F - Find better coverage. Search for others reporting the same thing. Look for sources you know have credibility.

T - Trace the origin of the information. Sometimes several articles report the same thing, but when you read you find they all attribute it to the same source, and that initial source may have unknown reliability.

Click the link to read Mike Caulfield's thread summarizing it, or here for more: https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift…
gchat-zalice

Moderna booster

When Ceila scheduled her Moderna booster shot and texted me about it, her phone keyboard or speech-to-text rendered it as "Madonna booster". So that's what we've been calling it ever since. I'm going to get my Madonna booster this week. Yes I know it wouldn't make any difference to boost Madonna with Pfizer instead, but this happens to be what the nearest CVS is offerring.


Crossposted from Dreamwidth - link to original post (comment count unavailable comments on DW)
gchat-zalice

FedEx is the worst

Another installment in a long series of FedEx failures over many years...

According to tracking, my replacement macbook arrived at a FedEx facility in Seattle on Wednesday evening. However it was scheduled for delivery Friday by 1pm, not Thursday. Oh well, it's not an overnight or 2-day package, I guess that's fine.

Friday morning, their tracking was still staying that, but shortly after 1pm, I got an update notification that it was delayed and would be delivered Monday by 1pm. When I checked tracking, the new entry for that day was "not scheduled for delivery", whatever that means.

Monday morning, today, it still said it would be delivered today by 1pm, and later in the morning it said it was out for delivery. And then, another update that my package is delayed, and now their tracking system says it's because "the recipient's business is closed for a holiday". WTF? This is a residential apartment building, and although there is a business in the building directly next to our front door, it's a dentist's office that has been lit and obviously open since early morning.

First call to FedEx, customer service says they're going to transfer me to customer service. Second person takes my tracking number, and oops, suddenly I'm on their post-call automated survey asking me to rate the quality of service I got.

Second call to FedEx, this time I get a customer service person who doesn't need to transfer me. She tells me she'll send a message to have the driver come "back" (I say that in quotes because I don't think they ever came here in the first place) to "re"-attempt.

Early afternoon, another notification, and FedEx tracking now says the item was returned to their local facility at 1:24pm.

Third call to FexEx ends up similar to the first - I start talking to someone and before I can even give them my whole tracking number, I'm on the automated post-call survey.

Fourth call to FedEx, I get to talk to someone new, and she says she'll ask to have a driver deliver it. She promises I'll get an update within 15 minutes.

Hours later, fifth call to FedEx after not having received an update, and I get a customer service person who tells me they will not try to deliver today because it's not a priority item.

...

Although I try to remember to tell any business who's sending me something to not use FedEx, and try to choose non-FedEx shipping options when I order online, sometimes I don't have a choice :( Apparently Apple always ships with FedEx? They didn't ask me. FedEx is by far the worst at delivering packages, consistently, at several different places I've lived, on opposite coasts. Avoid them if you can.


Update: Tuesday, it was again marked "business closed". A few more calls caused them to open a "case" that unlike the previous day's case, was transferred to someone who actually called the local FedEx location a couple of times. They eventually tracked down that it was not even sent out that day at all, and that nobody could explain why it was scanned as "business closed". They promised to send out out the next day (that is, today). We'll see.


Crossposted from Dreamwidth - link to original post (comment count unavailable comments on DW)
gchat-zalice

We are hiring a lot more tech people, want to work here?

The department I work for is looking for software developers, cloud engineers, SREs, product managers, and probably a bunch of other roles I haven't thought of. If you may want to come here (virtually), let me know and we can talk about what it's like, and I could refer you.

I've been working at McGraw Hill since early 2020. A couple of years before that, it was basically an educational textbook company, with a software division on the side doing online education software. When I joined was right around the time that digital products were passing 50% of the company's revenue, and now it's getting closer to ed-tech company that still does a bit of textbook publishing on the side.

The digital products division, which I work for, is explanding a lot over the next year, and we have a lot of openings. It's a pretty nice place to work. It doesn't pay at the same tier as Google-Apple-Amazon-Facbook, but if you have the background and skills to work at one of those companies, this is a place where you can be an opinion leader and make a big difference, and with less effort. It's a more relaxed job, yet still exciting, and with great coworkers. It's exciting because the digital products leadership has been really good, and thoughtfully shifting the whole organization from its old traditional dev vs. ops vs. IT practices and software on dedicated servers in data centers, to a more cooperative developer+SRE way of working, with software running in containers on cloud, and etc. I've seen a lot of change in this direction in the past year and a half, including reorganizations, and it has been done much more smoothly and thoughtfully and well than I've seen at most organizations I've been at. It's also exciting because there's more to go, and I can shape or drive big parts of it - and so can anyone else here who wants to.

Tech-wise, it's mostly on AWS with some things still in older data centers, lots of javascript front ends, some mobile apps, many back end APIs and pipelines in a mix of Go, Java, Python, and a smattering of other things, newer services on either kubernetes or ECS or serverless (lambda), and a variety of acquisitions at different stages of integration.

A lot of these jobs are full remote. The main offices are in New York City and Columbus, OH. Engineering had been mainly in Seattle and Boston but they decided to close both of those offices and convert all the Seattle and Boston based employees to full remote, and my group also has people in Germany and Argentina and other faraway places. Most of my coworkers are near Boston, NYC, Columbus, or Seattle, but I think we're open to hiring from just about anywhere now.


Crossposted from Dreamwidth - link to original post (comment count unavailable comments on DW)