George Budd @Gbudd@qoto.org

This is Spot. He’s getting his passpawt photo taken but won’t stop making silly faces!
Which one do you like?

I used to have a sail boat. One of the most important #safety rules in sailing is "don't sail on a schedule".

What this means is that if you have a destination & a deadline, you will override safety signals (like weather) & travel in unsafe conditions due to deadline pressure. This is how serious accidents happen while sailing.

Planning for sailing puts an emphasis on having a checklist that includes having situational awareness of issues like boat condition, charts, & weather by explicitly checking the marine weather forecasts.

Also you have to be prepared to bail on your destination & schedule if the safety signals change. You have to know where your closest port is to seek shelter if a storm arises.

It occurred to me that the #airbornePrecautions equivalent is "don't be task focused on a deadline".

The need to get a task done by a deadline causes you to lose situational awareness, & accept risk that you would not otherwise accept if you thought your safety plan through ahead of time.

This is exacerbated by the total lack of a danger signal in society right now. No mitigations visible. Out of sight, out of mind.

This bit me yesterday getting a vaccination from an unmasked pharmacist in a small room. I took a risk I should not have, because I lost situational awareness under the drive to get the task done. I never would have accepted that risk in my pre-thought out safety plan. But it just popped up in the middle of the task, & I let it slide because I wasn't situationally aware.

Now, ofc I was wearing #P100 #elastomeric so the risk here is relative. My event was ocular exposure during high water mark for community transmission, not being maskless. But it is not a risk I would have taken in a pre-thought through safety plan.

And that's the big deal now. Every little ordinary task needs a safety plan.

Its frustrating. Its exhausting.

When it goes wrong, when the safety signals change, when you get off plan, you have to be prepared to "bail". Halt a task, walk out, cancel, reschedule. Find a safe port in the new storm.

I should have refused entry with a maskless pharmacist. Cancelled, requested accommodation & rescheduled.

This is a kind of risk "velocitization" that happens. I am getting velocitized into one-way masking even during high community transmission periods. Everyone else but me unmasked is the new normal.

This is how accidents happen - a bunch of little issues leading to an unwanted, unplanned outcome.

Uptime girl
She's been living in her uptime world
I bet she's never had a downtime guy
I bet her momma never told her why
I'm gonna try for a

UPS
Redundant connectivity
Round robin DNS
High availability proxy
Multiple servers in different locations

Wah Owow Owowow.

Next time you see an ambulance rush by, know that in Colorado, Paramedics (the highly trained life savers who give medication, read ECGs, and perform procedures in the ambulance) get paid $20-30/hr to work horrible hours. For comparison, McDonalds is offering $19.50/hr right now, and the new Buc Ee’s off I-25 is going to pay cashiers around $19/hr.

Pitch: the clone of ellen ripley is called in again by the corporation because a deep space colony has gone dark. When Ripley and the space marines arrive at the colony there are no xenomorph aliens there. The colony decided to shut down communications with Earth because everything coming out of there sounded bad. Ellen and the marines decide to settle down there and live in peace. The ship’s cat hunt space butterflies during the credits.

Anyone who has ever tried to untangle the cables in their junk drawer, and wondered how could such a complex snarl even form, ought to have no problem understanding how complex molecules, and life, arose from a junk tidepool and sunlight.

When the first “shambling cablemonster” report came in, it was presumed to be a prank, or a viral marketing stunt.

Eventually we worked out that putting microchips in USB and iPhone cables had accelerated the development of sentience in the cablebeasts.

It was too late to put the genie back in the bottle, current best advice remains to keep your junk drawers tidy and, should you be confronted by a cablebeast, to remain calm and use a broom or a chair to gently guide it outside, where it will harmlessly graze on the electromagnetic field of power lines. They are to some extent our children, and deserve peace.

#MicroFiction #Tootfic

Shane MacGowan, Pogues songwriter and Irish music legend, dies aged 65 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/nov/30/shane-macgowan-pogues-singer-dies #music #poetry #Ireland

7 signs you're dealing with a micromanager

#Caturday

@miiko @tml This one always comes to mind when I encouter mysterious tech problems. No recollection of the source or who the person in the video is, but they’re awesome to create such a funny clip. 😄

Kensington Market, Toronto

If I wanted to buy a cheap yet reliable CNC for woodworking, up to maybe 50x50 cm work pieces, maybe only up to 30x30 cm... What manufacturers would I be looking at?

Boosts appreciated.

has anyone made a read-only FUSE filesystem for a git repository where every commit is a folder and the folder contains all the files in that commit?

the idea is that you could just run `cd COMMIT_ID` and poke around instead of checking out the commit

I dunno who made this, but I love it nonetheless

happy Thanksgiving! hope everyone has something to be thankful for.
🐱 🐶 🐼 🐦 ☕ 🍕 🍩 🍻 🎵

#Caturday

Do I still need to add a rinse aid?

Remembering the time my newbie #EMT partner was told by me earlier in the day about the superstition around The Q Word and he thought it was stupid, so he deliberately dropped it in front of the entire triage line. I thought the charge nurse, who is a 5 foot nothing black-haired Italian woman, was about to physically toss him out the ER doors by the look on her face. You can bet he never did that again.

#wholesome #dog #Mondog

The hardest part of photographing Mina is getting the shot before she shoves her face into the camera.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

Mina "Minoskins" "Mina Mina Jelly-Bean-a" Silverio-Zink left us yesterday evening at the age of 17, following seven months of enduring an aggressive cancer.

She was a "real trouper of a cat”, in David's words. In the words of all the vet staff who interacted with her over the last year, "a sweetheart who started purring the moment we touched her”. In the words of the innumerable rats she slaughtered and dumped at our feet over the years, "an unholy terror; avoid”.

She had short stubby legs, a very round head, and glossy dense black fur that looked chocolatey in sunlight. She was a luxurious cat to pat because of that fur and her easy-start purr motor. She didn't so much meow as chirp, and would have long erp-brrt conversations with me at times.

Her passing was painless and involved purring and belly-rubs.

In her memory, please post the cutest photo of your pet or pets you have.

I'll start. Here is a photo of Mina eating cheese, her second favorite food after raw fish. Here is also a photograph of her attempting to stifle me.