Rants

I don't trust backups, but I do verify them.

If you don't trust your backups, don't hamper them further.
Don't make a local "backup" in the form of a tgz file that
is the size of the data you are backing up.
You now have 2 problems.
I will leave it to you to sort it out.

Yeah, right. Social media "shares".

So, we do "share" things about our lives via social media.
What, if anything, do we "learn" about each other.
Meatspace is good. Visit, do supper, go out socially...
Don't just do this online crap.
Hell, watch a slideshow (Powerpoint for < 20 folks) at someone else's house.
It is not hard, (but they make it hard)... Don't listen to them, listen to you!
Hell, even set up a party centered around interests (can even diverge!)....
Learn something from each other. It might suck, or it might be great.
Kinda like old game shows. Door number 3 Monty Hall!
On the other hand, you might enjoy yourself (and others) greatly.
GTFO (there).

Ok, really, are we "salaried"? That is unless you believe in fairies and the $455 weekly wage.

So, I must have a different definition of salaried than most job posts these days.
Choice bits from a post I found (not the freedom vs asks from the employer)...

management skills.
Your position will involve working directly with (i.e. not managing!)
you’ll be part of an amazing team of very talented people... (i.e. not in charge of them)...
Assisting clients...
EDUCATION: BS or Masters degree in Computer Science, IT Systems, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering,
or related field plus a minimum of 4 years of related experience (Level II) or 8 years (Level III).
Masters degree in the above fields may substitute for 3 years of experience.

On the flip side, they will consider how much you are worth and...

Telecommuting not permitted. Daily start schedules can be flexible.

Screw all you who follow the the abandonment of the Fair Labor Act - and agree with:

Currently, salaried employees who are paid more than $455 a week can be deemed “managers” even
if they have little in the way of supervisory duties. They therefore become ineligible
to be paid at higher overtime rates if they work more than 40 hours per week.

This includes the NASA contractor where I found the key bits of this post!
Shame on you for not at least:

Posting the job yourselves.

If posting externally, reviewing it!

Makes me sick.

Good job?

See if you can tick any boxes:

1.  Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2.  Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3.  At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4.  In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5.  Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6.  Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
7.  At work, do my opinions seem to count?
8.  Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
9.  Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

Scientific method in everyday life.

Why not bounce ideas of each other (in a non-threatening way) - leave that up to you to decide what that is.
Come back later, and add up / subtract POV that affirms / dis-affirms both views.
and then re-assess your POV.
But, most imoprtantly: Make sure to include a Libertarian in your discussion as a control group

Caution! Fragile! Code may break other code!

So found this gem in a recent Windows update:

After installing this update, the Event Viewer may not show some event descriptions for network interface cards (NIC).

If you break something as basic as logging events with an update...
I am not sure if I trust other regression testing being done.

Microsoft (translated) outage message:

Warning Multi-Factor Authentication - Investigating

SUMMARY OF IMPACT: Starting at 14:25 UTC on 27 Nov 2018, customers using Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
may experience intermittent issues signing into Azure resources, such as Azure Active Directory, when MFA
is required by policy. Impacted customers may encounter timeout errors.

CURRENT STATUS: Engineers continue to restart backend services responsible for processing Multi-Factor Authentication.
Initial investigation indicates that some MFA authentication requests are completing successfully and some customers may
be seeing signs of recover. In other cases, service restarts appear to provide only temporary relief, so engineers
continue to explore alternate remediation options.

NEXT UPDATE: The next update will be provided by 19:30 UTC.
Status history

Translation

We have an outage.  We tried rebooting it, but it may or may not work for you.

Oracle - too funny

"You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower,
the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end.
You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you.
Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."

- Bryan Cantrill - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos (Usenix 2011)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=34m7s

This is also an awesome talk for many other reasons. Filesystem history, jokes, big data.
Also, why complex things should be a series of simple things, VM's, abstractions, other wonderful ideas.
Warning, you have to imagine the slides in your head (as the camera does not catch most of them)!
AWK puppet time theater...
Pipes, small programs, and Don Knuth...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=

Hey Apple!

Why do you have a T2 chip on your shoulder?

Workarounds in PHP/Apache development.

You can work around bugs in PHP with this simple rule:

Increase memory limits and or timeouts

It ceases to be a code problem, and now becomes a server problem.