Randomness Posts

If you ask people over a certain age, they can always tell you where they were when they found out about 9/11. I was a sophomore at Auburn, and my first class that day was at like 1pm, so I enjoyed the great collegiate tradition of sleeping in. Usually when I wake up the first thing I do is check my email. It’s still the first thing I do. That morning my inbox was full with messages on the fraternity mailing list, with things like “pray, a lot of people are dying today.” I turned on the TV just minutes before the first tower collapsed. Stayed glued to the TV the rest of the day. News coverage was on every channel, even Discovery Channel. Class was cancelled. I went and filled up my car in case I needed to drive the 250 miles back home to Tennessee. That evening I was in the SGA office in Foy Student Union folding thousands of little yellow ribbons for a very hastily organized memorial service on Samford lawn a few days later. We listened to President Bush’s speech on a small boombox in the office. I feel like I have been living that day over and over again for the last two weeks.

I’ve been working from home occasionally for probably close to ten years now, and full-time for the last few months. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, many more people are now getting to enjoy (I guess?) the privilege of working from their homes during the crisis. If there is one thing that I hope comes out of this whole miserable period it is the understanding that there are a lot of people out there have jobs that really don’t need physical presence in an office building. And if they don’t need to be in an office, maybe they don’t need to live in an expensive city either. This could be the beginning of a whole new boom for small and mid-sized cities with affordable costs of living. Maybe you can afford a house after all! And maybe companies don’t need to lease out an expensive building in an expensive city, fill it to the brim with people in open floor plans or (even worse) hot-desking to do the work they need to do. It’s an even bigger win for disabled and non-neurotypical people who often struggle to work in the modern knowledge workforce despite their skills. For people with autism, ADHD, and other related conditions, modern open offices or cubicles are a difficult work environment whereas the home environment may offer much more safety and control. If this is your first time doing this, it may seem a bit odd, even naughty, to be working without commuting to an office building. With that in mind, I’ve put together a list of things I have observed over the years of working from home to help you get a feel for what this is like.

Welcome to the new, freshly redesigned rebeccapeck.org! It’s amazing how you can become used to a design. It becomes like a warm coat. You love the predictability, you spent a lot of time getting the fonts right, getting the layour right, and everything is just perfect. That was the case with this site, that was pretty much exactly how it was way back when I migrated the site from Wordpress to Jekyll in 2013. To put that into perspective, my daughter was not even a year old yet. Barack Obama was just one year into his second term, the iPhone 5S had just dropped a month earlier, the first 4K TVs were shown off at CES. A long time has passed. And then the years pass. New devices and browsers appear. New technologies become available, and cruft builds up. In this case, a simple task of “I need to add a box to the site so that people will quit trying to use the comments for tech support and go to Github instead” became a full scale burn it down and start again redesign. So, aside from the new design, what else has changed?

I love flying. Always have. Ever since my first flight as a kid, there was just something magical about getting into a giant metal bird and taking to the sky. I say was because it seems like, especially over the last decade or so, we have gone out of our way to make flying as miserable an experience as possible. The “golden age” of air travel is long behind us and flying is now just a completely miserable experience. And it pains me to say that because I used to love flying. I loved airports, watching planes, feeling the potential of all the places you could go. But now, it is just an objectively awful experience.

I’ve been an Apple fan for a long time. My first laptop was a Powerbook 5300cs, purchased secondhand at the Auburn University Surplus Auction. I’ve been using Apple equipment exclusively since 2007. My desktops and laptops are all Apple, I use AppleTVs exclusively for streaming, I carry iPhones and iPads. If it has a shiny Apple logo on it, I’ve probably bought one. So it pains me to write this post, but… The 2018 MacBook Pro sucks. There. I said it.

Or, what happens when you send an email to the wrong place. Note, for the time being, I have redacted the names of the company and doctor involved as I am attempting to follow through with a responsible disclosure process for this security issue. I had something very strange happen to me today. It all began with a random email to an address that I don’t use much anymore, but still have in Mail. It’s an email account I’ve had for over 13 years, so it still gets the occasional stray email. The subject read as follows: Welcome To <redacted> Patient Portal Followed in quick succession by another one: Welcome To <redacted> Patient Portal Wait, what?

I’ve been a Linux user for many, many years. Going all the way back to Red Hat 5.2, which I picked up to install on an ancient Packard Bell 486 in the late 90s. Since then there’s always been at least one Linux machine in my dorm, apartment or house somewhere. At various times I’ve even run it for my desktop OS, although these days I use macOS for that. For much of that time, Linux was the choice of hackers, but was definitely not a choice for everyday users and required a significant amount of technical knowledge to run. That’s not true so much anymore, but growing in that environment I learned a lot about how computers and operating systems work.

Sometime in the mid 90s, I downloaded an astronomy program for my computer. I don’t even remember what it was called. In poking around on it, I discovered that it could plot future total solar eclipses and that one would pass, from the resolution of the map, very close to where I then lived in eastern Tennessee. The date was August 21st, 2017.

It’s been a crazy week. Apparently my last post struck a nerve. :)

Those of my longtime readers will know that I very rarely if ever mention anything on this blog other than my Randomness on tech. But today is a very different day and I feel compelled to write about this. So I’ll ask for a mulligan. And, as always, my views here do not represent anything or anyone other than me.