Monthly Archives: July 2018

Week 2099

Pals, Politics, , ,

This is the 6th week at my new job.

I’m really enjoying the new toys to work with there – there are so many smart folks and they’ve been doing the right thing  for years. I’ll suggest a clever solution and they will point out they’ve got that in their plan or that they considered it and it doesn’t work for good reasons.  The tools, the documentation, the culture, it’s all really impressive.

I’m working in tighter boundaries – instead of nobody caring about performance I find myself in meetings with high level people where we are talking about differences of 200ms. We’re hiring! Get in touch if you’re interested and I can refer you in.

There’s no dress code and that’s been really nice. It makes it much easier to bike in – so I’ve been doing that way more than usual. I skipped a few days due to rain and I’ve still done 36 miles this week. Since I joined Strava I’ve ridden 100 miles.

I’m sweating less for a 6 mile ride and I’m noticing differences in how fast I can go up bridges and such. I also don’t have as much energy just waiting around in my legs – they get more tired and I’m not giving them much rest at all.

I’m doing weight watchers with Sam and it’s definitely affecting my choices. Now that there’s points I’m eating way healthier. And the sous vide machine has been helping – it’s easy to pop something in when I get home and then finish the cooking after putting kids to sleep.

The boy got sick this week and we had to take him to the urgent care center because his heart rate seemed very high.  He refused to take anything to bring down his fever, I think that’s what caused it. So we go to the urgent care and they say take this medicine to reduce your fever and he refuses to drink it. Ultimately they say, then we have to give a suppository.

That’s no fun. But when they came back in a few hours and said it’s time for more medicine he looks up and says “I’ll do it the easy way. Bring me the cup!”

I’ve had a chance to volunteer on the texting team for the Beto O’Rourke campaign and it was fun and easy. I HIGHLY encourage you to give it a shot because Ted Cruz can be beaten.  If you can’t donate money, these days it is super easy to donate time.

Closer to home I found that since I am partially domiciled in NY-19 I can register to vote there and there’s a good candidate in a toss-up race in House. I’m going up this weekend to learn how we can volunteer to get Antonio Delgado in and John Faso out.

Baby Z is taking her first walks and she points at her belly if you ask her where it is! She also is playing with Max. This morning they both had fruitsicles (to keep Max hydrated) and she kept leaning over to wack him with it! It’s so wonderful to see them loving each other.

Sous Vide Machine Reaction

Pals,

I got an Anova sous vide machine because I’ve been wanting one for ages and now it seems silly not to get it. Some reactions for you.

It is bigger than I expected. We don’t have tons of space, so I was surprised that it is about the size of a big hand blender.

Sous Vide eggs are amazingly perfect but I never eat eggs with a 45 minute plan ahead.

Sous Vide filet mignon at 130 for 1 hour then put on a very hot skillet for 2 minutes each side is very doable and reasonable and that is a perfect damn piece of meat. Already this thing is seeming pretty good.

Also, Aperol Spritz is the drink of the summer.

DreamHost is making my life way more complicated

morelight, Pals, security, , ,

Argh – normally I like everything DreamHost does. They had a history of just making my life easier over time. Their plan was simple: unlimited email and storage for your website, a reasonable price.

But now, for the second time, they are taking away a feature that I use heavily! DreamHost is killing catch-all emails! This is terrible for me.

The short version: I own this domain and I get or send email from from anything@morelightmorelight – so honeybooboo@morelightmorelight gets to me and I could send you a mail from DarkCrushingVoid@morelight… This is fun, but where it is really useful is in dealing with all the damn signups online.

Everyone online wants you to sign in or sign up! The reason why isn’t always that they love you and want you to be a member, it is sometimes that they want to track you and sell your details to other businesses. Imagine that! Sometimes they are nice but they just don’t have great security and someone steals your email address from them. That’s how you get all that spam!

Stop for a minute and give Have I Been Pwned a check for your email address. Yeah.

The emails I use for talking to people I love and care about don’t show up here. For example:
Image showing that my primary email hasn't been in a data breach
But when I am forced to register with a service, I just make up an email address with their name in it and I make up a password just for them. When they get breached by hackers, they hackers can’t use that email or password on other services to get into more stuff. For example:
Image showing that an email and password associated with adobe was stolen from the adobe servers

The password with adobe and the the email address are disposable to me.
I filter out emails from places that have been breached by hackers.

And all is good! I have unique emails per place to log in, I have unique passwords per place to log in, and I have a way to respond to data breaches. But now, DreamHost is turning off this feature for me.

They will delete my email account in October if it isn’t converted over to a different email account. I have to figure out a way to create email accounts for all the logins I’ve had over the years or go change them on every site. It is going to be an incredible pain in the ass. So now, I have to start figuring out how to respond.

My likely plan:

  1. learn how to download all of my emails and get a way to analyze them.
  2. Figure out all the unique email addresses I get email at and mark them as keepers and personal. This will take coding.
  3. Create a main personal account
  4. Upload all my history back to this account and figure out how to sync that back with Thunderbird
  5. Create all the other personal accounts and forwards from all the other personal accounts to the main personal account. This will take coding.
  6. Create business accounts and forwards for each of them. This will take coding.
  7. Create a general new throwaway scheme for login emails
  8. Investigate whether it’s time to move to hosting that gives me more control or adapt to this and concentrate on other things in my life.

That last one is also important. When I was younger I did a lot of flexing in tech to do things myself so I could be super independent. This taught me TONS of things and is great! However, I can’t do everything, so I now make compromises so I can spend time on what matters most.

That’s the part that irks me. I am fine with adapting to the new business reality at DreamHost – but they don’t have a plan for me. I’m going to have to build my own tools and figure out my own way. I can do this, but I don’t want to! I’d rather spend this time building a website or helping people or being with my family.