Kithop @kithop@social.kithop.ca

I did *not* realise how hard I hit a wall today. Anxious/stressed, but in the good way of 'I can't wait to get started because I have *Ideas™* and *Opinions™* and I'm surrounded by like-minded people'.

Which turned rapidly into 'holy shit, my body is literally shaking because I've been going for four and a half hours today on a couple of sandwiches and coffee. Time to stop.'

Yup. I gotta force myself to pick this up again tomorrow.

Well, this has gone about as well as I expected. Stuff that really should have been discussed + sorted out *before* the meeting ended up dragging it down to a slow discussion with people struggling against the speaking/moderation system.

While it'd be nice to have more concrete answers on all the stuff we're not getting to (since a LOT of people want to talk open source + infrastructure), if we're not ready, we're not ready.

So next up (when I have the energy because god damn RL health issues are kicking my ass right now), learning OpenStack and Docker?

I'm guessing I could get my other rack server running an OpenStack instance of some form, leave the PostgreSQL DB alone on the existing BSD box, then like... get a Masto instance running under a Linux Docker thing on the OpenStack box, pointing back to the original DB (provided I keep the configs/secret keys/etc. the same)?

Eventually.

Bleh. Didn't realise the net-im/mastodon port is now totally abandoned due to www/node breaking everything and generally being a PITA. Had to portdowngrade that one and manually replace a couple ~> with just > in Masto's Gemfile just to get this to boot up again.

I totally get why, of course, and I'd do the same - Ruby is godawful for any sort of 'Production' use.

I can't bring myself to use something like Pleroma either though, so eh. I'll have to migrate this to a Linux box.

I forgot how long the 'applying patches' phase takes when upgrading a FreeBSD release.

(going to 11.2-RELEASE on here shortly. Soon™? Uh, when this is done...)

Oh look,
The day after I complain about my work using Slack instead of their older, perfectly fine in-house Jabber system (that was tied in to our phone system, no less!), Slack is down.

https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663

Just gonna put this on loop again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz1Jwyxd4tE

"I'm tuned standard. Tuner says I'm right. But it sounds wrong. Are they in Eb? What if I shift what I'n playing down a fret-and now I'm too flat. Is my tuner or guitar broken?"

*one internoot search later*

Quarter...step...down? So half way between E and Eb? What the balls?!

Yeah yeah, I'm like... 20-odd years late on that realisation.

TIL Dimebag liked to tune 1/4 step down.

No wonder I can't play along to Pantera without it sounding like ass. @.@; Whyyy.

I'm hoping the fact that they're increasing the frequency of this new immunosuppressant dosage may help, but I'm starting to see the appeal of just medicating it all away with something like cannabis.

I scoffed originally that Crohn's was on the list of things you could get medical cannabis here for - that was for terminal cancer patients, right? - but I'm seriously considering it now.

I've never done pot in my life, despite being around plenty of people who've offered.

I have to keep telling myself that I've been depressed for years because I've been in physical pain for years and learned to deal with it. That the reasons I could never keep up with anyone physically have their roots in decades of malnourishment and hidden bleeding.

Finally understanding why helps to rationalize it, but it doesn't make it suck any less. I want to be able to go for walks and not want to pass out. I want to not spend the aftermath of meals with crippling cramps.

If anything, I should be worried that I'm easily replaced by anyone in the world with a decent internet connection, even if company policy says everyone has to be somewhere physically in the province for tax/HR/etc. reasons.

At this point I'm so goddamned burnt out that I can't bring myself to care. I should be ecstatic to be doing what I do, but I'm just numb.

We've had the ability to do webcam videoconferences for years, but no one ever does it because it doesn't actually provide any additional value. Even when it's a single click away in a running voice call.

What does that say about the actual need for physical presence? Our servers aren't even in the office - they're even further away in datacentres across the country, so it's not like we're changing drives.

I'm not on the Help Desk, so I don't deal with physical machines.

Working from home to due distance and chronic health issues has been great for me, personally. Better work/home life balance. I don't have to waste a bunch of money, time, and energy trying to commute the ~100km each way.

People say that working from home can make people less productive, because they're 'missing face-to-face time with their colleagues'.

I work in IT. Face-to-face time is almost *always* better served by an e-mail. Phone call in an emergency.

Honestly, we're a Canadian company dealing with personal information.

We. Shouldn't. Be. Using. Slack.

At all.

I don't care if they say it's encrypted.

No AWS either.

But of course, we're so resource-starved that at this point it's the path of least resistance, so I get to sit and grumble to myself about how we're going down the wrong paths.

At least they're going to send us a survey about it? Again? FFS, they even mentioned 'survey fatigue' in the e-mail. No shit, huh?

Always fun when random people at work add me to Slack channels that I have either no interest in or nothing valuable to add.

Like, projects I don't even have anything to do with? I guess it's kind of neat from an 'FYI this is happening' perspective.

Oh hey, they're sending out a survey. Cool. Why do I need to be auto-added to a company-wide channel for people to ask questions about the survey that we haven't even got yet?

Potentially even a codebase where strong encryption can be implemented as a feature, without government-mandated backdoors, leveraging anonymous networks like Tor and VPNs to help bypass and route around censorship.

Not saying that has to be something from day one, but an open source project gives us the freedom to work towards it. Good luck convincing Facebook/Google/etc. to set up something that explicitly bypasses the Great Firewall.

...but who would you really trust more - a faceless corporation where *you* are the product to be monetized, whose algorithms are their 'secret sauce', kept hidden away from prying eyes?

Or a system where the codebase, warts and all, is out on the table for everyone to inspect, where anyone can contribute and offer their insights and experiences on how to make it safer/more robust/better/etc.? Where you can audit and validate that yes, there are no ads, no tracking?

I'd argue that taking profit out of the equation is the first step (co-ops, volunteer/donation models, etc.), and good old-fashioned hard work in terms of attracting and keeping a good moderation team and clear ruleset/code of conduct for them to work from is the next.

FLOSS products give power back to us to avoid invasive advertising, metadata collection, and the chance to re-home ourselves digitally if something goes awry.

You have to trust someone, in the end.

So when money is involved (and in these cases, *lots* of it), 'legality' is extremely fuzzy and tenuous.

The internet, as a system in and of itself, is virtually lawless. Countries can assert their laws all they want, but short of cutting themselves off completely from it, it's difficult if not impossible to control.

I can understand wanting to gravitate towards a big name as some sort of legal oasis in in the wilderness, but is it actually helping?