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Two weeks ago I stopped using TinyTinyRSS as my RSS feed reader. I love having self-hosted apps and the privacy and control they provide, but honestly I wasn’t real worried about someone snooping my RSS feeds or contaminating my OPML. I’ve been making a move back to some cloud-based apps recently to avoid the maintenance and backup space that my self-hosted apps require. I decided to try two popular feed readers and see how they compared. I left myself a reminder in Google Keep (see? NOT everything is self-hosted) to give it two weeks to decide which feed reader I was going to stick with. I disabled my TTRSS instance and opened two new tabs with Feedly and Inoreader ...

I have named my office “Fort Impostor” and this is my…manifesto. “The Fraud Police are the imaginary, terrifying force of ‘real’ grown-ups who you believe – at some subconscious level – are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night, saying: We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away, and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.” Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help ...

I attended my first Ohio Linuxfest this year (2017) and had a great time. I found the lightning talks especially inspirational. One of the talks I especially like were the lightning talks. Lightning talks are a series of short (5 minute), impromptu talks that anyone can do. They hand you a microphone, and you say what you want to say. There were a lot of Linux advocacy speeches (as you’d expect) and “How Linux has affected me” type talks. One of the talks that hit home with me was a gentleman who talked about how when he attended his first Linuxfest, Linux was not his career. Fast-forward a few years, and he is back to say that he now has a Linux job that he secured by being active in the community and meeting people and learning on the job. ...

Attended talks: Command Line Tools, Clif Flynt Keynote: The Battle Over Our Technology, Karen Sandler (robo-lawyer) Lumina Rising: Challenging Desktop Orthodoxy, Ken Moore The ‘Onwards’ & ‘Upwards’ of Careers in Open Source – A Panel Discussion, Warner Moore, Cassandra Faris, Jason Green, Chad White Secure Cloud: Linode With Full Disk Encryption, Roberto C. Sánchez So What Is It Like to Work at Red Hat Anyways?, Steve Ovens Working in the Open, Jason Plum, GitLab Lightning Talks Keynote: A Brief History of an Open Source Company, Tarus Balog Missed Talks: Building Sustainable FOSS Communities, Mike Dolan LinkedIn Keynote: Who Cares if the Code is Free? User Experience & Open Source, Máirín Duffy A Short Tutorial on a Revision Control System for Sysadmins, Robert Threet What’s new in FreeNAS 11 Top 10 Easy Cybersecurity Wins for Linux Environments, Michael Contino Slide deck Getting Hit by an 18-wheeler: Privacy & Anonymity in the Modern Age, Cody Hofstetter Plaintext Accounting with the Ledger Ecosystem - Colin Dean Links: Think Penguin (booth) CoverMyMeds (booth, recruiting) Karen Sandler’s Keynote at GUADEC 8/2017 Five Minute RCS Tutorial Reference Revision Control System for Sysadmins above KDE at Ohio Linuxfest 2017(booth)

I made it to Cleveland Givecamp this year after many years of wanting to go but never having the guts. I added this to my LinkedIn page: Technical Volunteer, Cleveland GiveCamp Jul 2017 I volunteered at Cleveland GiveCamp and assisted “The Valentine Project” in refreshing their web presence. I served as site admin by managing hosting, DNS, loading the initial CMS and database and configuring email. I handled site security by configuring SSL and hardening user accounts. I also assisted with scrum-style checklists and documentation to deliver a finished product in just over 24 working hours from July 21-23, 2017. ...

There are rules, people!

I found out after the fact that my bully from grade school died. He was not well liked by most people, if I remember correctly, but I was surprised at the outpouring of emotion online when his death was announced. A lot of years have passed in the interim and in hindsight, I suspect there were other factors at play. Perhaps he’d changed. Perhaps he didn’t grow up to be the insolent prick I knew him as. But that doesn’t change my feelings. His treatment of me (and others) affected my self-esteem for years. ...

“Describe Yourself In 3 Fictional Characters” was an online forum game in which participants select fictional characters from popular media that they believe demonstrate various aspects of their personality. Here’s mine.

Gotta Catch ‘Em All!

*Now, devotees may argue that one sport or game is inherently better than another. For me, sport is actually a chance for us to have other human beings push us to excel.*Robin Williams as John Keating, Dead Poets Society (1989) If this blog somehow survives me and is read sometime in the future, I would be remiss if I didn’t include an entry today. Last night I watched the Cleveland Cavaliers become the first major sports team in Cleveland to win a championship in my lifetime. ...