Emotional Support Dinosaur @dysmorphia@mastodon.technology

My experimental cutup poem "Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant" is live in Issue 14 of Riggwelter.

https://issuu.com/riggwelter/docs/issue_14/20

The poem combines cutups of my poetry with excerpts from "Expert judgment on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant" which you might remember from the "This is not a place of honor" memes last year.

(By volume it has much more of my poetry about wolves and coyotes than nuclear waste, but a little nuclear waste goes a long way)

I'm taking some classes on API documentation on Udemy because I've never done that professionally and it's a sticking point at every interview...and I have to say it doesn't seem that hard? Is it Dunning-Kruger effect and I just absolutely don't know what I don't know? It could be! Or it could be that hiring managers are being excessively cautious.

Anyway, the end goal is to generate some sample API docs to post publicly and hopefully get hired!

I should probably switch my blog to https soon, but I've been putting it off because it's a secret squirrel subdomain and my host only offers https on the primary domain. So it means buying a second account, probably, since I don't want to switch out what the main domain is.

I wrote a blog post about what it's like living with wildfire-polluted air when your main coping mechanism is going for a walk.

Bad Air Days

"I haven't felt this cooped up since Chernobyl"

http://www.rinsemiddlebliss.com/2018/11/13/bad-air-days/

It has very trying to make JavaScript pretend to be statically-typed smell. Or Java-as-a-first-language feel.

Have you ever "faked" an enumeration in JavaScript using a constant object? I just learned about it, and wonder if it's really all that common (or useful)

I’m volunteering at Science Hack Day in San Francisco today. They have a person doing live transcription of the presentations and it’s wonderful. I have good hearing, but I don’t always follow spoken words when I’m in a disctracting environment. I never would have thought to ask for it as an accomodation, yet now that I see it in action, it’s soooo useful.

"Writers are good at this" 😂

I wish it were as easy to name characters in my stories as it is to name variables. This is how you end up with Hiro Protagonist.

Somehow in all these years of using booleans, I hadn't learned that the boolean data type was named after the person who invented it, George Boole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole

I made an apple cake to relax/procrastinate. It’s in the oven so back to JS review.

Today seems like a good time to mention that I made my account on the technology instance because that's what I want to focus on here, along with writing and maybe occasional fun things. There are other places I talk about other serious topics. I'll talk about politics when and if I have an interesting opinion, especially when it overlaps with technology. But I'll leave stream of consciousness comments on current events for other places.

So, how about that dark mode CSS selector?

I’m at the Write the Docs meetup. Lecture about Hugo and Kubernautes today. I can’t really summarize it as I go (livetoot?) because it’s so much to take in. There will be a video later and I’ll share. #writethedocs

P means pending, not poem. Red P means it's gone beyond the average response time. Is that good? Bad? Probably just means the mostly-volunteer staff of the journal is overwhelmed.

Some sample literary journal wait times from my Duotrope submission tracker page. Basically, it's normal to wait six months, only to get a form rejection at the end.

It's weird to me how many jobs for technical writers specify they want someone with experience writing in a content management system. That's so trivially easy to learn, why do you need to screen for it? Unless they mean something weird and secretive by it and not just like, for example, Drupal.

So I found one that has a lot of code samples and might be just what I need
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/05/es6-in-depth-destructuring/