Bulleted π List π Of π Life π Events π In π No π Particular π Order - Wedding was great! Very emotional, pastor was sure keen to let everyone know that when a man and a woman are joined, the holy matrimony that only a man and a woman joining as women and men can do to seal the sacred bond between a woman and a man yada yada ... but the reception was great and we were all very impressed by the groom doing a front flip on the way to the altar. - Covid scare in the middle of the reception! Mostly for me everyone else didnt seem to care much, but literally everyone I had gone to the music fest with and all their coworkers got covid. Did two rapid tests and didnt feel symptoms so I guess it worked out somehow. - Got the XT -> USB adapter! So now after years of having it sit around I can start restoring the old model F keyboard! Supposedly if you ask enthusiasts (i am not one) this is the clicky clackiest keyboard ever made. I can confirm it is very clacky. It also weighs about 250 pounds, has the ctrl, backslash, tilde, and function keys in bizarre places. And the i, 4, +, and backspace keys dont work yet but that'll be fixed soon hopefully - Having a hard time at work, not because the job is that demanding really but because it's finally sunk in just how pointless everything is. Its so hard to bring myself to care when best case scenario our company gets some money and another one doesn't? I don't really like the products we're making. I wouldn't recommend them to a friend. And soooo many jobs are like this. Do I really care if Twitter's ad board is more efficient? Or Johnson and Johnson are able to automate away 40 inspector jobs etc. I literally cant think of the last time someone made non-indie-videogame software and I was like, wow. I'm glad they made this, my life is slightly better now. Seemingly everything is just new and innovative ways to make life worse & more expensive. Finally see why everyone else hates programmers. - Also in a funk 'cuz I feel like my life is stagnating living with my parents but also, where else would i go, and boy is $1.5k/mo rent with roommates really not that much better than $0/mo rent with two roommates that make dinner sometimes - Therapy insurance is annoying. That is all. - Found out about low power radio! https://www.prometheusradio.org/ Supposedly sometime soonish the FCC will give away radio bandwidth to nonprofits running < 100 W transmitters. Thats somewhere around a three mile effective radius. Music licensing is cheap (couple hundred a year) and cost of equipment is sorta cheap (~5k) definitely affordable for someone not paying rent. Less than the amount I've lost in stocks in just the last few months. Really considering trying to start one of those up, not like its been announced yet or anything. Would have to be after moving out of the 'burbs tho cuz three miles around here barely reaches the publix. Would be so fun to have just one station on the air only playing bad stupid songs. Could toss the what music u listening to threads on the air idk theres just so many gimmicks. - Secretly dreaming of leaving it all behind and finding a mixed use retail/residential place to start a boardgame cafe somewhere. Pittsburgh and Ann Arbor of all places don't have a single one!! Philly, which seems like a cooler city has 3 of course :p, might move there regardless of other plans it seems like a nice spot. Would be so cute, open 5-10 W, R, F, S, U, so I wouldn't have to leave the 9-5 until it picks up. Mixed use so it could be a house too without overpaying on land. I'd be the only employee so no fussing about payroll. Already have 100 or so boardgames for the boardgame wall. - @mk, fyi if you have a \* when you edit it will turn into * anyways thats everything, ty
mk and I had a pirate radio dream years ago... never got it off the ground. I hope you do! I'm going to DM you... do this. a friend opened a card shop selling magic, Pokemon and other gaming cards during the pandemic... sounded like a crazy idea... he just quit his other jobs and is doing it full time. Going gangbusters. I saw your messages in chat but didn't take the time to respond. Keep researching the where, but seriously - do this.Really considering trying to start one of those up
I don't really like the products we're making. I wouldn't recommend them to a friend. And soooo many jobs are like this. Do I really care if Twitter's ad board is more efficient? Or Johnson and Johnson are able to automate away 40 inspector jobs etc.
start a boardgame cafe somewhere
Thank you so much for the encouragement! & really appreciate the DM <3
Friends who don't go to church had a church wedding back in like '98. The pastor used the opportunity to lecture everyone there for the wedding about the evils of the Clinton administration for their intervention in Kosovo. I've heard a half-dozen stories like yours, where the parents insist on a church wedding even though nobody goes to that church and all of a sudden they're getting a lecture on the evils of masks or some shit. I get the sense that weddings are seen as an open-mic slam night by the clergy. As far as entrepreneurialism, non-profit or no, allow me to make a recommendation. It forces you to do the work, and doing the work is what gets you money, and what keeps you from doing dumb shit. I probably spent two months on ours (including integrating a bunch of data veen helped me with) and the end result was an 80pp document that got us $400k in funding... and that's only because we said we didn't need a million five.
Yeah it was definitely odd, I see now why people go for Elvis impersonators :p & thanks! I will check that out. For sure worried about the business plan part of it. Never did any classes like that in college and really don't have a ton of experience so trying to find something with enough leeway to fail for a bit at first or maybe just give up altogether without going bankrupt. & man, estimating demand and all that is spooky. Got some napkin math from just puttering around at stores near me but that's not very scientific. And mortgages ...
You'd be surprised at how easily impressed banks (and nontechnical people in general) are at any effective use of a few napkins of math. Here's a secret formula for ya: pick 3 simple indicators that you can research that are indicative of your potential audience. E.g. "nearby gameboard/nerd stores", "residents age 18-35", "number of basements per sqmi". Layer them and see where they peak. _Et voila._
Oooh, free and open source! And no I had not, did like a tiny bit of ArcGIS in one lab in one class in college and that's been it :p Ty for the recommendation, I'll definitely check it out :)
Absolutely. QGIS is incredibly powerful, so much so that ESRI re-wraps QGIS/Opensource GIS (Postgres) and calls it their own - in a more palatable and scalable manner in some cases. Opensource GIS can do some absolutely mind-blowing custom work. Talking specifically any combination of QGIS x PostgreSQL x pgAdmin x BlenderGIS. Example 1: Example 2: https://medium.com/@tjukanov/geogiffery-in-a-nutshell-introduction-to-qgis-time-manager-31bb79f2af19 For the record, you CAN get a fully kitted out ArcGIS license to use Pro/AGOL for ~$100/yr as a personal-use only software. No making a profit using their tech at all (that, they charge you many multiples of $10k for). So⦠just come to the dark side.
you had me at opensource ;) already having fun with QGIS+OpenStreetMap/OpenRouteService & wow those visualizations are cool, had no idea BlenderGIS was a thing either! Is there a better place to find datasets than https://hub.arcgis.com/search ?
It really depends on what you're looking for. Sometimes it just comes down to asking google "[subject of interest] gis data," then finding out where the best data store is located online. For anything Florida related, go to (if there's a specific state/county you have in mind, sometimes google searching "[the state/county] gis data"): https://www.fgdl.org/metadataexplorer/explorer.jsp For anything relating to the U.S. boundaries, go to: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/tiger-data-products-guide.html For Census/demographic data, you're in luck the 2020 decennial data is out (maybe helpful if you have a question about best area to service for a gameboard shop): https://data.census.gov/cedsci/ To be fair, there are many datasets also hosted on arcgis hubs, like FAA data: https://adds-faa.opendata.arcgis.com/ There are also non-arcgis options for other datasets: https://flightaware.com/ This all said, feel free to DM me about specific questions or what you are trying to do. I'd be more than happy to help.
FUN FACT: if you start talking to commercial brokers, they'll whip out all the demand data you could possibly want. It all exists as the datasets veen works with for a living, and realtors can pay like $200/mo to be able to run whatever reports they want. Barring that, you can do your own "winging it" version, which is what we started with: I looked at what characteristics a "home birth/birth center birth" consumer was likely to have, and then what other industries sought out that consumer. I started with "yoga studios" but had too large a dataset (and yoga instructors, I prejudicially assumed, didn't do that much market research). I then went with "natural food stores" and discovered that I could very easily correlate successful birth practices with proximity to natural food stores. At that point all I had to do was go "how many birth centers are there around this Whole Foods" to know whether or not the market was saturated or not. As a null hypothesis I pondered what demographic was diametrically opposed to my young, upwardly-mobile hippies and decided on "audiologists and hearing aid centers" for a category and "Five Guys Burgers and Fries" for my large corporation that does market research. My null hypothesis was null as fuck. No correlation whatsoever. Veen then did some fancy-pants python-scripting isochrone-mapping demographic-parsing census data voodoo that said pretty much what I already knew, but with much greater detail. Six years later and our deliberately-conservative estimates have been blown out of the fucking water. The research was sound, the data was good, and we won.
Oh that's really clever - always did wonder why you started a business so far from Seattle
Let me know if you ever want to talk about this. I helped two low power FM stations get "legit" or "get off the ground" in the PNW.- Found out about low power radio! https://www.prometheusradio.org/ Supposedly sometime soonish the FCC will give away radio bandwidth to nonprofits running < 100 W transmitters. Thats somewhere around a three mile effective radius. Music licensing is cheap (couple hundred a year) and cost of equipment is sorta cheap (~5k) definitely affordable for someone not paying rent. Less than the amount I've lost in stocks in just the last few months.
Definitely do! Only found out about it last week but it seems really achievable and fun. Already daydreaming about finally having a reason to go back to the makerspaces & putting on stuff for local bands and aaa... would be so cool. Was this around 2013 when the last LPFM bandwidth dropped, or is there a way to get space in the interim?
Also have experience with creating a little local record label and booking shows, happy to talk about that too. LPFM stuff was in the 2016 to 2018 timeframe but was based off the 2013 bandwidth, under the FCC leadership of the great Ajit Pai (this comment sponsored by Frontier Communications).
That's so hype, did you have your own event space? DM'd <3 & luv u Ajit, what a guy
(In response to a chat I saw you post) Psssssssssssssssssssst. Orlando has more than a couple. ;) There are 3 I can remember out near U Can't Finish. Also, we gotta chat about low rent in our state - I've had a small apt for $800/mo with no roommates in an urban area for coming on 2 years with no rent increase (without paying utilities, internet or trash mind you). Location, location, location... but that may not apply as much if you don't plan on living anywhere Where Shopping is a Pleasure.Secretly dreaming of leaving it all behind and finding a mixed use retail/residential place to start a boardgame cafe somewhere.
Yeah! Been trying to go to the cloak and blaster for a while, don't know about the other ones π And that's astoundingly good, esp. for Orlando which is kinda a real city
i haven't been on Hubski in over 3 years! I love that it's still active here. Since last time I've visited, I've transitioned genders and finished about 99% of a master's degree in electrical/computer engineering--still one week left before I graduate, but it looks like I'll probably have a 4.0 for the program. I can code in like five different languages now. Right now I'm knee-deep in the last data science project for a machine learning class, which involves predicting stock prices. Not totally my thing, but the problem-solving aspect is cool. My therapist let me know this week that they could give me an ADHD-I diagnosis. It gives me hope that I can look into medication and start getting my life together, and stop relying on semi-functional coping strategies and Indian modafinil to stay on top of my deadlines and obligations. I'm scared to death to try to get out there and find work this summer, but I think things will work out. I also finally got glasses after four years of noticing my vision gradually deteriorate, and they're super cute! It feels good to see things in focus.
Glad you're back hope you stay around a while! I myself come and go in waves as do many of us, so no worries. Congrats on being able to be your truest and most authentic self and on finishing up grad school. I've got one more year left in my MPH so I feel the grad school pain and am very excited on finishing it up.
Thanks! I think I will stick around, Iβve felt drawn more to long-form media and substantive discussions recently. I always liked the vibe here and am not totally sure why I faded out in the first place, but Iβm sure it had to do with a hunger for dopamine-driven interactions starving out more depth-oriented ones. Good luck with the last year of your MPH! I do think that in many ways this pandemic was a great time to go for a grad degree. We didnβt miss out on a lot being busy the past couple years haha
Hubski broke the 100 comment barrier twice over the past few weeks! Haven't noticed that in a while. recent comment activity 1 week ago: 101 2 weeks ago: 84 3 weeks ago: 76 4 weeks ago: 102 5 weeks ago: 71 6 weeks ago: 64 7 weeks ago: 53 8 weeks ago: 92
At a cool conference today. Love that I'm now finally at the point where conferences interesting not because of the talks and booths but because of meeting the right niche of people. Work is still brutal (by my standards). Had a meeting yesterday that, had it reached a different conclusion, could be the end of my team altogether. The idea for the short/medium term now is to seriously reorganise, in the sense that any work that can be easily offloaded to others will be offloaded to others so that I can breathe and grow again. Our mortgage is aaaalllllmost done. It got approved, but we had to fix a few mistakes in the final offer and thus need to re-sign it. Funny how it's a lot of effort to get through their system, but once you're through it's apparently no issue to change a tonne here or there. Effectively, that last hurdle is done and we will have a house in two months. (_In this economy? Yes. Send help. eeeeeee_)
Woke up this morning with a cough, thick head, and lethargy. I haven't been anywhere or done anything in a freakin' WEEK, but ... oh no! ... my body decides to catch something, and now I'm feelin' poopy. I'll go upstairs and take a COVID test as soon as I care enough to get out of my chair. Work is super slow right now. My work tends to be "seasonal" around how public agencies budget and spend the public's tax dollars. And I should be super busy into June ... but have literally NO work on my plate. So I'm making up some fun(ish) projects to do around my job, like graphics, and market research. I like doing that kind of stuff. - Aging is kinda fucked up in America, the land of zero discernible "health care" and lots of health insurance. Working with dementia (Alzheimers) and maneuvering various end-of-life issues and discussions is depressing because of the way our culture is all-in on "continue life at any cost", rather than people having choices about how they want to spend their final days. Humans are oddly inhumane towards humans, yet compassionate and humane towards animals in truly beautiful ways. That's fucked up. - The wife and I discussed the very real possibility that I might be able to retire very soon. "What would you do with your time, if you didn't have to go to work?" is almost as fun a game to play as "what if I won the lottery?" I'd definitely spend a couple days a week volunteering at my friend's blacksmith shop. I'd get a personal trainer and meet with them three days a week for workouts focused on long-term health. I'd probably re-open my marketing/writing consultancy and only take on clients I WANT to work with, regardless of their ability to pay. And I'd probably spend a month solid on Fallout:76, then put the Xbox away forever and move on. I'd read. I have a stack of books ready to dump themselves into my head and heart. It's fun to think about, at least. Gives me something to do while work is slow...
I retired at 44 but didn't realize it until 46. I recommend it wholeheartedly. Granted, I was used to it from ten years of seasonal work where "job" is this thing you do when there's work, and it pays enough that the other 2/3rds of the year you don't have to bother. Which sounds kind of like what you're dealing with, with the notable difference that nobody is expecting me to pretend to justify my salary. There's a flu going 'round. It's a dick. It's still in my lungs, although I never stopped walking. I definitely stopped running. Which is reflected in Strava. Which you were supposed to be my workout buddy on. So before you contemplate a personal trainer, maybe contemplate just getting out and taking in some fresh air. It's lovely out there lately. 
Oh man... Strava... forgot I had that installed! I still go out for two dog walks a day, minimum, and my knee is MUCHO MUCHO better-o, so i am going farther (somewhat) faster, when the dog isn't stopping every 9 feet to sniff something else, or try to eat yet another chicken bone someone discarded next to the road.
Earnings Before Interest and Taxes over Interest Expense. In other words, "all the money you're bringing in" divided by "what you're paying on the bonds you sold to stay afloat." With 80% of the NASDAQ composite earning less of a paycheck than they're paying out in credit card bills. You tell me. Does the market have further to fall? 'cuz if you issue some bonds now? no one will buy them. You gonna do some share repurchases? With what money? Graeber talks about these short-lived Roman gardens where housewives would basically plant a bunch of seeds out-of-season and make like a single plot of ridiculously overgrown seedlings to compete with one another. It wasn't agriculture per se, it was a festival thing where you weren't making anything to eat, you were making things to impress other housewives. Plant the seeds, water and fertilize the shit out of them, drag them down to the 4H club, win some beads, watch your shit wither and die, don't care less 'cuz that stuff was like two weeks old and it was never gonna be worth planting because it's out of season and will totally die. The French economy is in recession and inflation has not peaked 'Member this guy? Now imagine that wasn't about a hurricane, but about the economy, and it wasn't an orange-haired Nazi moron, it was actual experts, and they produced this: gonna bug me all day trying to remember what those damn gardens are called. Maybe it was "growth stocks."
The Baltics even hit close to 20% apparently (Eurostat data). There's a guy I follow on Twitter who monitors the tech job market. His account basically pivoted to a layoff announcement account in the past weeks. The canary are dead and the mines are being emptied.
This was the last time I had the displeasure of even briefly considering an economist's prediction: Most of the models showed significant deaths extending into the summer. But one projection, inexplicably, showed a smoothed curve βcalled in the technical lingo a cubic fit β with deaths disappearing by mid-May. That last curve did not belong on the chart. It was the wrong approach to understanding the data and has no basis in the underlying epidemiological issues. Disingenuous to the point of obviously trying to influence public perception, just to benefit oneself or one's friends. Seems like a pattern, huh? edit: lol it actually wouldn't surprise me if that particular cubic fit showed negative deaths in the more-distant future, if you were to expand the plot axis/timeline. Something tells me that it'd be entirely fruitless to try to chase this down. The idea that these types of people publicly disclose the assumptions that went into their (third order Taylor Series?) expansion fit of the data, or even the weights of the resulting coefficients is hilarious. I've recently been informed multiple times that, well, actually, inflation is notably lower in the U.S. compared to many other (sometimes the word "western" appears here) countries, and that seems to not really be true. Magically ignoring inflation, the U.S. economy reportedly looks pretty good right now, using traditional metrics, right? Almost no one in the establishment seems bothered that it's becoming impossible for millenials to afford a house and build equity, and how that will even further shift wealth accumulation towards 'inherited' instead of 'earned', as the 'Boomers croak. Almost no one in the establishment is calling for a minimum wage increase to account for the current wave of inflation, much less to account for the lower inflation rates of the last like forty fucking years. And shockingly few people in the establishment are bothered by how closely wealth tracks with Whiteness, and that the disparity's getting worse. (edit: it might not be getting worse, maybe a bit better, but is still atrocious) Meanwhile, SPLC is like... 'uh-oh, guys!'. Whether it's the social fabric becoming dangerously frayed, a pandemic, or global warming, the business class and their economists need you at your desks, forklifts, and steering wheels up until the moment of total system collapse. I love that Peter Thiel has already bought a citizenship in New Zealand. Truly the perfect example. I bet he can trash their country much faster, after warming up here in the USA.For the same book, Kevin Hassett, a senior adviser to Trump and the chair of the CEA until last year, said: "β¦our job is to not be political but to provide objective analysis." But that sentiment seemed to disappear last week when the CEA posted a chart on Twitter which showed the number of COVID-19 deaths in the US, declining now but still well over 1,000 per day, and model projections of future fatalities.