Craig Maloney snapl@identi.ca

Disqus sux! Don't go back to that xD

Other than that, congrats on your progress!

I bought a bag of beet chips at CostCo the other day and now every time I go to the bathroom I think I have cancer.

Congrats to Diogo Cordeiro on getting a GSoC internship this summer to add ActivityPub to GNU Social! And thanks to GNU Social maintainer mmn-o for mentoring!

GNU Social is a social communication software used in federated social networks. In a federated social network user data stays in user's server instead of a centralized one. Given that, standards were created in order to make the communication between different softwares in a social federated context possible. ActivityPub is the newer and covers parts out of OStatus's specification, namely the app/client development. Because of this and other benefits, GNU Social is looking forward to support this new protocol. The project idea aims at developing a plugin (as GNU Social is true to the Unix-philosophy of small programs to do a small job) that will implement the ActivityPub Protocol in GNU Social.

Hello! I haven't logged on here for a while. How are folks?

I took my last call of filing season on Friday evening just before 5:18 PM when we get to sign off.

My tour of duty doesn't include Mondays. I offered to do overtime Monday to help with workload but I'm not needed.

On Tuesday, the principal filing deadline, I am off-duty as a I have a medical appointment in Conneaut.

I finished the filing season by taking calls on essentially "punishment duty". There are 5 days for "perfection" of rejected e-filed tax returns starting after the deadline on April 17th for people to fix things if their last minute e-files are screwed up. I'll be back on a normal gate on the phone system by then.

Cardiac issues were starting to develop slightly. Fluid retention in my hands and feet were causing them to swell up pretty badly. My blood pressure one day after getting home was 130 over 85 after being home for 3 hours since work ended. This will be talked about Tuesday.

Surprisingly there was not an exchange of thermonuclear warheads Friday night. If you don't know what I'm referring to then be glad. You don't want to know.

I'm on the bloody SWITCHBOARD gate on the phone system at work for the rest of the week. What does that entail? Basically this:

"Hello, thank you for calling the Internal Revenue Service, my name is Mr. Kellat, my badge number is [REDACTED], how may I direct your call?"

8 hours per day for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I may not answer questions. I must triage what you want and then transfer you away.

Normally this is the "punishment gate".

Call volume is actually down pretty hard. Receipts of paper documents are down pretty hard too. I'm still in "seasonal" status which means my staying in paid status depends upon there being sufficient workload to justify my being in paid status. We took an entire campus off the air today which is extremely unusual for what should be the absolute peak for phone calls. If we take more campuses off the air tomorrow the possibility of furlough may advance forward earlier than the end of June.

The House Ways and Means Committee will be doing a markup Wednesday on a restructuring bill for work. What could go wrong....

Very true.

A sort of Diogenes syndrome, but with non-physical stuff =)

At the gym. I do this every Friday night. It's an exhausting way to end my work week.

I've had problems with coffee for quite a few years. When I'm drinking it regularly, I increase my intake gradually: an extra cup in the morning. A cup in the afternoon. One after dinner. A full thermos on my desk all day.
As I drink more, I sleep less at night, I feel less, and worst of all, I get snappy and irritable with friends and family.
So I periodically go cold turkey. I'll typically switch to green tea, which has much lower levels of caffeine. I'll generally get a better outlook, sleep better, and feel better.
Except I love coffee. So then I reintroduce coffee slowly as a treat, then every day, then it gradually creeps into chain-drinking, and I'm back where I started.
I've recently hit on a formula that seems to work, wherein I can drink all the coffee I want before noon, and no coffee at all afterwards. I have noticed that my mood stays stable, I sleep well, but I still get to enjoy my cup.
The problem with rules like this is the edge cases. Like, what if I have a cup of coffee in hand as the clock strikes 12? What should I do with it? I've been giving myself the benefit of the doubt and made the deal that coffee that was poured in a cup before noon can be finished.
A couple of days ago, I made myself a French press at 11:35. I filled up my large Thermos cup, and there was still enough in the pot to fill up another porcelain cup. All poured before noon, all fair to drink as long as I wanted.
I didn't finish the Thermos cup until 4:30PM. I was up from midnight to 3:30am that night. Damn.
So, lesson learned. No coffee after noon, period. Anything still in the cup goes down the drain.

Going home from Mozfest. Reënergized. I have a lot to do.

Dear online merchants,

Do not ship via DHL GM. It's worse than ParcelPool. It ships slower than international mail!

I see no reason why an American merchant would ever use such an inferior service over USPS!

If you charge for shipping, I expect at least USPS service times.

Typical service times:
UPS/FedEx: 2 days
USPS: 3-5 days
ParcelPool: 9 days
International mail: 14 days
DHL GM: 28 days

Mastodon is rolling out ActivityPub support this week & a new AP CR coming out. I feel like years of work are finally proving themselves. 😌

Now that I banned myself from roguelikes for 2 months I sure am playing tetris in emacs a lot.