This was a year of deep darkness and bright light; forsaken and welcoming journeys; rupture and attachment; pain and joy; reconnection and connection.

But here I am facing the uncertain future - wiser from that journey.  More connected and self aware of my power.

So it's oddly appropriate that my birthday falls on Bandcamp Friday and right after Trans day of Visibility and as my OpenCollective/Patreon contributions kick in.   Now, more than ever, we need to care for each other and support art and music that defines our collective humanity.  Support these artists/causes and I will happily spread the Birthday love to them!

No official party, but if you'd like to see me and Gus I'll be at the Internet Archive friday lunch, and I'll be at Lake Merrit on Saturday skating and doing some lighting/visualization for the always fun trance DJ extravaganze ASOT 510.  Oh and also prepping costumes and the CyberVan for Neotropolis Fest!

And with that I leave you with this lyric:

Don't act like there is no tomorrow
You should use the pain and sorrow
To fill you up with power
Life's both sweet and sour!

Time for strawberry cake!

• Archiving social media
• Deleting old accounts.  (Bye-bye AWS Glacier 85 cent/month backup images from 2012.)
• Lots of thinking...

Not sure how I feel.  Google is now my longest running gig, overtaking public school.  I have a ton of gratitude for the kindness and support that the people in this company offer and the opportunities it has provided.  Oh and...

• This job finally got me out of financial precarity.  With total comp it was 6x what I was earning a few years earlier.  I had so undervalued myself.  And this was in the midst of the great recession.
• It took a while, but I eventually found my groove, and have had so many chances to reinvent myself.
• When calamity struck 6 years ago people where there for me and I had the time to attend to family.  And now as I'm going through another rough patch I've found compassion and understanding.

Much, much gratitude.

That said as the company has changed I've less-and-less identified myself as a Googler.  I often feel reluctant admitting it in the alternative public spaces I inhabit.

I guess I recognize that the sociotechnical systems we build can reinforce the inequity of our society and extract or destroy the rich "variety" of the world..  I often yearn for a future where we can focus on "stuff that doesn't scale":  the human, the physical and local connections.

With that I believe that my contribution, overall, is a net positive to the good in the world.   It's hard to quantify and I grapple with it.

So yes, this job does indeed go to 11!  Here's to the embracing the present moment and the scary unknown future!!

https://youtu.be/F7IZZXQ89Oc

Finally submitted a CL that's been pending for 9 years (some simple Guice memory/performance tweaks)

Cleaned up all my citc clients. Down to 8 from over 100.

#googplus

Oh look there's a free TalkSpace benefit. I would've been on that earlier if I'd known.

#googplus

Did you know you can get into the https://museumca.org/ for free with your Google Badge?

Join me and 1 other Googler today (August 22nd 2021) and we'll tour https://museumca.org/exhibit/mothership-voyage-afrofuturism

text me at 415 425 1601 if you want to join in on this group!

#googplus

It's like a kubes/mainframe buddy movie. :-D Enjoy this talk from some fun folks from Minnesota.

https://youtu.be/7DXF7YDBf-g

#googplus

Saw this talk live. Well done! TLDR badly seeded pseudo-random number generators can be used to find the next random number in sequence.

https://labs.bishopfox.com/tech-blog/youre-doing-iot-rng
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zuqw0-jZh9Y

#googplus

Some perspective for this Perf season...

https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-values

My neighbor works for these guys.

#googplus

Anyone want to go to Oakland Museum a week from Sunday? With me and some other interesting folks? Pop into this twitter thread..

https://twitter.com/lindner/status/1426379023802724354

#googplus

Your period reminder of what we thought technology was going to give us...

https://archive.org/details/cyberpunk_201410

#googplus

Here's the video of the winners of the Twitter bug bounty/CTF for algorithmic fairness. It's a judo trick to get AI failures recognized in the same way as insecure code.

https://youtu.be/KLwdzLiJywI

Background
https://hackerone.com/twitter-algorithmic-bias?type=team
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/10/22617972/twitter-photo-cropping-algorithm-ai-bias-bug-bounty-resu...
https://github.com/twitter-research/image-crop-analysis

#googplus

I'm going. Just to be there for this:

https://aivillage.org/events/2020/8/4/ai-village-def-con-28-safe-mode-w6wsl

A bunch of it will be online too. But I evaluated the covid risks vs rewards and decided to go.

#googplus

https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/Zero-days-since-it-was-DNS-by-kclemson/44098011.EJUG5

#googplus

I did a video version of the blog post I did for them a while back about Love, Loss and Archives.

http://anniversary.archive.org/

Consider donating and signing up for the 25th anniversary webcast, they do so much with such a small budget. Funny thing is that Google started out as a Library project. In some ways I wish we could go back to that simpler time.

#googplus

With Covid (hopefully continuing) to decline there are some once in a lifetime opportunities to attend events at smaller scale.

I was just at the 30% capacity Disneyland last weekend. 16 rides in one day and just.. relaxed despite 40k steps walked.

I bought DEF-CON tickets.

I might go to the renegade Burning Man this year.

Socially distanced outdoor events mean I can bring my dog and dance.

Looking into doing a set of federated Decentralized Web camps.

Regional events instead of global ones.

Rethinking how things work...

#googplus

Going to take some time to parse this one...

http://ceptr.org/whitepapers/grammatics

#googplus