#smalltownnews

Now if only I could go back in time and reshoot my high school photos...

_“We’ve had high school students take their senior pictures with it and we even had someone take wedding photographs in front of it,” Horn said. “A lot of people contact me through its Facebook page (The Tardis) for scheduled photo shoots. I built it to make people happy, so we don’t charge for photographs with it.”_

http://www.bloomingprairieonline.com/news/sci-fi-comes-kenyon

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I read that we were going to participate in Net Neutrality protests today. I loaded up google.com to see if we were doing a home page promo. I didn't see the logo load and thought that this was a very sublime way of calling attention to content blocking. So I waited for a spinner and call to action...

haha; no. Instead it was this super heavy doodle that took forever to load over GBUS wifi.

Ah well. Looks like we're sending an "email" to our "listserve" (itsthe90s.gif) of committed diehards, and posting a video playlist hidden somewhere on youtube (couldn't find it, can you?)

https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/moma-news/july-2017/ourparticipationinthenetneutralitydayofact...

https://www.battleforthenet.com/

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Some 10 dimensional trolling by LinkedIn...

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Paul here from the Superfund Squad, where we're getting rid of the infrastructure you love to hate and paying off unfunded mandates with technical debt. And digging up the History of Google's Social Efforts in the attached collection.

I've been cranking at this social thing for almost 7 years at Google on Google+ and a long time before that at places Six Apart (home of Typepad and Livejournal), hi5 and LinkedIn. I did a lot of work on OpenSocial and other standards back then which is a big reason I'm here today.

Oh and this enterprise thing isn't my first rodeo. Way back at Critical Path we provided hosted email, calendar and tasks for Italian Telecoms, Major Universities *and* the Kiss Army. And at Red Hat we sold shrink wrap and services to all sales channels.

But I'm most proud of the work I did at the UN on telecom standards, relief efforts and publishing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 500 languages. (And the site is still standing to this day!)

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/SearchByLang.aspx

And finally before that was the Internet Gopher.. Me, with Heavy Metal hair:

https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol

Beyond all this tech I enjoy life in Oakland with my fabulous wife Julie and our Great Pyrenees Gus. You'll find us exploring the parks of the East Bay, checking out obscure music or cruising the rapidly gentrifying Valencia street in the Mission. I'm also heavily interested in building software and systems that last the long term. I'm a member of the Long Now (https://longnow.org) and I have a 20% project called Digital Vellum (http://go/digitalvellum)

Happy to be here with y'all and looking forward to our next adventures!

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A reminder that +1s *for web sites* are going away. You *can* export them to other places. I chose to move mine to Pinboard. One nice thing Pinboard does is archive the pages you bookmark, so now the content I +1'd is more stable long term.

In the process I found and fixed a bug where the timestamps on the plusones takeout export were wrong. It was broken for about 5 years and no one noticed :(

If you want a proper export file you can use https://ac-autopush-takeout.corp.google.com/settings/takeout for now. Prod push should be sometime this week...

https://pinboard.in/u:lindner/t:plusones/

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Never send a bill collector to do a recruiters job...

_Paul,_

_I wanted to follow up on two emails I sent over the past couple months, this will be my final attempt to connect in the best interest of our time. I came across your background and wanted to see if you'd be open to confidentially explore opportunities at Uber._

_Best,_
_Daniel_
_Director, Payments_

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So I hear that body slam GIFs are all the rage now. Of course back in 2011...

Many more cringe-worthy things here:

https://zahidlilani.com/2011/07/19/hilarious-google-plus-gif-animations/

https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/6438194510653877985/6438194508238025506?...

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SVL-MP5 has a stack of hardware in the lobby. Scary how many of these I've racked...

PowerEdge 2850, 2950
Sun Ultra 1, T1000,
Sun Storage Array
HP DL360, Procurve
Dell Powerconnect

Yikes!

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Something to keep in mind: fingerprints can be ephemeral too..

Latest _Healthy Stuff_ update: Julie only got 6 months off Pfizer's 0k/month wonder drug before progression. So we'll see if Xeloda will work next. Crazy side effects though.

Luckily there's a half dozen other treatments available and more coming.

As always props to my supportive coworkers and to our flexibility policies that make it possible to balance caregiver obligations with work obligations. And if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation I'm here for you too.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/05/28/cancer.fingerprints/index.html

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I have a mechanism that has enough crypto-theater to make me happier than just drawing numbers out of a hat and having someone pinky-swear that the process is legit
.

It uses a Random Beacon to seed a random number generator, which then chooses 5 winners from the 73 entrants. It's a silly perl script (might rewrite it in go if I
have time...)

https://plindner.users.x20web.corp.google.com/www/survey-drawing/README

------------------------------------------------

5 winners will be chosen on June 15th at noon Pacific Standard Time.

Read on to find out how winners will be chosen.

- Each of the 73 entrants is given a 'lot number', which is emailed to them.
- The file lot_to_username.txt maps the number to a hashed version of your username.
- You can verify that your lot is listed correctly. For example:

# Verify if your lot number is 12
sudo apt-get install apache2-tools
htpasswd -v -b /google/data/rw/users/pl/plindner/www/survey-drawing 12 lindner

- The http://winners.pl script chooses 5 random winners with a random seed.
- The random seed will be generated by the NIST random beacon on June 15th Noon Pacific Standard time. Results will be visible here:

https://beacon.nist.gov/rest/record/1497553200

- The seed value will be written to seed.xml at that point and winners will be
chosen!

TECHNICAL DETAILS FOLLOW

- The original names are stored one username-per-line in names.txt
- The lot_to_username.txt file containing bcrypt hashed usernames was generated using this command:

cat -n /tmp/names.txt | xargs -n 2 htpasswd -b -B -C 20 ~/contest.file

- Note that you could brute-force the usernames with moderate compute capacity. Please be polite and don't do that.

TAMPER VERIFICATION

You can verify that the usernames, script, and contest draw date have not been modified by verifying the PGP signature of the date and sums.

You can verify this message by using keybase https://keybase.io/lindner or looking up my PGP key lindner@inuus.com

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

sha256sum lot_to_username.txt http://winners.pl

6a86aadf90310cb83b2cadcf820d3b3a0ea0bfbd175822ebcfb44a55a1fc1e0f lot_to_username.txt
bf45ed9e504d51934261610bf69153c0f0646dfbe0b58c1fe044803a90dd3ff3 http://winners.pl

Contest Seed: https://beacon.nist.gov/rest/record/1497553200
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

wkYEAREIABAFAllBLkYJEPhZKFJz9YBUAADv9gCgkHEiWKjs7RlfM3G5U4NsYNmK
rqUAoBpiZrhGAy/SMPUqzX+Wl/6AuQdD
=XjMK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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"Heirloom" [1] - you keep using that word, I don't think you know what that means.

The sad thing is these folks are pivoting to an Alexa Task product. It tries to create a spoken story based on a set of photographs. Least compelling product ever...

At some point we're going to need to find a way to allow people to use new products without losing data.

[1] http://www.heirloom.net

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I spend the weekends pruning tabs..

There must be a better way.

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Okay, I have 72 submissions to my photo backup survey. And I promised prizes, so I need to give out prizes. But you shouldn't trust me since I might be evil. Of course I'd like to preserve the privacy of individuals, yet allow anyone to verify that I didn't give someone a prize. Help!

Some things I've thought of:
- Create 1-72 buckets.
- Use the NIST random beacon to pick random bits at a specified, agreed upon time in the future. https://beacon.nist.gov/home
- Use reservoir sampling to use those random bits to pick 5 items from the 72 total. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling

Now the question is can we mask the participants in the survey yet have everyone know with accuracy that the above is on the up-and-up.

- I could just publish a signed document with the number->ldap mappings, but that reveals everyone who participated.
- I could send each participant their participant number. However then how would anyone know that I had awarded the prizes?

Might need to read up on secure election protocols to make this happen.

Suggestions welcome!

https://beacon.nist.gov/home

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I didn't find my sound search within Google Play Music, but it appears that my 91 year old future self is still using GPM..

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Good news: Monoliths can be eliminated. Bad news: it took over 10 years...

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Digital Vellum is working on a project to help people store Photos for 100+ years.

That means I'm thinking about how to build a long-term, stable, resilient systems and business. I'd also love to see this applied to Google so it too can be a very very long term entity.

So I'm not an expert in this area but it seems that there are some ways that we can focus the business on long term value. Some are structural, others based on rethinking existing systems. I'm not an economist or an MBA by any stretch, but here goes:

- Sell annuities that pay out in storage/access "dividends" spread out over a long time.
- Create a wholly owned Mutual Society to manage storage and serving. Google can then become a Lloyds of London-stye "Name". [This entity could sell long-term/perpetual bonds that also have storage dividends]
- Create a customer-owned collective to manage long-term assets. Think of it as "Vanguard for Storage".
- We already store Photos for iPhone users, why not have each company back each other up and come up with coordinated storage systems with rights of survivorship.
- For the crytpocurrency angle use something like Streem (http://steem.io) or Storj (http://storj.io) Allow anyone to participate in a long-term storage system. This might be more adaptable.

And also remember to take our Photo Preservation Survey if you haven't already:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfBR7omZ1SDgpgO05W4UD70cITmBk6zqS1xvxyU1t-rtV0Vkg/viewform?...

https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_reeves_how_to_build_a_business_that_lasts_100_years#talk

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We have what, three or more internal Kanban tools? go/kanban, go/plananizer, and now go/scrumboard

None of them really do everything I want.. Trello or Jira+Grasshopper both worked better in the past, and I'm sure they're even better now.

I wish we could merge all three internal projects and then add the UI from this simple opensource sandstorm app WeKan.

https://wekan.github.io/

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Assumes:
- you have a jump host (existing ubiquity works fine)
- beyondcorp is disabled on laptop/jumphost

On jumphost
sudo apt-get install dtach

On laptop
ssh cloudtophost
echo
# copy the value of that environment variable
# create a new shell on your laptop and continue:
mosh --port=60000 jumphost
export SSH_AUTH_SOCK={pasted filename}
dtach -Ez -r winch -c ~/.cloudtop-session ssh cloudtophost
tmx # or screen or whatever you prefer

This setup leaves your mosh session active when putting the laptop to sleep, network changes, etc.

Every morning you will need to use go/auth-refresh to get fresh tokens.

If you have to reboot your laptop you can get back to your previous state by executing:

mosh --port=60000 jumphost
dtach -a ~/.cloudtop-session

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Finally can use GCP instances to replace Ubiquity.

Also so very happy that I put my dotfiles in git so I can get this rig the way I like it quickly...

https://user.git.corp.google.com/plindner/dotfiles/

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The Bay Bridge wishes it was built this tough. I wonder how much this chunk of steel costs in SWEh...

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The new Moffet Place campus is guilty here too... No Daycare to be found.

Daycare seems like such a no-brainer *investment*. Every parent that never comes back after maternity/paternity leave is another one we have to spend money hiring...

https://qz.com/984785/apples-new-5-billion-apple-park-campus-has-a-100000-square-foot-gym-and-no-day...

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*The +1 button for web sites is now the G+ button*

Hey Googlers - get ready to dogfood the new G+ button! It's an evolution of the existing +1 and +Share buttons you see across the web. It's leaner, faster and much less expensive to operate. Instead the world's most costly-click-counter you'll share directly to G+, which is what most users wanted anyway.

You can see the G+ button at various places such as:

- Blogspot blogs like http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/ or https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/
- The Chrome Web store https://chrome.google.com/webstore/
- And sites from a-to-z http://abc7news.com/weather/doppler/ http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/10069107/

Want to give feedback? There's a handy link in the pop-up sharebox to do so.

Big kudos to +106053902024703312631 / +110610523830483756510 / +104802479551695111660 and the cast of characters that have helped us get this far.

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*Whose Global Village?* added to reading list.

I do know one thing -- the Global Village as envisioned decades ago by Marshall McLuhan sure isn't what we have today.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29882956-whose-global-village

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Unsearchable and Daily Inspiration for a TGIF..

The following *delightful* Google Play Playlist is a comprehensive collection of music from Watch Dogs 2:

https://play.google.com/music/playlist/AMaBXyk097zW--4WF7YxbXiHUAwlq-_CkO6SUOEQuhlGiwkzcMYeVnWqK_Kyi...

Digdug doesn't know anything about it.

And yes, that's a base-64 encoded proto you're seeing! [and Let's hope that adding a new message to that proto doesn't rewrite all the permalinks....]

I was able to find the link to this in some disqus comments with a bit of search tweaking, but I couldn't get an actual link surfaced for a playlist in our own product. The original Spotify playlist does show up.

https://www.gamecrate.com/heres-all-music-featured-watch-dogs-2/15001

https://play.google.com/music/playlist/AMaBXyk097zW--4WF7YxbXiHUAwlq-_CkO6SUOEQuhlGiwkzcMYeVnWqK_Kyi...

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Looks like there was an internal presentation that I missed:

https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/eng-program-management/community-and-events/fireside_chat/safe

It gives names to processes that I recognize, so it seems like it might be a useful model..

http://www.scaledagile.com/

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*SocialExperienceLevel.SLICK_AS_VIC* -- some documentation may be out of date...

http://google3/social/common/segmentation/proto/segmentation.proto?rcl=128413029

cc @ebarn

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