Twenty Eight Bucks
It took a bit of searching to figure out why I received a check for 8. But if you get one here's why:
This is a wage and hour PAGA action arising from Defendant's failure to pay wages in a timely manner at the end of each pay period. Labor Code § 204( d) requires employees to be paid out by the seventh (ih) day following the closing of the pay period if employees are paid on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Defendant, who paid its employees on a bi-weekly basis, had a consistent policy of paying the wages of its employees on the eighth (8t11) day or later following the close of the respective pay period, and thus, beyond the time periods as allowed pursum1t to Labor Code § 204. This PAGA action is being sought on behalf of Defendant's other aggrieved employees.
In addition to the PAGA action, Plaintiff also asserts individual claims for wrongful termination in violation of public policy. Specifically, Plaintiff engaged in protected activity by removing alcohol from the workplace (due to fear for her personal safety and the safety of co-workers), and to prevent sexual harassment. However, by exercising such rights, Plaintiff was terminated from her employment.
Defendant's Position
Plaintiff was employed by Defendant from approximately January 27, 2015 to April 12, 2016 as a Program Manager. In late March 2016, a Google employee reported that several personal items had gone missing. Google's asset investigations team confirmed through video evidence that Plaintiff had taken the reported items. During its investigation, Plaintiff provided inconsistent accounts of her actions, which Google deemed to lack credibility. As a result, Google terminated Plaintiffs employment for violation of company policy and the dishonest conduct she exhibited.
Google denies that its payroll schedule was inconsistent with section 204 of the Labor Code. Moreover, Plaintiff cannot show that she or any of the members of the group she seeks to represent were aggrieved. An award of civil penalties under PAGA would result in an award that is unjust, arbitrary, and oppressive
California Fires
Two new local charities available for gift match for California Wildfires so it's not just the Red Cross now:
Still *0k* to match.
Also I learned that Google Docs has a 'mobilebasic' suffix which generates a simple lightweight doc. Many of the emergency resource docs are using this:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14ZhXDNaL260p5OempaFbCrsYBe_5pvNvDqV7xcwn95s/mobilebasic
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14ZhXDNaL260p5OempaFbCrsYBe_5pvNvDqV7xcwn95s/mobilebasic
The Ethical Regulator
[Part of a new Collection for Cybernetics as I explore this fascinating discipline..]
Hey there, it's the trolly problem again...
_Ethics modules can be treated like *ethical device drivers*, so that to be fully operational, a hypothetical gun-carrying, tax-advising robot that can drive on roads requires valid ethics modules for gun-law, tax-code, and traffic-rules. Without all necessary modules for the appropriate legal jurisdiction, the robot’s gun, tax advising, or driving capabilities are automatically disabled._
Google Now Everywhere - 2012
Not strictly "social" per-se, but there were a number of cross overs from iGoogle. Also relevant as Now is undergoing some historical changes of it's own..
- Pixie Labs ended up moving their games to Google+ Games (remember Farmville?)
- The gadget infrastructure from iGoogle (GGS) was used heavily for the +1 button, OpenSocial, PeopleSense and others. +103390686048441232976 might even still carry a pager for this old infrastructure...
New comment by lindner in "How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block"
First install ipfs
then run:
ipfs pin add QmZxWEBJBVkGDGaKdYPQUXX4KC5TCWbvuR4iYZrTML8XCR
and wait for a large amount of data to be pulled in....
Blockchain...
s/Blockchain/Beyoncé/g
Better than replacing Cloud with Butt.
https://gizmodo.com/the-best-of-cloud-to-butt-the-only-extension-youll-eve-1685863609
7 Years at Google today
*
Hired to work on web protocols. Immediately detoured to the needful work of building a social network. Learned a lot along the way.
I don't have a lot of sage wisdom to offer other than be humble, humane, and empathic. That goes a long way.
That and banjo. Always have banjo.
Looking forward to 7 more years of causing trouble with you.
Mario Kart - Bay Area
Maps and GBUS work pretty well split-screen, especially useful to know if you're going to get to the stop on time.
Google Assistant (circa 1973)
Google Assistant as envisioned from 1973's "Designing Freedom"
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=8pOruwSkOisC
Much of what we implement today was predicted then. We also forget that people once derided and feared "The Computer".
This work is quite accessible and reading it gave me a better understanding of complex dynamic systems, relaxation time, variety, Ashby's Law and the nature of bureaucracy. Also originally broadcast on the CBC as a lecture series:
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-designing-freedom-1.2946819
Only Variety can absorb Variety
It's such a simple concept that makes sense.
_...for every factor outside of your own control that can have a positive or negative influence on your ability to meet your goals, you need to put a compensatory control in place to allow you to respond._
Gaia service bits, D3 policies, gSuite vs Identity only -- the number of states for an account is dizzying. But by Ashby's law if we don't have mechanisms to absorb that variety bad things will befall the control software and we'll be unable to achieve homeostatis or even viability.
http://talesoftheenterprise.com/2013/06/mr-ashbys-bright-idea/
ess see ohhh
World's worst SEO choice for a band name. Second only to the musician named dash-M-dash -M- which g+ cannot even render.
I guess I'm supposed to use Archie to find this...
User Trust Research
Found some research around measuring User-Trust.
• First, developers can learn that trust concepts can be operationalized into specific attributes or questions that can be examined in research and designs.
• Second, one of the key findings is that trust seems to be related to beliefs about another’s ability, integrity, and benevolence.
• Third, trust and risk are related concepts, and factors that reduce risk perceptions, such as reducing uncertainty, can be beneficial for increasing trust or decreasing the need for trust.
• Fourth, ease-of-use characteristics, such as the ease of finding information and completing transactions, can affect trust.
• Fifth, external factors or context that may seem to be unrelated to the situation can affect trust, such as the characteristics of the truster and the type of risk involved in the transaction.
• Finally, trust probably develops in stages. In the first stage, superficial interface properties, such as colors and designs, can have a large effect on initial trust decisions. Later, users may make trust decisions based on more reasoned analysis of information. Eventually, long-term trust decisions are based on direct experience and personal service.
Google at the Edge of Chaos
Looks like we once had an Ethnographer on staff. This is the only notable mention of Complex Adaptive Systems I found. But it is interesting reading back from 2011....
https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/google-culture/home/google-at-the-edge-of-chaos
VSM
Doing Perf and listening to some lectures on VSM and it finally all starts to make sense.
I can see organizational patterns now in ways I could not before. Still grappling with the math though.
Google Forever
Greetings Area 120. Google Forever has also made it to the final pitch round.
We have plenty of opportunities for people to pitch in on sustainable bizdev models, decentralized engineering and more. But one role we'd love to fill is a UX/Design/Frontend leader. Here's our job listing. Please reach out if you're interested!
https://grow.googleplex.com/opportunity/job/2000000020689
Are you interested in building user experiences and critical user journeys that work for generations? Do you want to help people preserve their most important digital memories?
Consider joining the Google Forever Project. We're a proposed Area 120 project that's already made it to the final pitch round and we need you!
Our project is creating the software that will power a business and ecosystem that will last for decades and centuries. We're starting with a way to preserve the world's most valued Photos in an easy, simple sustainable way.
As a lead/founding frontend member of the team you will have considerably freedom to set the direction and tech stack while working with our passionate engineering and business teams. You will also be able to explore experimental user interfaces and user experiences that might be used in the far future.
If accepted to Area 120 you will have the chance to work on this full time. We also will accept any and all people who want to help us achieve our vision!
See http://go/google-forever or contact Paul Lindner to discuss how you can contribute.
Circle
Public profile, private profile actually map pretty well to human psychology, at least to non-millenials...
https://thenextweb.com/facebook/2017/09/11/facebook-testing-private-profile-closest-friends/
Mastodon Enterprise Edition
Federated social networking is relatable to dasher...
Seems like it might be interesting to provision following for new users.
_5. To improve the experience of brand new users, we’ve added something in the old tradition of MySpace Tom — except instead of following some central Tom, new accounts will start off following their local admins (this can be adjusted by the administrator). That way, on your first login you are greeted with a populated home timeline instead of an empty one._
https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-and-the-w3c-f75f376f422?gi=5de3cfdbd29f
Proud Code
GoogleCloud asks: *What was the first program you wrote that you were proud of?*
_Please include what language it was written in and a brief description. Feel free to go out of bounds if you have a creative answer!_
My response:
At age 17 I was published in Compute!'s Gazette. The small utility, named ML Runner, is tool written in Commodore 64 Basic and 6502 Assembly. It converted machine language binaries into easy to use BASIC programs. The result was a better, easier way for users to execute code.
You can see the actual short code on page 98 in the June 1987 Issue here:
https://archive.org/details/1987-06-compute-magazine
Crashplan to home customers: bye bye
60 days isn't a long time for people with lots of data. I have a feeling it's going to take legislation to get companies to do the right thing here (and that includes us too, Google Drive notice is 60 days as well...)
Also facepalm on the earnest CEO video at:
https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/consumer/nextsteps/
Justice and Closure
The memo damage has been done and now we're left with the mess. Here are some ideas on how to make amends:
- Everyone ever interviewed by Damore is offered an onsite interview.
- Everyone peer-reviewed for promo is given an automatic appeal.
- Everyone peer-reviewed gets their previous calibrations revisited, and comp retroactively adjusted.
Friday Night Dance Party
_Just move on up_
_Toward your destination_
_Though you may find, from time to time, complication_
Complicated week eh? Just remember we have each other and when we work together we can make the world a better place!
And thanks to the brave souls that communicate wisdom. (especially since I've been a bit absent from these discussions)
New comment by lindner in "The world in which IPv6 was a good design"
I thought this was what HIP was supposed to provide?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Identity_Protocol
Anyone know what's going on with those protocols?
Kill all Normies
So decided to finish "Kill all Normies" to get my head around "what hath the internet wrought" and how technology has affected society.
The book is a little shallow, especially if you were paying attention during gamergate. Read on if you want a sickening tour of the worst that's out there.
Given Techs great power I believe it behooves us to expand our concern to the outsized level of influence we have. We all built this platform. Behold. (Including what may be the weirdest set of recommended books from Play.)
Missile Mail
tired: drone delivery
wired: missile delivery
If you look back you'll see the parallels between Google and the Postal Service....
New comment by lindner in "If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture?"
I'm hoping that labels and musicians wise up and move to a coop model.
I'm liking what I'm seeing so far on http://resonate.is and am hopeful that those lessons will finally be learned.
Jungle Gym
Question for Jungle Gym -- how does it stack up against the Q&A feature in Groups? It seems that there's some overlap here that needs to be shaken loose. Maybe something for Daniel when he returns from his travels..
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
Moving your Google +1s to Pinboard
So the +1 button on the web is riding off into the sunset. But you can still make good use of the data that you've collected over the years via Google Takeout! I like to keep my bookmarks in Pinboard, so here's how I did it and you can too.
Export
1. Visit https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout in your browser. You'll see something like this:
2. Click Select None, then click on the checkmark next to +1s.
3. Scroll to the bottom and click Next
4. The next screen has some choices for file format. Change if you want, but the defaults should be fine and will email you a link to a zip file you can download.
5. You'll receive an email with a link to the zip file. Expand the file and you'll find something like this:
Import to Pinboard
Now that you have the +1s.html file you can import it to Pinboard. (Or other sites that support the Netscape Bookmark file format)
1. Pinboard 'tags' imports with the name of the file. I wanted to use the tag 'plusone' so I renamed my file from +1s.html to plusones.html
2. Next visit the Pinboard settings page, then click import (or just click on this link) You'll see something like this:
3. Click on the Choose File button, select your html file (in my case plusones.html) and click upload.
4. After a little bit of time Pinboard will have your imported bookmarks! You can then view all of them based on the tag (plusones). Click on the tag and you can browse/clean them up. Woohoo!
Other Places
Once you have the exported bookmark html file you can also import to other products.
Contact me if you have more. I'll add them here!
Battle for the Net
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?)
Greetings Plussers!
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!
Plusones to Pinboard.in
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...
Subject: My Final Attempt - Uber
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_
New comment by lindner in "EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products"
Speed Queen is making a go of it. Slogan is "Built Better to Last Longer."
When my Frigidaire washer finally dies that's what I'm getting. I already injured myself replacing the pump once. And now that I've seen the cheap plastic parts used I don't have confidence it's going to last.
Google+ vs Facebook GIFs - 2011
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/
Rack and Stack
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!
Changes coming to the +1 widget you see on web sites.
Changes coming to the +1 widget you see on web sites.
Originally shared by John Nack
Making the G+1 button load more quickly
The G+1 button is shown billions of times per day on web pages around the world, so it’s important that it load as quickly and efficiently as possible. To make it easier for people to load and share the pages they’re interested in, we’ve created a simpler G+1 button sharing experience.
Beginning in a few weeks, clicking the +1 button will open a streamlined new Google+ sharing dialog, and the G+1 button will no longer display a +1 count. If you’re a publisher, you can rest assured that these +1s do not affect search ranking and the size and layout of the button will remain the same.
These changes will only affect the G+1 button outside of Google+. The +1 button within Google+ will continue to work the same way it always has.
If you’d like to view all of the pages you’ve +1’d over the years, you can download a list using Google Takeout.
We hope this change makes it that much easier to check out and recommend all the interesting things you discover!
Fingerprints
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
PHOTO PRESERVATION DRAWING!
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 [email protected]
-----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-----
Heirloom
"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.
Help me award some contest winners! -- securely
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!
Sound Search
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..