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Excitement in Santa Fe
I don’t deal well with emergencies. If I am driving on the freeway and spill my coffee, I get sort of upset. If something serious happened with my car, I would be really upset.
We will contrast this with what happened to my brother yesterday.
He was flying an airplane, and the engine started leaking oil, and the oil splattered all over the windshield, so he couldn’t see out the windshield.
You can listen to the LiveATC archive here. It starts around 2:15.
How did I find which LiveATC file had the recording? Well, my dad emailed me a bunch of photos that my brother and his student took inside the plane while having the emergency, and I checked the timestamps on the photos. That made it easy for me to find the recording.
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Adventures with CATS
There hasn’t been a lot of generally interesting stuff to report with work lately. Recently I have been put in charge of shopping for CATS. OK, I am not actually shopping for CATS, I am shopping for an ATS (applicant tracking system), and CATS is the name of one of the products that is on the market. But it sounds funnier to say that I am shopping for CATS. But you could call it a Candidate and Applicant Tracking System. So, yes, this is what is taking up a large fraction of my time these days: shopping for enterprise software.
Everything that I want to know about the world is impossible to know because Google is getting more and more useless as the internet fills with garbage. There are a lot of easy-to-find articles that tell job applicants how to “outsmart” one particular use case that companies have for their Applicant Tracking Systems. These pieces of software include resume parsing tools, and some companies will use the automated tools to do their initial screening. Since we don’t do that – and we have no particular interest in doing that – these articles are especially useless for me. Several months ago I was at a meeting with some sort of marketing rep from LinkedIn, and he proudly told me that if I were looking to hire curriculum developers that their software could find people currently (or formerly) working as curriculum developers and bring them to my attention. I told him that sounded like a terrible idea because most commercial curricula out there are terrible, and I would never want to hire any of the people who worked on those. (Pearson, I am talking about your K-12 products in particular.) Cover letters tell me far more than resumes do. If I had a choice between a cover letter and a resume, I would pick the cover letter every time.
As you know, everything is databases. Sadly, the marketing people don’t know a lot about databases, so I have to phrase all of my questions in terms of practical hypothetical situations instead of asking them about their database schema and the way that their server-side architecture interacts with the database. Perhaps it is not entirely a coincidence that the two products that are currently at the top of my list both publish APIs. The one that I like best also has great documentation of its API.
Many of the products on the market assume that the hiring process is centrally managed. They assume that there is an HR/recruiting office that manages the pipeline of candidates and that the few candidates that make it through HR (and the parser) are temporarily granted to domain experts for the interview stage and then are returned to HR for the rest of the process. The default permissions level for the software has it so that HR can see everything about everyone, and that the future-colleagues doing the interview have approximately zero access to the ATS. Only HR can be trusted with anything having to do with hiring, and the process should be out of HR’s hands as little as possible. We didn’t even have an HR department for the first several years that I worked here, so this is not at all the model that we are using. But this means that most of the software that is meant for most companies isn’t a good fit for us.
In some ways this is like all the terrible curricula out there. Just like all of the major publishers strive to have their textbooks be approximately the same as the textbooks from their competitors, the ATS software developers also strive to have their products have similar features to all the other products on the market.
As part of my due diligence, I did briefly install OpenCATS (free and open source) to see what it does. It doesn’t do much that we need, sadly. Also, I checked in its database, and the password column is just the md5 hash of the password; they don’t salt the hashes. Even I know that is bad, so I don’t really trust them on anything else in terms of security. I really do feel bad saying negative things about free and open source software because I feel like I should be supporting the open source community. But this software just does not do what I need. Also, I am a little bit resentful because their installer script doesn’t work on Amazon Lightsail instances, so installation did not go as smoothly as it could have.
So next week I will be testing software! I’ve set up tests with two different vendors. One vendor has a product that is simple and streamlined. The other vendor has a product that is sophisticated and highly customizable. We’ll see which end of the spectrum we prefer and then iterate from there.
And then when this is all done, I get to shop for conference call software. Major unanswered question: Approximately everyone uses either GoToMeeting or WebEx; why can’t we just use one of those?
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Small Victories
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More work stuff, blah blah blah. Seems like everything is all resolved and on the upswing. But just in case, I have joined the LinkedIn, so now I have one more site on the internet that is hungry for fresh content and likely to be disappointed by my inability to provide it with what it seeks. But if you want to be my imaginary work-friend, by all means.
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The hoop-jumping and whatnot required by my health insurance company is annoying. They had approved the Aimovig until September 6, which was in the past. They also wanted some data about how well it was working before approving more of it. But since it took a while for me to get the drug in the first place, it also took a while for me to have any information to send them. But today I got a letter in the mail saying that they have approved 999 refills between now and December 31, 9999, so that is nice.
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I did show improvement, and I was able to send the insurance company a limited amount of promising-looking data, based on the two doses that I had taken so far. We will see if this progress continues.
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Up to 149 Pokémon in my Kanto Pokédex. Just need a Mr. Mime and a Mewtwo.
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Not a victory: Everyone keeps forgetting to buy cat food.
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Sophie the Cat Works on Her Artist Statement
Sophie
Untitled, 2018
Wooden table, found objects, cat barf
Private collectionThe idea of food being the center of the home goes back to the Greek notion of Hera as goddess of the hearth. Yet, food by its very nature is ephemeral. The food is served, we eat it, the table is cleared, and there is no trace of the meal.
In our modern society, so often we struggle to make time and space for family meals. Frequently we cover our dinner tables with clutter. We don’t make time to sit down together as a family, and we often neglect to feed the cats on time. The cats are not fed at the family table. Rather, one cat has a food dish that locks out the other cat and the very hungry cat must struggle to dig food out of a puzzle feeder.
These cycles of everyday life go unnoticed and unrecorded. The kitchens, food dishes, and dinner tables are silent about their circumstances, and they have no way of telling a story.
In this series of work I was inspired by the social artifacts left behind by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The residents of Pompeii were caught unaware by the eruption of the volcano, and the pumice and ash captured the everyday lives of the people of the city.
Barfing on the objects left on the table makes their traces visible. Some of the objects mask the table from the barf, while other objects react with the barf. Once the objects have been removed and the table cleaned (by my assistants), a pattern of wood and stains remains, capturing a snapshot of everyday life.
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Boring Updates
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Finally got around to dealing with AT&T and switching my phone plan to one that is less ridiculous. All of the frugal-boys that I know will no longer be so very, very appalled at how much I was overpaying for my phone plan. The frugal-boys seem to really enjoy keeping track of all their money. Meanwhile, I forget to pay the bills, and I have several uncashed checks that ride around in my bag. I think that some of the checks may have expired. It really is too bad that I can not just have my billing address for everything be my parents’ house and have them pay all my bills from my bank account.
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You know that I am planning on buying a new phone. But I’m thinking of getting a slightly obsolete phone and not a very new phone.
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I impulse bought half a yard of neoprene, so I am thinking of sewing myself a case for this hypothetical new phone.
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Other recent impulse buys: A subscription to the massage therapy practice that is about half a mile from my apartment.
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Other recent impulse buys: A bunch of credits to take German classes online.
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Now that everyone else has stopped reading because this is so boring, I will mention that something happened about a week and a half ago that made me absolutely furious. That is one of the reasons that I haven’t written anything on this blog lately because there was a chance that I would have written something about this situation that made me so furious. And that would have made things worse. Sorry that this is so vague. It is a work-thing.
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In my opinion, there is plenty of blame to go around. Others might disagree.
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In other work matters (unrelated), I brought a whole bunch of tools to work one day last week because the easiest way to solve someone’s problem was for me to swap the doorknob on my office for the doorknob on one of the conference rooms.
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Unrelated, I had to rebase one of my repos at work, and I am hoping that this did not accidentally break things that were not broken.
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Knitting update: I quickly realized that the published pattern that I was basing my new project off of was insane. It’s knit in the round, and the stripes change color every 1-2 rounds. But this means that there is no structural integrity at the end of the round. So now I am making the stripes change color every 2-4 rounds. The stripe pattern is determined by the Random.org coin-flip app. Is the stripe 2 or 4 rounds? Is the stripe gray or purple? Is the stripe made out of a yarn that I have a lot of or a yarn that I only have a little bit of?
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The detail guy at the carwash where I over-tip informed me in no uncertain terms that I need to stop parking my car wherever I’d been parking it because there is a sprinkler system with salt in the water, and the droplets are ruining the paint. He can fix the damage that has accumulated so far, but it will cost $150.
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Rationalizing the Denominator
I kind of hate the idea of rationalizing the denominator. It’s like some sort of weird rule, like not wearing white after Labor Day, that doesn’t really serve much of a purpose.
But for us, it also does serve a very pragmatic purpose. Our system for grading short-answer problems is not very good at recognizing when two different representations of the same number should be considered equivalent with respect to evaluating a student’s response to a homework problem. If the problem asks how many widgets there are, then it really doesn’t matter if the student answers 8 or \(2^3\). But if the problem asks the student to evaluate \(2^3\), then 8 is a much better answer than \(2^3\). So our homework system is fairly limited in what it accepts as right answers, and one of its quirks is that radicals should be simplified.
And this works great in algebra class. And pretty well in geometry class.
The problem is when we get to calculus class.
Not meaning to give too much away here, but there is a short-answer problem in the calculus class whose right answer is \(\frac{1}{\sqrt{\pi}}\).
One of the students submitted \(\frac{\sqrt{\pi}}{\pi}\) and insisted that this was the better answer because he had “rationalized” the denominator.
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Work Finished
It’s been hard to think of anything to write about for the past week or so. Things are so very much the same from day to day. Someone reported a post from 2010 as possibly cheating on a mail-in math contest that is happening this month. Someone else doesn’t realize that calculators only have so many bits of precision, so he’s angry that the answer his calculator gave hime was marked wrong. My code has some remarkably subtle error in which an object that I believe should be within the scope I’m operating in appears not to be.
Over the long weekend I have managed to get things done, though! At home, of course.
For a very long time four of the outlets in my kitchen have not worked. Well over a year. Possibly more than two. A long time. The solution has been to run an extension cord across the sink to one of the two outlets that did work.
Today I finally got fed up with the situation, walked to the hardware store, bought a new GFCI, and installed it. I have electricity again! My Instant Pot can cook on either side of the kitchen! Spices can be ground without unplugging the rice maker!
I finally dealt with all the fiddly little details of the quilt that I had been working on. The label is sewn on the back. The loose ends are trimmed. Excess, visible basting thread has been removed. It might even go on the bed tonight.
It is very hard to take a picture of a quilt. Your best option is to find a way to hang the quilt on a very big wall in a place with lots of diffuse light and to be fortunate enough to be able to place the camera on a rather tall tripod. If you don’t take the picture straight on, there will be keystoning; the quilt will look like a trapezoid. Now, most quilts are not perfectly rectangular, but most photographs make things look even more dire.
So I feel the need to point out that this quilt is perhaps one of the most perfectly rectangular ones that I have ever made. Even though you can’t tell from the picture.
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