sdrothrock

The first thing that came to mind was The Homer: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer

More information: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/20/tesla-megapack-battery-caugh...

I usually don't comment for this kind of thing, but I'm not so sure about the name... with a lowercase "L", it's easily confused with "iota/Iota" in many fonts.

Even if it's clear that it's an "L" and is "Lota," that just makes me think of a portable bidet and not ebooks. Whichever way you end up reading it, it seems kind of unfortunate and difficult to search for.

Crystalis was my first brush with the aRPG genre as a kid; in fact, when I first played Diablo II, I thought "Wow, this game is like Crystalis, but with better graphics and more choices! In college, when I would tell people about the "hidden gem" that was Crystalis, I always thought it was one of those "peak platform" games where people had finally really gotten comfortable with a platform and managed to crank out games that took advantage of everything possible.

The art looked great AND the movement/animations were smooth, too. A lot of the third-tier sword effects blew me away.

Incidentally, I knew the author in college. He's a tremendous fan of NES/SNES-era games (especially platformers) and was most recently a judge on the Make a Good Mega Man Level 3 (http://magmmlcontest.com/wiki/index.php/Make_a_Good_Mega_Man...). I've always admired his self-taught game design/user experience sense because I've seen it grow over the years and was a part of playtesting some of his level designs! He's a tremendously kind and thoughtful guy.

I believe a level he designed actually made it into an official Mega Man collection from Capcom, but I can't remember which one...

I have this issue with Amazon Japan; it's frequently related to clicking links from friends or Google that have the language setting encoded in the URL, which changes my personal settings.

> Finally, something that people might not think about: If he misses something someone said and asks you what it was, never say "it's nothing" or "it wasn't important" or "it was just a joke" no matter how minor the comment was. Just repeat it no matter what.

This is absolutely critical. It's hard enough to interrupt multiple times (especially when you need to ask about the same misheard thing multiple times) and being shut down makes it even harder.

Have you spoken with him about what he'd like?

I think everyone has different tastes (both personal and also in relation to the types of hearing loss they have) and one of my buttons in particular is when people go out of their way to do everything... except ask what I prefer.

For example, if he prefers to do video chats (I myself do), he may appreciate hand raising/visual cues before speaking (to context switch), clear lighting and dimmer backgrounds (to help lip reading/curing), better mics (basically not anything onboard). Additionally, things like someone taking minutes and recording decisions can be helpful for review afterward to clear up misconceptions or assumptions.

It may be that no matter how many video chat accommodations there are, he may not feel completely included and would prefer text of some kind.

I think another important thing is to make him feel welcome to interrupt or say something outside of the meetings, both implicitly and through explicit reminders -- sometimes it turns out that some accommodations don't work out, or someone is just particularly difficult to understand (accents, enunciation), or something just throws it all out the window (people without cameras, suddenly noisy backgrounds, etc) and it can be hard being the odd one out saying "Hey, this actually isn't working."

I think really though, my strongest recommendation would be to keep him actively involved in accommodations without springing anything on him.

Edit: I want to emphasize that I do think it's great that you're reaching out and trying to help! I just also want to emphasize that for some people, loss of agency regarding how they handle their accommodations, no matter how well-intentioned, can feel bad.

> what baffles me is that even a lot of smaller companies do this

Thoughtfully creating an interview process and the procedures/questions is a skill that has to be learned... and when people haven't or don't have the opportunity to learn that skill, it makes sense to turn to resources like books or articles, the most popular of which are often based on FAANG practices.

I also know from my own experience structuring and performing interviews that there can also be a lot of pressure from the top to eliminate candidates following the belief that "the last one standing" is the best, rather than actually trying to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of every candidate.

That way tends to lead toward interviews of 5-7 rounds that act as sieves.

This is all just my limited personal experience though and I'd love to hear from other people who've done interviewing at/for smaller companies!

> I am also not sure of any good alternatives because someone will always object to any alternative which they cannot achieve for some reason.

When I was on the market, a couple of companies actually gave me a variety of options, which I appreciated. I don't want to spend hours on a take-home and I also don't want to do leetcode, but an open question/answer plus some code review and live debugging was an acceptable combination for me.

Providing the options definitely has the potential to take up developer time, but I think the tradeoffs are worthwhile for both the interviewee and the hiring team.

I also have a cochlear implant; it doesn't allow me to hear ultrasonic frequencies -- in fact, my hearing range is still a subset of "normal."

For me, it's that emojis tend to be very high context since they're basically pictograms. They add communication overhead because you have to think about what they mean, and what the writer intends them to mean, and whether those are the same.

Japanese ceiling lights have standard functionalities for adjusting not only brightness, but also yellow-blue levels.

Are simpler (e.g. not full RGB) LED lights like this not as common/affordable in other places? I just realized that I really take them for granted.

    Location: Tokyo, Japan (APAC, UTC+9)
    Remote: Yes
    Willing to relocate: Perhaps
    Technologies: Python, Django, PostgreSQL, AWS (ec2, Route 53, SES), Twilio
    Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X6yKo1inJDKvfJeTQ_jx1mTqjpTBVVaMnlZ7dPhI1NA/edit?usp=sharing
    Email: scott [at] blackwhitedog [dot] com

Hi, I'm Scott, and I am a generalist, self-taught full stack engineer who's been in Japan for 15 years and can speak, read, and write Japanese fluently. Although I have severe hearing loss, we can absolutely address that with some basic accommodations.

I'm currently the principal engineer at a small, fast-paced startup in Tokyo, where I've been leading a small team in developing a product to provide temperature measuring and alerting services to over 2,000 clients across the country in the food service, hospitality, and medical industries. I work with a Python/Django/PostgreSQL stack on ec2, but I'm also flexible and very willing to learn.

I enjoy not only the engineering side of my job, but also mentoring and growing my team members. I consider myself good at communication -- a good portion of my work involves collaborating with support, sales, and our CEO. My background also includes education, support, and sales.

    Location: Tokyo, Japan (APAC, UTC+9)
    Remote: Yes
    Willing to relocate: Perhaps
    Technologies: Python, Django, PostgreSQL, AWS (ec2, Route 53, SES), Twilio
    Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tE2cm227edROyMqDGj8WPOf-xEjFyMAf/view?usp=sharing
    Email: scott [at] blackwhitedog [dot] com

Hi, I'm Scott, and I am a generalist, self-taught full stack engineer who's been in Japan for 15 years and can speak, read, and write Japanese fluently. Although I have severe hearing loss, we can absolutely address that with some basic accommodations.

I'm currently the principal engineer at a small, fast-paced startup in Tokyo, where I've been leading a small team in developing a product to provide temperature measuring and alerting services to over 2,000 clients across the country in the food service, hospitality, and medical industries. I work with a Python/Django/PostgreSQL stack on ec2, but I'm also flexible and very willing to learn.

I enjoy not only the engineering side of my job, but also mentoring and growing my team members. I consider myself good at communication -- a good portion of my work involves collaborating with support, sales, and our CEO. My background also includes education, support, and sales.

That's really interesting to hear; as a generalist, I've had a hard time finding positions that aren't super spiky!

Coincidentally, I just saw this and thought of your comment, which I'd read yesterday...

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/moviepass-track-eyes-phon...

I'm glad you enjoyed it. :)

It's pretty common for animal communities in captivity in Japan!

For example, a lot of zoos or aquariums will have a large penguin community and they'll keep track of the family trees and relationships, friendships, enemies, all that, on a chart.

Here's one for the Sumida Aquarium: https://www.sumida-aquarium.com/sokanzu/assets/img/img_sokan...

And a similar one for the Kyoto Aquarium: https://www.kyoto-aquarium.com/sokanzu/assets/img/img_sokanz...

Note that even the staff are included in this chart...

Interestingly enough, foxes are connected to shrines in Japanese folklore. I've heard some people claim Ghost of Tsushima uses foxes to lead to shrines in a homage to this behavior in Skyrim, but it's really just an older cultural connection and a nice bit of kismet. :)

I see a lot of engineers here saying this is redundant and wonder if you might not be targeting the right audience. Parents with kids, students, people trying to form better habits, people with depression all seem like they could use this kind of tool.

> Recruiters love phone calls and don’t like doing things over email or text.

This has really hindered me as a person with a severe hearing impairment. It's annoying how pushy some people can be about it too, insisting that there has to be SOME way to make it work.

> It felt like reading a Brian novel - a bunch of weird stuff that didn't have any heart or feeling.

The novels were largely written by Kevin J. Anderson, who also was in the credits for the movie as a "Creative Consultant," so make of that what you will.

I agree with your feeling, though; the metaphor I keep coming back to is that it was a tapestry that was reduced to a thread: Paul's rise.

It felt like all the supporting characters and their motivations, which form a part of the tapestry of time that the entire Dune series covers, were reduced to steps that Paul is climbing to the top.

Recorded in February 1969, typed in February-April, 1970, so not that much of a gap.

"Sent to Turkey in 1997" seems more like a publication date in Turkey than anything, given the site itself.

> Ideally, you want to have a game where so much is going on, that you NEED to split up the tasks to multiple teammates. I don't know, maybe have each of the players doing an "Overcook'd" style minigame, trying to do whatever their sections of the ship need to get done.

Puzzle Pirates really nailed this for me; each ship had a number of action stations (with different kinds of puzzles) that did different tasks, such as providing speed/maneuverability to the ship, pumping the bilge, or keeping the cannons loaded. This all came together in ship-to-ship combat, where having the crew man the stations appropriately was integral to the captain being able to fight other ships... and then boarding was another game.

The other pronunciation diversion I think of is how "teat" is "tit" but is now pronounced "teet".

Sazae-san is such an institution here that there's slang describing the feeling when you watch it on Sunday night and know you have a full work week coming up: Sazae-san Syndrome.

That's why the comment is specific about what the writer wants to hear; his apology in Mandarin apologized repeatedly for making a mistake but didn't specifically say what the mistake was or say that Taiwan belongs to China.

The long intestine bit is a common piece of nihonijinron.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron

> I still remember the "Duck hunt gun" on the Super Nintendo which was widely interesting.

The Duck Hunt zapper was for the original Nintendo, but the Super Nintendo had the Super Scope. :)

https://theoldschoolgamevault.com/blog/articles/1007-super-n...

If you're ever forced into using Zoom, it's possible to add captions: https://webcaptioner.com/help/integrations/zoom