vanadium

I use a 14" RGB Sony Trinitron medical imaging monitor for retrogaming; PVMs and BVMs are pretty much the gold standard these days, especially the Trinitrons, for their quality and longevity.

If you think Trinitron quality is great in your average Television CRT, it's _amazing_ in true RGB. Who knew SCART would keep bare-metal retrogaming alive?

ReplayTV back in the day. Man, was that an awesome, if underappreciated, product for its time. Seriously loved the upgrade capability and user-centric features (like commercial-skipping, until litigation came along).

You might remember this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/eu-fines-microso...

Of course, that ended not too long ago. While having IE was necessary to hit the web, it immediately presented the choices available.

It's almost like Google's talking out of both sides of its mouth: On one side, to sell through AMP, they talk through how much it benefits people with constrained/metered bandwidth (3G) as a worldwide concern, and then are just fine with auto-playing videos. For a company hyped up enough to peddle performance as a first-class citizen, this is a very questionable decision.

Accessibility?

During the dot-com boom in Atlanta back in '99-'00, agencies and, to some extent, startups around the city were known for hitting the strip clubs for client meetings. It was pretty rife out there within the industry.

I doubt that would even remotely pass today. Just because some practices were "acceptable" over a prior timeframe doesn't exactly render it acceptable today.

My wife nearly jettisoned the smart plugs after 5x attempting to get them all to turn on at once. Worse, sometimes a command will hang, leaving two lights on and the other one just randomly lights up a few minutes later.

The eTekcity 1Tx/5Rx remote outlets running on (I'm pretty certain) 433.92Mhz that these TP-Link smart plugs replaced work every single time. (Going back to those is sounding better, now that I think about it.)

Got this deal a week and some change back, along with a separate two-pack to dip my toes into home automation.

The TP-Link smart plugs will work in full concert only about 75% of the time; it's Home => Kasa, then an Alexa => Kasa integration.

"Ok Alexa, turn off/on the Living Room" gives me hilarious permutations of which of the three light up, are delayed, need to be asked again, etc. I've done enough wireless network testing locally to know it isn't network strength getting in the way.

It was a nice toe-dip and I'll probably keep messing with the idea of home automation...but I am really not impressed with the lack of responsiveness and consistency. Probably going to shift gears more to localized automation next without involving the cloud.

In most companies I've been exposed to, it's the _minimum_ expected effort for the rate.

It's also why one of the first career mentorship steps I go through with Juniors is calculating their hourly rate with the assumption of 40 hours a week (per the ostensible employee agreement), and then calculating it against the _real_ hours worked per week after taking a position.

You'd be surprised how illuminating that's been to those Juniors, and how much of an imprint it left on those folks as they progressed in their careers. A lot of people in our industry genuinely don't recognize how much they devalue themselves and diluting their hourly rate when they're putting in 60-80 hours a week.

The Pedway is one of the best open secrets here in Chicago, especially during heavy blizzard conditions and generally escaping the elements. Used to walk it daily when I worked downtown.

The right answer for any leader at Director or above is to simply schedule 1:1s with random people from all levels of those you manage directly or indirectly, at least once--if not more--per week.

It's a rather efficient bullshit detector when you have two or more layers down in the organic chart.

"Google plays a central role in this confusion because they are the organization most strongly attempting to blur the lines between the open web and their platform. Google blurs the line between this is a tool to interact with Google products and this is a direction or philosophy for web development. It can be hard to follow."

Well, between PWA and AMP, and Google's recent hard pushes to both developers and corporate America to adopt them, I can see where that confusion would come in.

In the last 6-8 months, I've been watching and fielding inquiries from clients whom Google's approached on AMP, seen Google holding and inviting corporate dev teams (and marketers) to PWA/AMP hackathons, etc. It's really a full-court press these days, and line where the web ends and Google's ecosystem begins is starting to become lost on plenty of people.

Run a WebPageTest on an AMP link and tell me it fits within the 1 second promise AMP keeps making.

Without prefetch, on a lot of the pages I've cross-checked manually, it doesn't. So there's already gaming from the other side of the aisle in a sense.

So, lean splash pages?

I mean, you can already see many publishers (Reddit, ebay, some newspapers like USA Today) doing it. Already gaming AMP.

Technically speaking then, AMP isn't accomplishing a whole hell of a lot, and risks being relegated to "splash page technology", if that becomes a trend.

I'm curious how long it'll take for spammers to start inundating AMP, personally.

You mean GameSpy? Yes, that merged with IGN and subsequently went into oblivion.

The company I left a few years ago did this in order to obfuscate the rampant issues that were being unaddressed.

The recipe was to hire in a bunch of college grads, and while they're still nervous about their first corporate gig, have the VP of Human Resources email a demand that they post a glowing review.

And, when the rating inevitably continues to be hammered by negatives, instead of addressing the patterns within the negative reviews, HR would send that review demand to the overseas team(s) where the jobs were even more tenuously-held.

While HR made glaringly obvious positive reviews, themselves, of course. Pretty insidious.

My mother smoked for around 45-50 years herself and quit immediately after her heart attack last year. As a former 17-year smoker myself who started vaping almost 6 years ago when my kid was born, I'd been trying to get her to replace the cigarettes years ago. Didn't work.

Another spot of anecdata, when I was a smoker I couldn't go a few hours without a cigarette. After 6 years of vaping, I can pretty much go 8-10 hours with no real craving.

It's unreal how much less of a hold vaping has on me versus cigarettes when that nicotine isn't coming along with a few thousand other chemical compounds.

This was the easiest upgrade to consider in my career; $30 is nothing compared to the value and ecosystem around Sublime Text.

I'd entertain such a model as OP to ensure the ongoing viability of the app.

Started out my career during the dot-com boom in Atlanta. The only reasons I left were proximity to family, and the traffic problem.

Also, the "I'm not quite going to snow, so have some 35-degree rain" or "Hey, how about an ice storm?" winter weather.

Never really had much of a problem finding a gig down there.

Same experience here as a Director of Front-End Development. Worse than not only hiding that they're coming from a bootcamp, they're positioning their exercises as actual "work experience." Granted, this appears to be a few of many bootcamps instructing their classes to do this, but it's definitely something on my radar these days when I'm looking to hire. Also--and this is an egregious oversight in my opinion--many of the portfolios are nothing more than a lightly modified (if that) Wordpress site, using a select few "popular" templates; usually the templates that tell people what level of experience they have with each technology, etc. If you want my eye, you really need to take the time and initiative to build it independently using what you learned.

Agreed, however, that internships and apprenticeships are a great first step coming out of bootcamps, but I don't believe that's the expectation being set when they're admitted. The reason I usually have to pass on bootcamp grads is that, working in a client-focused environment on tight deadlines, time spent training someone up from a narrow view of the industry to what we need is at a very high premium; CS grads coming in as Juniors have anecdotally worked better to that end.

Apprenticing at a product-focused organization with high competency in managing expectations is where I see most bootcamp grads excelling.

That's too broad a question; you'd need to specify "front-end developers" in the context of their primary focus, first.

Are they game developers? Are they working on enterprise apps? Are they working on lead-gen landing pages for marketing companies? Data visualization? Accessibility-focused? etc...

Front-end is becoming increasingly specialized to a degree.

But it's _their_ bloat.

Same for Reddit; it's a heavily abridged version of the post with maybe 5-10 comments. Then when you actually want to read the comments...you end up on full-scale Reddit instead of just going there in the first place.

I'm really not sure what I'm supposed to be getting out of these sorts of implementations if I'm in "researcher" mode.

Well, here's an interesting data point to dig through insofar as AMP performance is concerned: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170816_7R_b596415003dabf34...

Average Guardian article.

Yeah, this was on NPR Marketplace the other day. First I'd heard of it.

Exactly the same progression with my five year-old. He still uses his hardened Kindle with Freetime, but for most gaming, really likes his DS I restored from a broken state on the cheap.

I was going to bring up the iPaq line of Windows PDAs and phones beginning in '99, but you already preceded me by 3 years with that Nokia play.

First, you'd need the Illinois legislature to stop arguing and navel-gazing about the long-standing budget impasse and actually do something about it, for better or for worse.

This seems unlikely.

Last I checked (RT-AC87U owner here), most of the features are still there, but still opt-in. I believe there's one I can't name off the top of my head that was neutered, though.

I did some mentorship at a P-TECH/STEM style academy here in Chicago a few years back when the idea was young. (http://www.goodestemacademy.org/)

About 75-85% of the mentors were in fact from IBM, and the rest of us were from marketing agencies. IBM is very, very highly represented at many of these sites and have enormous skin in the game to propagate the model further. See here: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_innovation/2017/04/ibm_pre...

Now that IBM has a few years under their belt supporting said academies, and some analytics to determine whether it's benefiting them or not, they're pushing it to the next level.