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An unexpected side effect of raising a stink about the direction SCA is taking on education is that I've been getting more phone calls from some of my favorite coffee people. I won't be at the committee meeting on Monday since one tends not to show up for such things after resigning, but I'll be having a conversation with the chief education officer and the education director on Tuesday. Back channel info I've gotten suggests they plan to move farther in the wrong direction so I'm not optimistic

subtoot 

It's not collaborative content creation if only one person is rolling up their sleeves and doing the work.

Three days in a row now I've tried and failed to order from one of my suppliers because they took their website down for maintenance. I'm guessing the maintenance crew set something on fire and now they've got people repopulating a product database by typing stuff in manually because what's a backup? That is, of course, only a guess.

@craigmaloney@octodon.social This is explicitly not a standard for properly brewed tea.

(I'm glad I didn't opt for email notifications of new subscribers)

Today I sent out the emails to people who have recently asked me to let them know when the book is available, sending them to roastingbook.coffee/

I'm honestly a little surprised by how quickly that list is growing (and you can tell from a lot of the email addresses that these are people in the target market) given the minimal marketing effort going into it.

Given how easy cosmetic surgery is in Star Trek why aren't there people who try on a new species every week?

Updated roastingbook.coffee/

Now served up with https, links added to the first paragraph, mailing list sign up form added. Now I can ignore that for a while and get back to finishing the book.

My cat's allowed to make his rap albums, but I don't let him cuss, so he has to say things like "motherflirka"

End of the day and the web site for one of my suppliers is still down for maintenance (they were also down all day yesterday). Part of me wonders what exactly they managed to botch so badly to take them down for so long and another part of me is wondering how many orders they're losing as people look to substitute a competitor's product.

@gnomon Once I've got https enabled I'll push an update that puts relevant links in that first paragraph and adds a form to subscribe to a mailing list for the project. Probably some time later tonight or tomorrow.

I have enough email addresses. I don't need to set up the new domain to do email at all.

Tentatively decided to go with TinyLetter. I'm already using that for the Typica release announcement list and nobody has complained about that. Considered self hosting but decided that I don't want to deal with that.

If DNS records have updated for you, you can check out the extremely basic site for my book at roastingbook.coffee

I haven't turned on https yet.

Starting out with a single static page as a placeholder. The next thing is deciding how I want to handle an announcement list so that people who are asking me to let them know when they can buy the book can just subscribe to that.

Setting up the web site for the book I've been writing. Waiting on DNS propagation.

The down for maintenance page has been updated. It no longer indicates a date when they expect it to be back up. This seems pretty amateur hour.

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On leaving the politics out of hacking 

So I guess that sufficient time has passed that I'll tell the story.

At a company I once worked at one of the managers sent out an email. Could anyone volunteer to give some programming classes at one of the local schools? It sounded ok: a bit of outreach and a chance to educate the next generation. Until I looked up what school it was. Turned out it was one of the elite private schools for rich kids only.

One of my co-workers replied, saying that they had also looked up the school and that they were affluent enough that they could just hire a hacker for a few evenings. There are plenty of hackers around who could use a bit of extra income. They also said that volunteering for this would merely help to perpetuate special privileged access to skills or knowledge by the rich, and I agreed. I said it's not a feedback loop that we should be helping to reinforce. If it were a state school it would be a different proposition.

It later turned out that the school in question was where the manager was sending their own children, and this pulled the rug out from their previous often repeated statements about "believing in meritocracy". It made them look like a hypocrite - claiming that anyone could rise while trying to give an already over-privileged class yet more advantages.

In a later meeting when the hypocrisy was pointed out the manager went on a rant about "there will be no more politics at this company". Everyone just looked at them as if they had just said something really unintelligent. Which of course they had.

There is always politics in hacking. Many of the hackers of my generation didn't come from elite schools. They were not "toffs" with special tutors. Most attended state schools and were self-taught on home computers. The "apolitical hacker" is just someone who thinks that their own politics should be hegemonic.

@cardassianvole It's fine as long as you've got an accent where the t is silent and online nobody can be sure you don't.

Web site for one of my suppliers is down for maintenance until January 2. I suppose it doesn't say what year.

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