# (2) 01 Dec 2012, 10:35AM PST: We Are Hiring - You Too?:
Wikimedia Foundation is hiring, a lot. We need your help to:
And of course everything you make at the Wikimedia Foundation is freely licensed, so you can suggest your buddies use it to solve their problems, write public blog posts about it, talk about it at parties and conferences, and link to it on your résumé. Isn't open source rockin'?
Some other places that make open source software and are hiring:
Linaro, 10gen (makers of
MongoDB), Participatory
Culture Foundation, Balboa Park Online Collective, CollectionSpace, Mozilla, OpenStack, Red Hat, Canonical, Collabora. And you can check the
FSF jobs board.
If you're hiring people to improve open source -- designers, tech writers, product managers, sysadmins, coders, etc. -- feel free to leave a comment. I know a few FLOSS-ish folks who are about to start looking and maybe I can direct them your way as well.
# 08 Dec 2012, 01:28PM: Friday:
"What license is it under?" "The 'I put it on Tumblr' license?" "Ah yes, Misattribution-ShareAlike."
(Today) I read "dear web people: forcing smartphone users to click on a tiny dot 9 times to see all of a story almost guarantees no views past the 1st page" and momentarily got anxious before I remembered that I work for Wikimedia now, not Salon, and we don't do that!
"What lists do we post to to advertise that we're a queer-friendly workplace?" "The Castro?" "I think me standing on a corner handing out pamphlets doesn't scale."
"In engineering we have these six Director-level groups, but we might be adding The Seventh Directorate, by Robert Ludlum."
Also yesterday when I walked to lunch I was the thirtysomething middle manager bopping down New Montgomery to a decades-old rock song ("Smells Like Teen Spirit"). I am not a Dilbert character, but I believe I show up in a Jonathan Coulton song or four.
# (2) 12 Dec 2012, 11:48AM: Sick:
Just returned from San Francisco. I could feel the tickle in my throat start late Monday afternoon. With zinc, citrusy or chamomile herbal teas, Emergen'C, whiskey, Thai curries, and cough drops, I was able to delay the real misery of the cold until after I got off the plane last night. (A flight attendant issued me booze, forgot to charge me for it, then waved away my attempts to pay. Free as in beer -- still sometimes a novelty.)
It still surprises me how miserable I find it to be sick. My fine motor control goes away. My speech goes aphasic. I cannot meet my own standards of competence, so I have to take a day off work, but since my ambitions remain the same, it's just a frustrating day of the hamster wheel in my head fruitlessly spinning.
I am grumpy and bad company but Leonard is sweetness and light. I don't know how he does it. I am in my thirties and I need to recognize what I'm just not good at. Maybe I will always be dissatisfied and impatient.
# 25 Dec 2012, 05:35PM: A Merry Christmas:
Yesterday in my weekly one-on-one with my boss, we talked about matters ranging from recruiting and hiring to Firefox OS to Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. I got to introduce him to the management fallacy "We must do something; this is something; therefore we must do it."
Today: slept late, edited Wikipedia and commented on MetaFilter, listened to Civil War songs, read fanfic. Ate warmed-up frozen stuff and leftover greens and Brussels sprouts and drank instant coffee and chamomile tea. Very quiet.
Ahhhh.
# (3) 31 Dec 2012, 12:06AM: Linkbunch:
I'm thoroughly enjoying the webcomic "Strong Female Protagonist": "SFP follows the adventures of a young middle-class American with super-strength, invincibility and a crippling sense of social injustice."
Please encourage people you know, especially women, to apply to Hacker School by January 1st if they enjoy making software. Financial subsidies are available.
So far, my favorite fanfic this month is "A Great and Gruesome Height", which is about Dar Williams's song "Iowa" and The West Wing and a closeted lesbian.
It's 1998, Josiah Bartlet is the Democratic nominee battling sitting Republican President Lawrence Armstrong for the Oval Office, and back in Iowa, Republican campaign coordinator Megan Richter is about to fall from a great and gruesome height.
And I found a lovely Babylon 5 fanvid from 2007 that hits most of the high points of the series.
I spent my Christmas this year alone in my apartment, which was very nice in some ways (zero travel, zero hassle, no presents, no feasts, etc.), but it would have been nice to see loved ones. And this Kate Beaton cartoon gets at the incoherent yearning far better than any Christmas carol I've ever heard.
Finally, links to a bunch of Key & Peele sketches that have made me very happy lately.
