Done Since 2018-09-23

Not a bad week? Hard for me to tell. Nothing disastrous happened, anyway, and my trigger thumb appears to be mostly better. I sent out two job applications, and got back a rejection from the one I had a phone screen for last week. There is one from a couple of weeks ago that I'm also waiting to hear from.

I spent almost all of Friday and a lot of Saturday programming -- it's very encouraging to know that I can still do that. It suggests that I probably can handle a full-time job. The program in question is an update of the rotating hypercube (and other polytopes) demo I wrote somewhere around 1990. The original was, of course, in C; the current version is in JavaScript. I'll be packaging the pieces, thereby adding to the confoundingly cluttered chaos that is the npm package ecosystem. Last night's work was unit tests for the polytope classes. So those are working, and I'm learning more about JavaScript.

The security kerfuffle of the week was Facebook's announcement that 90 million accounts had been compromised. Think about that number for a moment. You can find out whether your account was compromised in this or any other breach by entering your email address at Have I Been Pwned. Think about the fact that Facebook is not on their list of the ten largest breaches.

The privacy kerfuffle of the week was the latest version of Google's Chrome browser, which automatically logs in the browser whenever you log in to any of Google's other properties, e.g. gmail, calendar, and maps. You can turn the "feature" off, but you'll have to google for the instructions. Irony intended.

It's worth noting that if you only have one Google account and keep Chrome logged in so that you can sync, , this doesn't affect you, and you might even consider it the convenience that Google says it is. And if you're on Android or ChromeOS, where Google is your login, or (like me) have already switched to Firefox for other reasons, this doesn't affect you either.

I went through the list of symptoms at Burning Out: 12 Real Signs That You’re Overdoing It, referring to my last couple of years at $A. Twelve out of twelve. The author says that "Burnout is [...] a sustained—yet unsustainable—pressure on yourself that causes a physical, mental, or emotional collapse. That collapse can cause you to make really drastic, and sometimes disastrous, decisions." Yeah. That.

( Notes & links, as usual )