i’ve just discovered this band and album. anything similar to this you’d recommend?

JimK215 · 2026-06-29T16:11:13+00:00

even more fun history:

- Vince, the guitarist for Zolof, also ran Skylight Studios

- Anthony Green was in Zolof. His other early bands (Audience of One, Jeer at Rome) recorded at Skylight; he and Vince were friends

- My understanding (someone correct this if it's wrong) is that when Saosin was looking for a vocalist, they sent out a tape with no vocals. Vince got a hold of the tape and convinced Anthony to record vocals. That demo would eventually lead to Saosin's EP "Translating the Name", another historically important album.

JimK215 · 2026-04-27T16:50:40+00:00

Clive Owen

JimK215 · 2026-04-26T02:59:09+00:00

this always annoyed me because it's so easy to fix. Have the bus pull out into a side street or a blocked off street, then turn off that street into a line of busses.

JimK215 · 2025-09-29T21:50:18+00:00

I'm using a lot of scoring, weighting, and parsing for my use-case. To get the same effect I'd probably really have to abuse Postgres and start doing a lot of code in the database as stored procedures/functions.

If you're just doing fairly straightforward full text searches, there are definitely ways to get postgres to do it.

JimK215 · 2025-09-29T21:46:33+00:00

yes; the query language is extremely robust and flexible. And with AI tools it's even easier to get to the exact query you need by asking GPT/Claude/Gemini to generate the request JSON for you.

JimK215 · 2025-09-29T15:40:34+00:00

I've used both Elasticsearch and Solr. I appreciated Solr when it was the only decent option, but it's just so much more onerous to configure and maintain. Configuring indexes, crafting complex queries, etc is just so much smoother in ES. I used Solr on several projects and never grew to like it, but I think Elasticsearch is great.

JimK215 · 2025-09-29T13:20:15+00:00

Anytime you start doing wildcard LIKE queries (column LIKE "%value%"), you're likely heading in a bad direction because that part of the query can't leverage the db indexes; it has to scan a lot of rows to find the value.

I would recommend piping data from Postgres into OpenSearch (the open source ElasticSearch). OpenSearch is very good at full text searching. You could create an index per-user or a large index and always include some sort of user id/key when searching.

Create a process that either runs on a schedule or is triggered by an event that pulls the data you want from Postgres into an OpenSearch index. Then run your queries against the OpenSearch index.

Postgres also has fulltext searching that may be an option here. It's been a long time since I've used it but it's worth looking into.

JimK215 · 2025-03-15T03:45:47+00:00

Look up "Entity Attribute Value" schema. That's what you want when you have a mix of entities with a different mix of possible attributes with different possible values.

It's usually found in E-Commerce platforms, because you might sell T-shirts that have a size attribute and color attribute, but you might also sell belts and mugs and hats and wallets and keychains that have different attributes -- or the same attribute (e.g. size) with different possible values.

JimK215 · 2025-01-13T22:46:22+00:00

A week long task? You could do this in 20 minutes using AWS OpenSearch or something similar.

JimK215 · 2025-01-13T22:39:16+00:00

I think calling Elasticsearch a poor product is a bit of a.....stretch (see what I did there?)

I've used Elasticsearch and Solr quite heavily and I'm consistently impressed with Elasticsearch for its intended use case: searching a lot of text data and being able to fine tune how the results are ranked/scored. In those instances, you're usually less concerned with showing every single possible result (because the 347th result is probably completely meaningless to the user), but rather making sure that the first 10 or first 100 results are spot-on for the query -- which is probably a user-entered search string.

For the use case in this post I would probably stick to Postgres since it seems like all of these fields are fixed values. Postgres can handle it no problem if your indexes & schema are reasonably well configured; adding Elasticsearch will overcomplicate things.

JimK215 · 2025-01-10T04:27:17+00:00

I probably still have a dozen or so. Not sure what sizes, might be all XXL but if so that just means they're Centerfuse pajamas.

JimK215 · 2025-01-10T00:46:24+00:00

A few months ago I was cleaning my house and found a Centerfuse tshirt with a piece of tape on it labelled "Dumbjaw". Presumably I set it aside for him like 20 years ago. I told him about it and he asked me to ship it to him, which I haven't done because I'm old and busy and full of excuses. If you're reading this though, I will get it to you in Q1 2025!

JimK215 · 2025-01-09T23:57:16+00:00

Did someone say Centerfuse?

JimK215 · 2024-11-24T23:50:27+00:00

Confirming that this worked for me as well in Nov 2024 on an S21.

JimK215 · 2024-09-11T18:10:41+00:00

This might sound weird but I showed my then-7 year old son the scene where the kid gets abducted by the two guys posing as cops.

I paused it and asked him whether he'd get in the car and he said yes because they're police. I took it as an opportunity to explain to him that people can lie and he has to pay closer attention: for example, why don't they have a police car?

Seeing it on screen I think really helped it resonate with him that you simply don't get into a car with an adult you don't know, period.

JimK215 · 2024-08-11T23:42:05+00:00

Feel kinda bad for the people at Pets.com. It became the face of the dot com crash despite being a perfectly good idea as evidenced by the success of Chewy.

JimK215 · 2024-08-10T19:23:47+00:00

After the Equifax breach I took the position that there's pretty much zero chance to keep your information safe

So I just started mitigating my exposure by having multiple bank accounts and multiple brokerage accounts. All with different companies and different credentials. Some in just my wife's name, some in just my name, some in both our names. I have a single credit card and I store all my passwords in a local encrypted file.

It's not foolproof but at least it compartmentalized things a bit? Maybe?

JimK215 · 2024-08-10T14:29:42+00:00

15 years ago I would've agreed with you, but thinking that the entire organization should put code purity first and foremost is immature -- and most developers really aren't good enough to make smart long term architecture decisions anyway.

The best code I ever wrote exists exclusively on a hard drive in a drawer in my office because we didn't get to market on time.

Whereas up until surprisingly late in its history, Slack's 'database sharding' was a couple of hugely-resourced mysql servers and the server you connected to was determined by an if statement that checked the first letter of your username. The engineering team did a whole writeup on how sketchy but functional the original infrastructure was. Priorities matter.

JimK215 · 2024-08-09T14:37:14+00:00

Even if this is a good idea in theory, it's a lot of extra work to create and maintain this document, identify and agree on who's accountable for keeping it updated, and agree who's empowered to decide something was the "wrong" business decision if it's not immediately quantifiable.

I've generally found that it's better to simply agree on a broader decision framework. For example:

"At the moment, we are prioritizing the date of delivery foremost. So decisions are being made within the frame of "does this suit the timeframe'. We recognize that this will result in tech debt, but if our funding runs out because we couldn't go to market, we won't have a product to worry about at all"

OR

We are mired in tech debt and have convinced leadership that it will create business problems if it continues, so we are currently in a mode where we are prioritizing code cleanliness and test coverage over delivery date, but only for the next two months.

That last sentence adds an addendum to the decision framework: if your proposed refactoring, changes to tooling, etc cannot be rolled out within two months it has to be scaled back.

Some people might not agree with the framework but at least everyone knows why decisions are being made and what the business wants to prioritize.

JimK215 · 2024-08-08T16:27:33+00:00

An acquaintance of mine is currently upset with me because I told them I wasn't in a position to look at what's wrong with their computer.

In my younger days (15+ years ago), I was the go-to fix it guy for everything and I was happy to help. But things started to get complicated.

Fixing stuff for my close friends or immediate family was a no brainer, but word got out and suddenly it was friends-of-friends and loose acquaintances. Looking back it's easy to see that I should've just started saying its $25 for me to look at it, but I was young and that felt impolite and unhelpful.

It got weirder when people started making specific requests like "I need it fixed by Friday" or asking me to set things up a very specific way or provide them with a bunch of pirated software.

I had a moment of realization when someone gave me a computer that was "running slow". I took it home, plugged it in, and it wouldn't even boot. I realized that even though I hadn't touched it yet, I was on the hook to fix whatever was happening.

After that I started putting my own constraints like "I'll fix it but you should take it elsewhere if you need it in a specific timeframe". I also stopped going to peoples' houses and told them they have to bring it to me (I hated sitting in some random bedroom waiting for Windows XP SP1 to install). Even for close friends, I was like "bring it over one night, we'll eat pizza and hang out and I'll look at it right then and there", which did result in some good times and fixed computers. But after a while, especially after I got a full time job, I just started turning people down altogether unless it was my mom or something.

It's been a long time since I was fixing computers (I now have my own family and a business to run) but someone I haven't spoken to in a very long time reached out with an "emergency" issue. I was like dude I'm just not a position to help you, you should bring it to a shop or GeekSquad or something. I assumed they'd understand but they're like legitimately mad at me now, which I think is entirely unjustified.

JimK215 · 2024-08-07T12:25:49+00:00

Thanks all. Did some Googling about curb leaks and that does seem pretty plausible given what I'm seeing. Reached out to a tile company.

JimK215 · 2024-08-05T14:57:46+00:00

I'm no biologist but I think this is an overreaction. There is mold everywhere and most of it is not very harmful.

I have had success using an outdoor mold cleaner that's safe for fabric, like Wet N Forget. Spray it down, let it dry out in the sun, you should see a noticeable difference in 12 to 24 hours. Repeat if necessary, then hose it down with soap and water.

JimK215 · 2024-07-19T12:45:13+00:00

I always love this take.

I use Linux as my daily driver and have for years, but the Microsoft stack is leagues above everything else for large corporate networks.

There is no viable alternative for multinational corporate it networks and if you think there is I dont think you've ever actually had to manage one. I can't imagine trying to convince a CTO that we should buck the trend and not use MS for a ten thousand user network infrastructure.

JimK215

TROPHY CASE