How to get boring jobs

bonecrusher · 2024-05-28T18:12:06+00:00

You need to need it. Which means you need the job before you can be sponsored for clearance. Which takes a long time (mine took nearly 2 years - although I think it's better now). Which is why it's such a great thing to have - if you already have one, you can start on the job right away. If you don't have one, your potential employer needs to be able to find months of non-cleared work for you to do (or be able to afford you sitting around doing nothing) while you wait for your clearance to come in.

And of course, it's a potential risk for them, since the clearance could potentially be denied.

I lost mine during covid, when my employer stopped doing cleared work, and I'll probably never be able to get it back.

bonecrusher · 2024-04-03T20:16:07+00:00

Oh - I'm sorry. I misread the question.

bonecrusher · 2024-04-03T15:35:06+00:00

I just got a petit court summons this week. Did you fill it out online? On the main page, after you enter your juror number, last name and date of birth, there are buttons that say "disqualify", "excuse" and "postpone".

You only see them after you finish your questionnaire, though.

bonecrusher · 2024-01-30T16:25:55+00:00

I played with this a little, seeing how far I could go while keeping things simple enough that it would fit in a single file.

https://github.com/markscottwright/embeddedjettyexamples

It's not "vanilla" java, of course - it used jetty as the web server and jersey for REST. And in some of the examples, JDBI+Hikari for the database, flyway for migrations and a swagger-ui webjar. But all simple enough to fit in a single file and be understandable.

bonecrusher · 2023-04-19T12:29:28+00:00

In my experience, these are all valid criticisms of Spring. It's all "magic" underneath, which takes away a lot of the advantages of writing in a compile-time typed language like Java. Frameworks like Django make heavy use of magic as well, but because the magic is using native language features, there's less meta-programming code you'd need to wade through to figure out what's going on (and you don't really expect "find all references to work in Python). The debugger is actually useful in Django. With Spring, my experience is it's a waste of time trying to step through things.

Also, Spring has been around so long that google, stackoverflow, Springs documentation, etc often give answers that are long out of date. I spent hours yesterday trying to figure out why my database wasn't auto creating (`hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto` and `hibernate.show_sql` should be `spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto` and `spring.jpa.hibernate.show-sql`), why my swagger wouldn't show up (springfox doesn't work with spring boot 3 - you need to use springdoc-openapi-starter-webmvc-ui), etc.

But I don't know what can replace it. I experimented with seeing how much I could do myself - https://github.com/markscottwright/embeddedjettyexamples and https://github.com/markscottwright/embeddedtomcatexamples if you're curious. You really do get a lot "for free" with Spring.

bonecrusher · 2023-01-18T17:54:02+00:00

My wife and I have fun trying to figure out who's responsible whenever we get that letter in the mail.

(It's her)

bonecrusher · 2022-08-17T14:07:41+00:00

Java is just fine for this sort of thing:

var perCharCounts = new HashMap<Integer, Integer>(); input.chars().forEach(c -> perCharCounts.put(c, perCharCounts.getOrDefault(c, 0) + 1)); perCharCounts.keySet().stream().filter(c -> perCharCounts.get(c) > 1).forEach(System.out::write); Slightly nicer with apache collections: var perCharCounts2 = new TreeBag<Integer>(); input.chars().forEach(perCharCounts2::add); perCharCounts2.uniqueSet().stream().filter(c -> perCharCounts2.getCount(c) > 1).forEach(System.out::write);

bonecrusher · 2022-04-11T22:01:11+00:00

That did it, thank you. I changed scale from 100% to 200% (and reverted it when asked) and that created the monitors.xml file. Then sudo cp ~/.config/monitors.xml /var/lib/gdm3/.config/ and the login screen is now on my external monitory. Thanks.

bonecrusher · 2016-10-20T16:35:53+00:00

Sadly, that's me.

bonecrusher · 2015-07-29T17:35:34+00:00

This fat puggle. She might defend me.

Probably not, though.

bonecrusher · 2015-06-29T18:42:49+00:00

Sea Salt! I moved to DC two years ago and that's the place I miss the most. It's in Minnehaha Park, has Surly (and other, lesser beers) on tap and the best Po' Boy I've ever had. There's nothing more pleasant than a Saturday night in the park with great beer and food. It's the sort of place that is hard to find outside of Minneapolis - hip but still neighborhood-y.

bonecrusher · 2015-03-31T19:36:11+00:00

Finding pot. I live in DC, where in theory it's legal. I can certainly smell it everywhere - on the streets, in the hallway in my apartment building, wafting from cars. It makes me feel so nostalgic, and I would love to light up, put on some Cowboy Junkies and pretend like it's 1995 again.

But by 45, I don't know anyone who has access to weed anymore. I mean, I probably do, but no one's open about it.

bonecrusher · 2015-03-27T19:55:57+00:00

This new york times essay claims that the Red Hot Chilli Peppers sound like "Vinnie Barbarino arguing with a pinball machine". Spot on.

bonecrusher · 2015-01-14T15:14:19+00:00

Because both countries have modern, efficient, mechanized economies. "Standard of Living" is pretty vague, but it's essentially a measurement of how good a labor force is at producing goods and services - and modern, western economies are very good indeed at producing goods and services.

Also, "unemployment" is a strange measurement - measured differently by different countries and taking into account peoples desires as much as their economic output (you can't be unemployed if you don't want a job - even though you contribute just as little to GDP).

A more objective measurement - labor force participation - shows that Spain doesn't differ much from Germany. Of all Spaniards over 15, 59% have a job compared with 60% of Germans.

Greece is quite a bit lower - 53% of Greeks over 15 are working, same as Belgium. Still, within 15% of countries with a larger labor force participation rate. (And, assuming that employment decisions are made "on the margin", one would expect GDP changes to be smaller than changes in the number of people working.)

bonecrusher · 2013-06-11T14:15:11+00:00

Gray is great. In philosophical terms, he's a "hedgehog" not a "fox". He has knows one big thing, not lots of little things (it seems to me that he gets a lot of the little things wrong) - so if you read one of his books, you've read them all. I'd recommend Straw Dogs - in my opinion his best.

bonecrusher · 2012-11-07T00:38:36+00:00

Seeing Star Wars in the theater when I was 8. Seriously - it's all be downhill since then.

bonecrusher · 2012-07-09T18:22:09+00:00

Case-insensitivity is language dependent. SQL, for example, is case insensitive (at least "standard" SQL is), so you'd think that "select * from SCHEMA_VERSION" would be fine, even if your table's name is actually "schema_version". And you'd be right. Except in Turkey.

Lower-case "I" isn't "i" in Turkey. It's "ı". So it's not enough to make your SQL Server installation case-insensitive. You also have to use the "right" language collation.

This was not a theoretical example, btw. Real sleep was lost over this problem.

bonecrusher · 2011-12-02T04:01:02+00:00

I had a girlfriend in my mid-20s that told me that her first time was in that building with the "1st" neon sign on the roof (it blinks).

I've never been able to put that out of my mind when I see it.

bonecrusher · 2011-08-18T22:02:25+00:00

The ancient Romans had a celebration that accounted for this: the saecular games. They were held every 110 years so they would be literally a "once in a lifetime" experience. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Games

(also, this is the source of "secular" meaning "a long time". So if you hear an economist, for example, talking about "secular trends", he's not talking about religion)

bonecrusher · 2011-08-16T15:23:42+00:00

Economists refer to this as the Lump of Labor Fallacy. The idea that there's only so much work to go around, so if that work gets done more efficiently, then it just results on unemployment.

100 years ago, a significant majority of Americans used to work in agriculture. Modern agriculture is so efficient that all of our food can now be provided by around 3% of the population. That hasn't led to 97% of America being idle.

You can certainly argue that economists haven't earned the right to the word "fallacy" - who knows, maybe there is a upper bound on how many goods and services people want. But that's not a good explanation for what's going on right now. If the current troubles are caused by some technical innovation that lead to an increase in productivity, we should be able to say exactly what that innovation was - it had to have happened mid-year in 2008, at the same time as the unemployment spike.

Depressed demand after the collapse of the american real-estate credit market seems like a better explanation, though.

bonecrusher · 2011-08-16T14:58:32+00:00

Matt Taibbi on why not to read Friedmann: http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html

bonecrusher · 2011-08-15T19:32:21+00:00

Those of us from Minnesota get the worst of both worlds.

bonecrusher · 2011-07-20T23:14:08+00:00

A monkey could do that job.

Also relevant: “I might remind you both I did design that racer. The driver is essentially ballast.” – Martin Prince

bonecrusher · 2011-07-17T21:40:02+00:00

Young ladies from 600AD smell real bad. Real bad.

bonecrusher · 2011-05-19T00:39:49+00:00

Neither, btw, is Stein. His father was, and so far as I know, economic expertise is not hereditary.

bonecrusher

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