man, this tablet project.
so it stopped charging. it was at 23%, I charge it for a couple hours, still 23%
I turn it off and leave it on the charger for 23%, confirm it's charging, and 8 hours later... 21%

so I get on the internet and order a replacement battery.
in the two days it takes it to arrive, the tablet somehow charges to 100%?
it arrives and I'm like "eh, fuck it. I have the battery here, that one is old, I might as well swap 'em.
I try to open up the tablet, following the instructions, and... the digitizer cracks.
it turns out the fact I had to replace the digitizer before meant that the new one wasn't glued in as well as it should be, so when I pried it open, the wrong part came off. Whoops.
that's okay, because of an amazon mix-up long ago, I actually have a spare digitizer on hand for this tablet! I can just replace that after the battery.
so I finish taking out the old battery, start inserting the new battery, screw it in, and... the power connector won't attach. Odd.
Maybe they sent me the wrong battery?
The old battery connector looks like this in my microscope.
and the new one looks like... oh shit.
so I go back to amazon and tell them "THIS BATTERY IS DOA REPLACE IT" and they're like "sure. just drop off the bad one at a drop-off place"
so I put the tablet mostly back together so it won't get damaged while I wait for the new battery to arrive, and...
oh. it's not just the digitizer. the screen cracked too. motherfucker
so I get on ebay and find the replacement screen and order that. I put the battery to be replaced back in the packaging and put it by my bedroom door, and go to sleep
I wake up in the morning and I'm like "I'm gonna go get coffee and drop off that amazon box!"

the box isn't there.
apparently while I was asleep, my lovely wife cleaned up some boxes in the room, and thought the box-in-a-box was empty. so she put it outside our room, in the hallway, to be taken to the trash/recycling. uh-oh
so I go out there and... it's not there either.

oh goody. my roommate was nice and proactive and didn't procrastinate on cleaning up boxes for trash/recycling and... it's gone.
and today is the day the truck comes and empties out the trash & recycling.
but good news:
it turns out she took it out AFTER the truck came!
I go out to the trash bins and it's sitting there, on the bottom of the recycling bin.
see it turns out that it being after the truck came makes it harder to get: if the truck hadn't come, it would have been sitting on top of a big pile of recycling.
since the truck did come, it's now on the bottom of the recycling bin.
6 feet (2 meters) away
so I go get my grabby arm thing and grab the outer box, and... it falls over. throwing the battery box out of it.

so now I can't grab the small box.
so I go back in and grab a pole I had handy and shove the battery over to the lower end of the recycling bin and FINALLY I GET IT
so now I can return it to amazon, and the recycler isn't going to get a Spicy Exploding Surprise
this is how far the story goes at the moment.

The drop-off point is less than a mile from my apartment, but at this point I half-expect that I'm going to make it halfway there and my car will get hit my a train
there's not a traintrack I'm going to cross to get there, but that's just how this project is going
anyway the replacement screen is on the way too.
it's probably going to arrive folded in half
also I'm pretty sure I passed the point where it would have been cheaper to just buy a new tablet like 8 steps back
anyway I haven't because of the Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
I can always afford a 20-30$ replacement part. I can't afford a 400$ tablet
anyway bring this fact up reminded me that a family member sent me a cheque for chrimbas, and I haven't cashed it yet. I should do that now!

and my bank's mobile app (which can cash cheques) is down.
I would normally take a screenshot of this to show you, but it turns out my phone just goes "image is null" when I try to take a screenshot. I think that's because my bank app uses that security protocol thing to disable screenshots.
normally when I run into this problem I just take a picture of my phone's screen using another device.

usually that's my tablet. *sigh*
I could use my webcam, but it turns out my webcam isn't working.
(I had a major USB Crisis the other day and disconnected a lot of USB hubs and shit to diagnose it, and haven't yet reconnected them all)
there we go, got it to work. sorta.

good to know it's on their end.
god, I bet they turned off the fucking backend servers (running cobol) for the christmas-new-year break.
just because they don't have any techs in-office to refill the punchcard bins
I say that like it hasn't been under like 8 hours since I was last researching building my own punchcard machinery.
an amusing related thing about banks and history:
I noticed that the #1 time I am most likely to brainfart and use my birth name is signing cheques.
You'd think that might make sense: I've had my current name for like a decade, cheques are getting less common, so most of my cheque-signing was naturally back in the Dark Ages of the 90s and early 2000s, when I had my boring name.
and it seems to make sense, for about 10 seconds, then you remember I'm ME.
I live in the 1990s PROFESSIONALLY.
I have like 3 Win95 machines within reach. There's actually almost a dozen pentium computers sitting on my bed right now!
but I'm never making an account on a BBS using a real dial-up modem and think "oh I'll just type in my old name here!"
it's only cheques.

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I think about this a lot, both in IT and civil infrastructure. It looks so trivial to “fix” from the outside. In fact, it is incredibly draining to do the entirely crushing work of real policy changes internally. It’s harder than drafting a blank page of how the world should be.


I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.

Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.

And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.

God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.

For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.

That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.