My kid just WhatsApped from his German exchange trip. They had to call an ambulance for him.
He has food poisoning, was very pale and nauseous. He was dehydrated and his blood pressure was dropping.
He's fine now but I wanted to share this because it has the most Western Europe Is a Civilized Place ending ever.
The paramedics came to the mall, took him into the ambulance, gave him an IV, checked him out, stayed with him until he felt better, then told him "No charge. Enjoy your trip to Germany." And if that wasn't enough, when they realized the group had had to move onto the train station without him, they gave him a ride over there to catch up with them.
I'm so ground down by the predatory realities of America in general in 2025 that this just about blew my fucking mind.
REMINDER TO AMERICANS: Amtrak sucks (and so does your domestic airline service).
https://cupoftea.social/@moof/114528204740010932
A picture may say a thousand words, but a few well-chosen words of alt-text can make that picture accessible to a broader community.
As well as including people with visual impairments, alt-text can clarify the bit of the image which was important to the person who tooted it, and can explain what the image conveys.
It also makes the content accessible to people in low bandwidth or small data bundle situations, as well as those accessing via a text-mode browser.
Is today #FediHire Friday? Sure looks like it!
What I'm looking for: A senior level, individual contributor role supporting Windows, Active Directory, Certificates, PKI, Azure, and information security in a large environment. Interested in relocating outside of the US. I like to solve weird problems and make computers run smoothly. I want to help others use technology effectively.
My main focus the last few years has been rebuilding and modernizing a struggling certificate management team. That includes growing the team to meet our company needs, migrating our AD-integrated private PKI stack, getting a handle on our web PKI consumption, and making massive improvements to our certificate lifecycle management platform. I supported and advised our CyberSec and Desktop teams as we rolled out multi-factor authentication to 50,000 employees and contractors across the US. My background in understanding deep computer fundamentals, talent for quickly grasping nuances of larger systems, and calmness in a crisis have contributed to quickly resolving major technology outages regardless of root cause.
This role hasn't been exclusively technical. A big part of my current job is building relationships with our developers to help them understand how certificates work, the responsible ways to use them, and what our relevant internal policies are. I've been training and teaching junior and mid-level engineers both practical PKI concepts and our specific enterprise requirements. I've gotten to spend some time with upper management to both explain the immediate challenges we've had and the plans we can implement improve our infrastructure, reducing costs and outages.
While this position has been focused on certs and how to use them, I'm very comfortable considering a technical leadership role for Windows (server and desktop) administration and Active Directory. I also have some good experience with Azure and virtualization platforms, but they haven't been my daily focus for several years.
My current employer is direct retail for general public consumers. I've also worked in banking/finance, manufacturing, and architecture firms. The common thread is I love to help people leverage technology for their goals, to help them be more effective.
In my personnel/volunteer time I've done very similar: working backstage with lights/sounds/projections so live performers can do their best.
Right now I'm in Syracuse, New York (about five hours from NYC), but I'm open to relocation/migration anywhere in the world.
PMs open if you want to talk details. Boosts/reshares appreciated.
#Job #GetFediHired #ITJobs #Windows #ActiveDirectory #Certificate #PKI #Azure #Migration #CyberSecurity #InfoSecurity
Hi all. I would otherwise ask y’all to consider donating to support our instance(s) but instead, I’m going to ask you to consider helping to support one of our own, @catbailey, who was one of the many casualties of recent government cutbacks. You can support Cat here: https://gofund.me/f5aab496
Serious Business People in Suits flummoxed as car company run by friendless open neo-nazi who also routinely calls people "retard" on his online Klan forum and works as an unelected, unaccountable lord chancellor to materially destroy the U.S. as an economy and as a republic sees profits drop 71%.
If video games have taught me anything, it's an unlockable expansion
Drink special @ Promiscuous: Democracy Drinks In Darkness -- Kraken dark rum, ginger ale, and lime
"If someone says something Nazi on your page and you say fuck you and kick them off, that's fine.
If someone says something Nazi on your page and you don't, you're a part of the problem."
- SF writer Steve Perry
@bflipp yeah, I’ve been kinda dancing around whether I want to do state-based or migration-based. State seems a lot more straightforward, and the flow seems simpler. I’m not sure how/what the tools work to generate what I want with migration-based, how source control works with that, how long it takes a new database to and what needs to exist in every environment, and how/what gets checked in and where, to support each env. But I’ll go read more.
@bflipp I feel like I’m missing something critical here. Deploys are typically straightforward, since you’re just adding a column or altering a SP idempotently. But it seems that the devs have to write all the migration scripts, which we’ve had issues with. That’s why I’d been looking at SQLpackage/red-gate, since they can(?) both script out the current environment and make the various env’s match, where it generates the change scripts and you just double check them first.
@bflipp thanks, was curious about it. What’s it look like as a dev, especially if you have multiple network-separated dev/qa/cert/prod env’s?
I check out from source control (can I get a standard source control check-in with full schema?),
alter local DB so it looks like prod (unsure?),
make my changes locally,
check in the new state of the DB(unsure?),
liquibase (?) generates the changeset, provides scripts, and then we move that to the next environment(?) and have LB deploy?
Today's real 'fake news' incident (which added $2.4 trillion in market value and erased it nearly as quickly) hopefully will be dissected in every journalism class and newsroom. https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/07/media/fake-news-x-post-caused-market-whiplash/index.html
This is very interesting. One of my favorite novels -- this has made me want to reread it.
DOGE fired me.
Last Friday, the National Endowment for the Humanities put the majority of its staff on administrative leave. On Wednesday, they fired us.
This was the most fulfilling and important job of my career, and I'd hoped to retire there. It was an honor to serve my country alongside colleagues with such integrity, care, and wisdom.
I don't know where my next adventure will be, and I'd appreciate your help figuring that out.
At NEH, I was the Chief Data Officer and founded its Office of Data and Evaluation. Before that, I led initiatives at universities and libraries. For my next role, I'd like to help some nonprofit, philanthropy, university, or mission-driven organization make the world a little better.
If you know anyone hiring a senior leader who cares deeply and broadly, please have them reach out to weingart.scott+future@gmail.com.