IBM’s Asshole Test by johnpublic
This is an interesting anecdote that demonstrates pretty clearly that soft skills matter.
Foundry VTT
I’ve set up a new instance of Foundry VTT. As an old time pen and paper RPG player I find it quite impressive to see where the tools to play traditional tabletop RPGs online are these days.
If you’re interested in checking it out, you can see it here.
Cats and Dogs
Emmanuel Acho on the Current Situation
Managing a TLS Certificate Authority with OpenSSL
I’ve updated my old notes on managing a certificate authority and turned my current usage into a GitLab project. If you are looking at using TLS certificates on a private network, this is a good starting point to learn more about the process and best practices.
Take Care by Michael D. Higgins
The President of Ireland is a poet of some acclaim. He published this today on the official Facebook page of his office. Pretty sure this is a first for me, linking to Facebook, but I thought it was worth sharing under the current circumstances.
A Motivating Thought on Coping With Social Distancing
Truly believe deep in your heart, that by stepping out of the social realm right now, you are doing one of the greatest services you can do [for] the public’s health.
Carolyn Cannuscio, University of Pennsylvania social epidemiologist
Week 1
This week the CBC sent most of its employees who could reasonably work remotely home. It came fairly suddenly on Monday shortly after the federal government announced it’s formal recommendation, formalizing something that was starting to happen organically in various parts of the organization late last week.
The Data Centres team routinely is required to connect to systems remotely to deal with support requests and other operational needs off hours, so for us this is a lot less disruptive than it might be for a journalist or somebody whose primary job function requires a lot of face-to-face meetings. It’s still a strange experience. I’ve had jobs in the past where I often chose to work from home, but since I’ve been a member of the Data Centres team, I’ve generally only been working remotely when I’ve been sick or had an appointment or delivery that I needed to be at home for. This is a big adjustment. Not only is it less than ideal to not have my primary workstation setup, I’ve also been thrust into coordinating team meetings and other collaborative activities via telework tools that we don’t have a lot of experience with as a team, and with almost no warning.
The positive side of things is that everybody’s been pretty helpful and seems to be doing their best to adjust to the new circumstances, under the conditions there’s not much more I could ask for in this respect. We’re all in this together, and it could be a long haul depending on how things go and how seriously Canadians decide to take our guidance with respect to social distancing — a term we didn’t know a few weeks ago.
I’m going to make an effort to log the experience here. Even if this has been a very busy week that has left little time to dwell on the situation, I’m sure that once things settle in I’m going to have a lot of time to think about things, so this is as good an outlet as any. Might as well make lemonade out of this and try to do some non-work related writing, something that I’ve been doing much less of in the past several years.
It’s my birthday tomorrow, this is likely one that I won’t forget!
Social Distancing HOWTO
Toronto is now is an early stage of a pretty strange situation that none of us have probably ever faced before. I’ve been working from home for the past two days now and I’ve been trying to figure out just what the rules are.
The good news is that it turns out that not only are you allowed to go outdoors, at least for the time being, the official medical advice is to do so for your own health. Just try to avoid close contact with other people. So with that in mind I thought I’d share this useful guide that the City of Toronto has put together for people trying to navigate the current confusion.