Gsuite Phishing?
I received an e-mail today at my work address with the subject [Feature Ideas [Customers Only]] - [Survey] The G Suite Admin Experience team wants to learn your needs around data/resource access boundaries
which looked like the following:

Quick — is this real or is this spam? What would you look for?
read moreElection Spam, 2016 ed., The Final Countdown
As you may or may not know, today is the day before the most contentious election in recent memory. Aside from the presidential race between a competent woman and a can of orange spray paint, there are also a host of down-ballot candidates at the federal, state, and local levels, and, here in San Francisco, an outstanding 42 state, regional, and city ballot propositions. As is usual, I've received a healthy pile of 77 pieces of election spam this season; here's my tally.

Overall, of the 77 pieces of mail that my wife and I received in the months leading up to this election, 15 of them were voting slates and 62 of them were either single-issue or, in many cases, dual-issue (U & P, Q & R). As far as I can tell, only a single one of them (the state-issued party-level official endorsements) even touched on the presidential campaign. Read on for details!
read moreElection Ads, 2016 ed., Part 1
Hello readers! If you've been living under a rock (or, really, anywhere that isn't California), this coming Tuesday (June 7th) is the most important primary election in California in recent memory! As befits such a momentous occasion, I've received another batch of election spam!1

Surprisingly, the biggest issue in this election in San Francisco isn't the presidential primary, but is instead the election of the Democratic County Central Committee (the DCCC); the vast majority of election spam that I received was either a complete slate for the DCCC, or an ad for an individual candidate ...
read moreSerialization Format Performance
Most of the work done in actual programming jobs is taking structured data in some particular format from one system, slightly tweaking it, and sending it off to some other system. When exchanging data between different processes, it's almost always necessary to serialize it into a series of bytes which can be sent across a dumb byte-oriented transport (such as TCP). There are hundreds upon hundreds of different serialization formats out there, but I just wanted to talk about a few of the most common that folks use with the Python programming language.
read more2015 Election Ads - Update
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the election spam that I'd gotten. I figured that since voting had begun, the flow of ads would taper off. Boy was I wrong! Here's my current count:
| Candidate/Issue | —2015-10-18 | 2015-11-18—2015-11-18 | Total (so far) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yes on Aaron Peskin/No on Julie Christensen | 15 | 13 | 28 |
| Yes on Julie Christensen/No on Aaron Peskin | 8 | 18 | 26 |
| Yes on Prop A | 2 | 3 | 5 |
| Yes on Prop D | 2 | 6 | 8 |
| Yes on Prop F | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| No on Prop F | 7 | 3 | 10 |
| No on Prop I | 6 | 3 | 9 |
| Vicki Hennessy for Sheriff | - | 1 | 1 |
| Voting Slates | 5 | 15 | 20 |
| (total) | 46 | 63 | 109 |
In addition to all of this paper spam, I now get between one and four phone calls a day from supporters of various candidates (and, in one case, from a candidate themselves). And three times now, I've caught campaigners tailgating into my apartment building to annoy people door-to-door.
Here's the list of distinct organizations I've gotten voting voting slates from so far:
- San Francisco Tenant's Union
- Alice B Toklas Democratic Club
- Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club
- San Francisco Young Democrats Club
- Affordable Housing Alliance
- San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee
- Sierra Club
- FDR Democratic Club
- District 3 Democrats Club
- Affordable Future for San Francisco PAC / Jane Kim
Most of these have sent three or four different ads with the same slate but different artwork or highlighting different issues.
Augh.
At least there are only two more days.
read more2015 Election Ads
You may or may not know this, but 2015 is shaping up to be a big election year in San Francisco. Yes, it's an off-year. Yes, there are "only" nine propositions on the ballot. Nonetheless, if you believe the rhetoric, this is the year that's going to make it or break it for the city of San Francisco. How do I know all this? It's because I read through all 46 pieces of printed advertising that I've received so far this season.
read more
