roguelazer's website

Hello infrequent readers: here's a piece of good news for once: as of October 27th, I've moved! $SPOUSE and I now live in the Elmwood neighborhood of Berkeley, California in a nice little two-bedroom one-and-a-half-bedroom single-family residence. It's a little surreal; even though where we live has a pretty nice mixed-use vibe (there's an apartment building around the corner, a bunch of restaurants nearby, and a Whole Foods only a few blocks away), it's still practically rural compared to the apartment in the Tendernob that I've lived in for the last eight years¹.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but Twitter hasn't been a very good company in the last few years. Between the aiding and abetting of white supremacists, the continued hosting of our obnoxious orange tweeter-in-chief, and the ongoing user-hostile platform changes, it's just not as fun of a place as it was when I joined on November 14, 2007. So, uh, I'm not there any more.

No, I didn't delete my Twitter account. However, I have started trying to use a new microblogging system in its stead: Mastodon. Mastodon is an interesting ...

Hello intermittent readers, and welcome to the latest edition in my series on electoral advertising. As you may or may not know, June 5th is California's primary election for 2018. We've got a contentious list of ballot measures, as well as a variety of local, state, and federal offices up for election, which means it's time for a bunch of special interest groups to spend money sending my family high-gloss advertising pamphlets.

On the ballot this time around:

• Governor
• Lt. Governor
• Secretary of State
• State Controller
• Treasurer
• Attorney General
• Insurance Commissioner
• Board of Equalization
• US Senator
• US Representative
• State Assembly
• Superior Court Judge (x4)
• Superintendent of Public Instruction
• Mayor
• 5 State Measures
• 1 Regional Measure
• 9 City Measures

After the fold, let's see who's spending their advertising budget in densest San Francisco.

Here's an amusing iOS 11 bug:

If an iOS device is set to the en-US locale and Siri is set to a British voice, when reading dates aloud, Siri transposes months and days. For example, given the command Remind me Wednesday Morning to buy milk, Siri responds with OK, I added it for Wednesday at 10/11/17 7:00. When reading this aloud, Siri reads it as OK, I added it for Wednesday the 10th of November two thousand and seventeen at seven o'clock.

It seems kind of crazy to me the Apple is parsing the raw text shown on screen rather than having some kind of machine-readable tagged data. So weird!

I reported this to Apple. I guess we'll see if it gets fixed in iOS 12.

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?

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!