Ode to a Pager

I've been on-call for most of the last 11 years. I was on-call for the CS Department at Mudd. I was on-call at
Yelp, in a rotation that at times contained as few as three people. I was on-call at Uber in rotations ranging from one
to twenty people. And I've been on-call at EasyPost — initially in a rotation with one other person, and
currently with two other people. I have responded to tens of thousands of pages. I have been woken up in the middle of
the night hundreds of times. For the last seven or …
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Ditching Gmail After 15 Years

Everyone who even casually follows the tech industry knows, intellectually, that Google builds an enormous dystopian profile of everything you do in order to sell ads.
But I think there's a difference between knowing that Google Analytics is a shameless back door to do cross-site tracking and actually coming face-to-face with your own profile. Yesterday, CNBC featured a
story about a new
Google UI which shows you a list of every purchase that you've made in the last few years:
https://myaccount.google.com/purchases. For me, wide variety of commercial activity — every
purchase I've ever made at a …
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GPG Key Transition

My current PGP/GnuPG key is expiring, so I've rolled a new one. The ID of the new key
is 0x3C7775DD37811E62
(full fingerprint:
1ED5 E5A3 01C3 D109 9040 2289 3C77 75DD 3781 1E62
)
and it should be in your favorite keyservers,
cross-signed by my old key. You can also find it at https://files.roguelazer.com/roguelazer.gpg.
It has also been attached to my keybase.io account and my Github
profile. My previous key (0xAEE8F2454A41B87D
) has not been revoked
and has not been compromised, but you should still stop using it if possible. The new key is a 4096-bit RSA
key with SHA-2 digest signatures — I'm not quite bold enough to switch to ECC for a long-lived key yet.
My signed transition document is below, and can also be found at
2019-04-27-key-transition-statement.txt.asc if
you prefer to download it directly.
Additionally, I have generated a separately-signed key with ID 0x233E5EAF0EC3ABA9
(full fingerprint:
14E8 9660 188D BC9B 2C17 67AA 233E 5EAF 0EC3 ABA9
). This key should not be used for communication,
but will only be used to sign VCS commits/tags/&c (in Git and perhaps in
Pijul). It's going to be on my [managed] work computer, so treat it with a grain
of salt.
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Wildflowers
I went up yesterday with my wife's family to hike around on some Sonoma Land Trust
property up in the North Bay and brought my
camera. It's amazing to
see the hills green and growing after so many years of drought! You can see a
smattering of photos in this flickr
album, but
here are some of my favorites:
If you're in Northern California and are physically-able, you should try to get out and enjoy this; it's gorgeous!
Vim Setup: 2019

It's been a little while since I posted about my editor configuration, and I thought I might post what I'm using
now. I guess the most notable change is that (after much prodding from my coworker Drew
Ditthardt) I've switched from Vim to Neovim. Neovim is a vim-compatible editor
written in C and Lua (as opposed to Vim, which is written in C, Vimscript, and prayers). I upgraded to Vim 8 last
year and have had a few too many segmentation faults in the editor, so I decided to switch to something where more
functionality was implemented in a memory-safe language. So far, Neovim has been pretty good to me, although the
new process model means that it's pretty hard to write functions which invoke an external process which takes
interactive input from a user.
As is probably expected for this sort of thing, here's a couple of screenshots; the first is of VimR, and the second is
from NeoVim in Terminal.app
, both editing files from rust-mysql-binlog:

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Site Updates
Some minor site updates over the last few days:
- Comments are now powered by Commento instead of Disqus. This
significantly reduces page load size on pages with comments.
- Icons (social media, etc) are all now 2x resolution for modern retina screens.
- Site-specific search is now powered by DuckDuckGo instead of Google. No longer loads an iframe, significantly
faster site-loads, and better privacy to boot.
- Archives page works again. Did this ever work?
- Page is back to being fluid instead of fixed-width.
- Improved CSS across the board, particularly on mobile devices.
- Code page is updated.
I also managed to backport in some blog posts from the 2004-2007 era that were on the Internet Archive. For
posterity!
Feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me if you notice any bugs.
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