roguelazer's website

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 idea: it's a federated social network¹, which means it's made of a bunch of different copies run by different people but set up so that you can follow people and read their toots² no matter which instance they happen to be on. I'm on mastodon.technology, which is generally themed around mainstream tech stuff, but I follow people at fosstodon and cybre.space and mastodon.social³. There are a couple of outstanding things about mastodon that I'd like to point out:

• The local timeline is a timeline that shows every toot marked as "public" from people on your instance If you are on an instance that is relevant to your interests and which isn't too big, this can be a great way to get exposed to new people and new ideas. Mine has a few too many bitcoin enthusiasts on it, but is generally fun!⁴
• Instances have rules and a code of conduct. Mastodon.technology (like many other instances) actively blocks hate speech and white supremacists. How novel!
• You aren't the product! Most instances are either run by volunteers or funded by donations (mastodon.technology is funded by a Patreon), there are no ads, there's no garbage algorithmic timeline. It's just a chronological list of short mixed-media posts from people you choose to follow. Again... novel...

Of course, mastodon isn't the first technology product to try to move into Twitter's space. I also used the bizarrely- named App.net during its brief existence between mid-2013 and mid-2014; it was okay. There was also identi.ca in 2008 and the ever-popular Google Buzz, which I think I used when I was a Google employee 🤷‍♂️. The real advantage to Mastodon's design is that since it's open-source software and is federated, it's moderately harder for a single company to tank the platform. Of course, social networks are only useful as long as people you want to interact with use them, so it remains to be seen how well-populated Mastodon will be. If you're reading this, maybe you're someone who would be fun to interact with on Mastodon and you should make an account and follow me? Hm? If you still want more information, this Motherboard article is pretty good.⁵

The biggest weakness (for me) for Mastodon so far is a dearth of good native clients. I'm currently using Amaroq on my iPhone, which is feature complete but doesn't feel like a very good native iOS app, and beta testing Tusk, which feels like a native iOS app but is missing lots of features. There's nothing worth using yet on iPads or Macs. However! There is light at the end of the tunnel — Sean Huber of The Iconfactory (makers of Twitterrific, the best iOS/macOS Twitter client) appears to be working on a top-secret Mastodon client named Fantastodon. I'm excited.

So, yeah. If you @-me on Twitter, I probably won't respond⁶, but you should totally join me on Mastodon and follow me as @roguelazer@mastodon.technology. Awoo!

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!

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.

I've decided to break down my analysis a little differently this year; I'll be counting each piece of mail separately for each issue it advertises for; therefore, the sums don't necessarily add up to the total amount of mail (42 pieces, if you're curious).

Beyond that, 15 of the flyers contained complete DCCC slates, most of which were either the Reform Slate or the Progressive Slate. A decent overview of the slates can be found at https://medium.com/@understanding_sf_politics/the-2016-san-francisco-dccc-elections-c0f6fc84537d.

And, of course, we always have a bunch of ballot propositions. Here are the tallies:

Using my estimate from last time of 35¢ per piece of mail, that's $14.70 spent advertising for this local primary election to my household alone. What an efficient use of money!

Anyhow, if you live in California, be sure to vote on Tuesday. I'm sure I'll see you again for another of these tallies in November.

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.

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:

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.

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.

In February, I Kickstarted the Pebble Time. As soon as it was announced (March 3), I upgraded my Kickstarter pledge to the Pebble Time Steel. As you might remember from last year, I had Kickstarted the original Pebble ("Pebble Classic" now) and purchased the Pebble Steel as soon as it was released, so this was a no-brainer.

Well, it took a few months longer than expected, but my Time Steel arrived about a week ago, and here's my review.