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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Ask about ‘Independent Study’ from your faculty adviser. If you don’t have one, go to your Department head. If you don’t have that, ask the Registrar.

    Independent Study means you get to propose your own coursework and, if approved, get to do it and get credit for it. You still have to deal with faculty supervision but the subject is specific to you. Think about what you would love to learn and propose a way to get there.







  • Interviewed at two big, well-known tech companies. Had done a lot of mobile dev work at the time, but really wanted to switch to connected hardware and told the recruiters.

    Showed up for the first on-site interview. Guy walks in. Explains the actual first interviewer couldn’t make it so he was a last-minute stand-in. Goes: “So, it says here you are intererested in mobile. That’s good. My team is looking for someone like that.”

    I explained it was actually the other way round. What proceeded was an awkward hour of bullshit questions about train schedulers and sorting algorithms. Repeat five times that day. Every. Single. One.

    Second company a few weeks later. Same thing. Except this time, 2/3 of the way through, a manager in HW group walks in. Grouses why he was asked to talk to someone, checks notes, about mobile. We had the greatest conversation after I set him straight. He wanted me to come back and do another loop just with his group. Except a week later, they announced a hiring freeze and I never heard back.

    In retrospect, it was a good thing. I would not have been a good fit.


  • Many pumps come with built-in timers so you can turn them off when sleeping. You can also connect them to smarthome switches and set a routine to turn them on and off only when needed or via remote apps, wireless switches, or voice control (Alexa, turn pump on.)

    We found the cost savings to be non-trivial. Main reason I put one in was because we had a teenager who started the shower running, then went away and got distracted. This solved the problem. And with a smarthome controller, it also reduced costs.

    Also, those under-sink instant heaters do exist, but they’re only good for a single faucet. They won’t work with showers and baths.


  • That’s why I put ‘timed’ in there. You can program when they shut off so it just goes back to the way it was before. Like when sleeping or out of the house.

    A more fine-grain solution is to get a non-timer (cheaper) version of the pump, and one of those Alexa, Google, or Homekit compatible power switches, then not only can you set the time through a smart home routine, but can override them whenever walking out or coming back.

    If using a traditional water heater, you’re heating the whole tank all the time. And with a tankless but no pump, you’re running gallons of clean water down the drain, waiting for it to get warm. It’s all a tradeoff, but this, at least, only heats the water circulating inside your pipes and only during the hours you set.






  • Friend of mine used to drink quadruple espressos at Starbucks every day, then go back to work. I was talking to him last week and told him about remembering the time he called me from the Starbucks and his name was called with the quadruple order. He laughed and said he actually bumped it up to quintuple at one point.

    Then he sold his house and moved to another state, living out in the woods. Asked him how he managed without a Starbucks nearby. He said he now does Keurig espresso shots every morning. But it was getting expensive, since he had to press 10 pods in one sitting!

    Moral of the story: he’s perfectly functional and productive. Go nuts!