pseudoSXSW

I am between jobs (hopefully) and I was going to indulge a vacation I had planned. Before I ever drove out of Minnesota, I knew that SXSW had been cancelled due to COVID-19 and thus my chance to again see Kælan Mikla in America where they seem not to return to since becoming my favorite band was dashed, but my mother and sister and a friend of mine live in Austin, Texas so I went to Austin, Texas on vacation nonetheless. The entire time I was there things tightened up more and more. I attempted to go to four tech talks when in Rome, but only half of them panned out, specifically this one and this one. ADNUG became a webinar and another talk on Amazon SageMaker, an AWS cloud-based machine learning platform, was just outright cancelled. I ran into Sogeti cellmate Matt Hinze at an HEB (a grocery store named for a Howard E. Butt Sr. wherein the E stands for Edward) and made safe pleasantries with him. I arrived early and just stayed at my mother's house and then left before the Hampton hotel room reservation kicked in. I got the pleasant surprise of the Hampton agreeing to refund my nonrefundable room reservation given the extreme circumstances. Supposedly I am going to get my money back at some point this week just as I am supposedly going to start a new job on the 23rd of this month. We shall see, eh? In wandering around the convention center where I could have otherwise picked up my badge for SXSW, I took the photo here which now seems comic. The convention center was a ghost town. The mail from SXSW so far is baiting me to roll my reservation forward to the next year or maybe two years ahead, etc. I did not take my laptop with me to Austin and back and I am just now typing up some notes I took. Things I made dirty scribbles to remember for this blog include Figma, a collaborative design tool, and befunky.com, an online Photoshop of sorts. zebra.com is a performance monitoring tool. If you zoom in on your iPhone to take a picture, when you try to get that photo onto your PC and open it in Photoshop, Photoshop may squawk in denial at the image per my mother. Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's three laws are:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The third of the three is mentioned in this (Did you know there was a She-Ra reboot? I only know because I ate at Sonic on this trip. Sonic has the toys.), and it sounded a lot to me like Frank Pasquale's prediction that our own technology will become what might as well be magic. On my iPhone X, running 12.4.1 for the software version, when I go to unlock my phone there is a flashlight icon at the lower left. If you press it, it does nothing until you unlock your phone and then the flashlight comes on. I do not yet know of the right way to turn the flashlight back off, but if you just power your phone down and then back up that kills the flashlight. Emily Weiss is the founder/CEO (chief executive officer as opposed to COO or chief operations officer, CTO or chief technology officer, or CFO chief financial officer) of Glossier which does cosmetics. Mozy was bought out by Carbonite. KOA is the Kampground of America with the campground part spelled with a K. "Linux on IBM Z" might be the name that came to be for IBM's Linux. My mother mentioned that before she got the axe in 2002 that this was the thing that she was working on closest to the end of her 33 years at big blue. Z stands for zero downtime. My mother couldn't tell me what the name ended up being for the thing she got cut from so I am guessing a bit here. PoF stands for Plenty of Fish, a dating app. Enneagram is something like Myers–Briggs. There are nine different personality categories in a wheel and you are constantly moving from one to another in life although some go faster than I others I bet. DHL is named for Adrian Dalsey, Larry Hillblom, and Robert Lynn and is a logistics/shipping company out of Germany. It is a GmbH which stands for Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung translating to "company with limited liability" per Wikipedia and being in form like an American LLC (limited liability company) or the British "Ltd." for just limited, I guess. DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act and it allows some leniency for access to copyrighted works by forbidding some blockades. The .NET Foundation supports the building of open source software in .NET. OpenCart is an open source shopping cart of some sort. AutoML stands for automatic machine learning and has some helpful gunk for picking models for machine learning. Bolt On Technology is some tech for auto shops. Smartsheet is some better way to do spreadsheets.