Wheel Reinvention Project Abandoned

That's right. The oft-neglected, painfully minimalist, and oddly spamophilic jeffevans.us will no longer see any new content. Given that Google is gradually commandeering the e-mail, medical archival, and interplanetary planning domains, it seems only natural they should absorb my smatterings somewhere along the way. Plus at some point I forgot how to write php, or at least read the festering pile of pre-CS-125 spaghetti code that comprises my source.

Yes, I know the timing is highly suspect but no, this is not a joke. This, however, is... I hope.

Comments

Don't Trust the Process

Don't Trust the Process Prelude The first thing I did, after signing the offer letter, was to uninstall the Blind app from my phone. My brain needed a long break from that one. The anonymous commentary from tech employees is valuable, but I don't love the picture it paints of us. Next, I cancelled all the five-hour-long "virtual onsite" interviews I had scheduled for early January and closed my in-progress homework assignments. The feeling of liberation from this was palpable. I had finally landed a new job, one that I was very excited about. More on that later. For now, let's delve into the months of misery leading up to it. As is tradition in my field, allow me to lay out a statement of scope. Not in Scope A solution to these problems. If you're someone who thinks that nobody can present complaints without bundling them with a neatly packaged solution, you should probably turn back now. Any treatment of those coming from less advantage...

Reflections on working as an election judge

I don't know how to start with this. There are a number of isolated moments that stand out in my mind. Some are poignant, like the woman who, upon hearing we couldn't find her registration in the computer, shook her head and said, her quiet frustration palpable, "I just won't vote, then." She put her driver's license away and calmly walked out of the room. We had already told her about the Voter Verification Hotline, but she didn't seem all that interested in waiting on hold for what promised to be a very long time. So she left without casting her ballot. I tend to personalize negative outcomes in a way that isn't warranted (my wife can attest to this), so I had to acknowledge, then dismiss, the sinking feeling that the situation was somehow my fault. Some moments were joyful, in that primitive "caveman starts fire" sense, like when our one troublesome ePollbook (the custom laptop builds used to check in voters) finally connected to th...

All I Want For Christmas is a Super-Intelligent Public Transit System - Part 1

I was having a friendly debate with another commenter over at Chicagoist, in an article lamenting the latest round of RTA cuts . Upon floating some rough ideas for how Chicago's transit system (or, indeed, any city's transit system) could be made to operate more dynamically, I was rebuked by a solid wall of skepticism. I think my biggest problem--and my problem with most technology--is that I simply don't see the benefit outweighing the expense of implementation coupled with ongoing maintenance. I honestly believe that a simple, fixed route bus system runs about as efficiently as it is possible for a bus system to run. Could it be? That nearly the simplest possible approach to a bus system one can imagine happens to be the most efficient? I find that to be highly unlikely. Many problem domains don't favor simple approaches. Said another way: the universe is complex; deal with it. Take one example from the field of computer science: sorting numbers. Specifically, ...

Amalgamated Content

Search This Blog