The last time I had to go through a new-hire process was at the beginning of 2007, at a startup that didn’t quite fit in two large rooms. The onboarding process was basically “oh, you’re here; good thing you already know half the company from working with them six months ago”.

This week is a bit more involved, in a good way. Even without the aggressive use of online services to work around all the Corona-induced issues, it’s clear that the new company has invested the time and money to get people onboard and up to speed well.

I’m spending a crapload of time on Zoom, but my time isn’t being wasted. Instead, I’m seeing a lot of things being done right that we had to half-ass at the other place, because nobody had the free cycles or the management support to expand on solutions. There’s automation I set up in 2007 that’s still running basically unchanged, because that’s-good-enough-now-here’s-another-hat-to-wear.

Seriously, there’s a script I wrote in the middle of our first building move to let the rest of build team quickly handle config updates for physical and virtual machines, with the obvious name QUICK. It gained features and safeguards over the years, but deep down, the central pillar of corporate IT remains a weekend hack, running on ancient hardware with an obsolete version of CentOS. (technically there’s only one piece of it that couldn’t be migrated to a current OS on a VMware virtual, but that had to be kept alive as long as there were still Windows 7 machines in the company) (and the last attempt to do a P2V conversion before I left failed)

Yesterday afternoon, I was shown a self-service web portal that made my old script look like, well, the weekend hack that it was. It’s like they started in the same place, and then it became someone’s job to keep making it better. With funding and management support.

I was also shown a nice tool that looks quite a bit like something I proposed a while back, that got shot down because it would have disrupted The Way Things Have Always Worked. Which was the entire point. Because The Old Way was a compliance/audit nightmare.

(classical reference)

The SCU Complex and CZU Complex fires continue to threaten Silicon Valley from both sides, but while the evacuation zones have advanced, they still haven’t crossed 101 or 280 yet, and the fires were not visible from 101 when I drove up to San Jose yesterday (needed to show ID to prove I’m legally eligible for employment; the company’s using a remote service, but their location in Salinas was booked past my start date).

On the way home, I stopped off in Morgan Hill for Boar’s Head lunchmeat and a car wash, and not only was the car still clean today (apart from the paw-prints), late this afternoon the air quality index was back to a safe-and-healthy 25, so I was able to open up all the windows and air the place out.

According to AirNow, the sensor nearest to my house peaked at just over 200 on Saturday, but is down to 8 right now. By comparison, Mountain View was over 150 today, and is currently down to 62.

Yes, California is on fire. Mostly in the mountains right now, but the mandatory evacuation zones cover a lot of the highways leading out of the affected areas, so, y’know, leave now while you still can. The LA Times has a useful but graphically muddy map covering all the active fires.

The one nearest me, the River Fire, is mostly working its way through mountain areas that are very sparsely populated, with the exception of Carmel Valley. The perimeter doesn’t seem to have shifted much in that direction, so presumably that’s part of the ~10% they have contained. It’s not a threat to me at this time, apart from the smoke and ash; it would have to go through a lot of irrigated fields and the entire city of Salinas, which would admittedly suck.

The SCU Complex Fire (East Bay) is huge, prompting evacuations in parts of Fremont, Milpitas, Morgan Hill, Gilroy, etc, and is getting close to I-5 near Patterson. The evacuations are only advisory for Morgan Hill and Gilroy at the moment, according to this map. While the northwest edge is getting close to I-680, the southwest edge is still comfortably far from Highway 101.

The CZU Complex Fire (Santa Cruz Mountains) is currently completely uncontained and the mandatory evacuation zone now includes parts of Santa Cruz and all of Scotts Valley, as well as Highways 1, 9, and 17.

North of the Bay Area, Napa and Sonoma are threatened by the LNU Complex Fire, and west of that, the 13-4 Fire stretches from Highway 101 to the ocean, northwest of Santa Rosa. And there are a lot of smaller fires scattered around the state.

On the bright side, the heat wave that had the utilities threatening rolling outages has subsided somewhat, although the advice to open your windows at night when it’s cool is probably not being followed in most areas (coughcough).

I have never heard so many unofficial fireworks going off, many quite elaborate. And quite close. The smell will linger for weeks.

I am very glad it’s been damp and humid recently, and that I watered the yard today.

Update

By the time I went to bed, the weather app on my phone had been reporting “unhealthy air quality” for several hours. Seems all the particulate sensors in the area were reading ~5x the usual amount of stuff in the air…

Ah, social media…

Nextdoor is full of complaints this morning, both about the massive fireworks displays and the city’s failure to stop them all. “Don’t these people know that it’s illegal?!?!?!?!?”

Malled In

The local mall is almost-entirely open, albeit with masks and sanitizers and roving social-distancing enforcers. Well, open from 11am to 7pm on weekdays, anyway (11-6 Saturday, 12-6 Sunday; feels like being back in the Seventies).

What’s still closed?

• Bath & Body Works
• Build-A-Bear Workshop
• Cinemark Theaters
• Disney Store
• Dairy Queen
• Main Street Studio (art gallery w/painting classes)
• Manpower (temp jobs agency, something you’d expect to be busy)
• PLAYLive Nation (“upscale gaming lounge”; their words, not mine)

And that’s it. None of the others have any restrictions beyond masks and limited capacity, and the non-food-court restaurants are all open for dine-in as well as carryout.

I might go there tomorrow for the first time in 8-9 months, just for the novelty of having somewhere to walk around. For about ten minutes, anyway, until the mask starts lowering my blood oxygen and raising my blood pressure.

Meat run

When I went to the coast for a haircut a few weeks ago, I stopped at the Safeway that carries Boar’s Head meats; they were mostly out. Today? They had every variety of turkey in quantity, but had to open the last roast beef and teriyaki chicken for me (because I didn’t want the turkey either). They’re expecting a delivery just in time for the 4th.

Speaking of haircuts…

…Anita Ekberg is enough to make me want to shave…

On Friday, Monterey County approved the partial reopening of additional classes of business, including campgrounds, gyms, hotels, card rooms, racetracks, bars, wineries, zoos, and museums. So we’ve got that going for us.

In theory, the local mall has been open for a week, but most stores inside it were still closed until today, when it looks like about 2/3 of them will be back in business, including about 4/5 of the food court resturants and snack vendors. The closures aren’t simply by category, so this may reflect how well they were able to survive being shut down; Cold Stone Creamery is open but Dairy Queen is not, Auntie Anne’s is open but Wetzel’s Pretzels is not, etc. Sears is closed, but they effectively went out of business years ago, so they don’t count.

It is strongly “suggested” that you socially-distance your cars, carefully choose which entrance you park near based on the stores you plan to visit, and participate in all ritual activities. Or their security teams will violate your social distance and forcibly eject you.

Sad thing is, I had very little reason to visit that mall before Corona-chan came to town, and the only reason I can think of for going there now is maybe to take a walk someplace other than down the aisles of a grocery store.

It sounds like the editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit was an asshole, and his actual on-the-job behavior may well justify his sudden departure. But of course he was actually fired because someone dug through his social media accounts and found out that he once played dress-up for a party (“brownface”).

But that’s not important. The story leads off with complaints from his female person-of-color administrative assistant, a Stanford graduate who was being paid an annual salary of $35,300. She has held this position for more than two years, at Bon Appétit’s Manhattan headquarters. The focus of the lead anecdote is that just days after her boss wrote a recent “woke” piece for the magazine, he rebuffed his only Black subordinate’s request for a raise, despite knowing that she hadn’t been able to pay her rent for the past three months.

Not asked or answered are the questions of what her Stanford degree is in, how much student-loan debt she has, why she took a shitty admin job in the first place, and why she’s still staying in a job that pays shit money that won’t cover her rent.

Sure, her boss might be an asshole and hypocrite who considers her skillset so unexceptional that he’ll blow off her plea for something better than $17 an hour, but maybe he’s right. Maybe there are twenty other gullible young recent grads so eager to work in the publishing industry that they’ll pass over a lucrative career as a Walmart greeter in Montana to polish his golf clubs (not a euphemism, apparently).

(via Althouse)

(someone in the comments claims to have tracked down her social media presence and found that her degree is a BA in “African and African American Studies”; that and a quarter-million in student loans will buy you a job fetching coffee)

Unrelated

These are not the sweater puppies I was looking for.

Corona-chan wears mink

We now have two known cases of mink-to-human infection, leading to a massive cull of the mink population in the Netherlands. In the US, we have a lemming problem, but so far they’re penning themselves up in Seattle, asking for gluten-free soy-based food to replace what was looted from them by their feral comrades.

Mushroom

Not a “kept in the dark and fed bullshit” reference, just this week’s episode of Good Eats Reloaded. I don’t cook with mushrooms as much as I used to, because most of the people I’ve been cooking with the last 20-some years don’t like them. But since there’s nobody around…

Related, Alton Brown has a number of new videos on Youtube, in his new Pantry Raid and Quarantine Quitchen mini-shows, along with some extras from Reloaded, including a short video on knives.

The New York Times suddenly has something nice to say about moving manufacturing back to the US, as New Yorkers are afflicted with a devastating kettlebell shortage.

I particularly love the bit where someone finally managed to order one, twice, and both times it was stolen off of his porch after being delivered. I’m guessing that had less to do with it being a kettlebell than with him being in New York City.

The story actually covers the fact that pretty much all fitness equipment is out of stock, but only makes the Chinese manufacturing connection for kettlebells, despite the fact that most of the stuff is made there, and even their knockoff products are hard to find right now.

Speaking of which, I enjoyed the Amazon review of a random-brand knockoff of the TRX Xmount, which said it was just as good as the much more expensive one, even with the poor welds. Yeah, “poor welds” is just what I’m looking for in a product designed to hold my bodyweight and keep me from smacking my head into the floor.

Forget 1984…

This year’s playbook really is Demolition Man, where those calling to “defund the police” claim they just mean “reform and retask them for social justice”, but really mean get rid of cops, a policy leading to peaceful conflict resolution, as ably illustrated in this documentary clip.

PBS comedy hour

Actual headline, emphasis added:

San Francisco may stop hiring cops with records of misconduct

Neighbors Against Illegal Fireworks

With both wildfire and fireworks season coming on fast, I saw a bunch of signs from this group while I was out shopping today. Not looking up your acronym in a dictionary before ordering billboards makes you look a bit naïve…

Well, that was unexpected

My new Okabashi sandals, ordered Sunday with the promise of delivery sometime next week, arrived today. But what’s unexpected is that their new-rubber scent smells remarkably like pipe tobacco. Specifically, Captain Black.

Multitasking Considered Harmful

I was baking bread while chatting with an old friend and potential new co-worker, and when it came time to preheat the oven, I forgot that I’d stashed a package of Costco pastries in there a few hours earlier.

Surprisingly, twenty minutes of warming to 350°F had done them no serious harm, but since the clear plastic container had turned milk-white, I decided not to find out what sort of outgassing might have taken place.