June 9, 2024

Hit and Miss #353: Outdoor meals and Home Depot hauls

Hello!! Spent the morning hanging out with SR and T, strolling through Home Depot to pick up some project wood and catching up on life. Yesterday morning was planning woodworking, this morning was enabling woodworking, and this afternoon—after I’ve sent this out—will be for actually, y’know, woodworking. (These are all, philosophically and practically, part of the act of woodworking, but some scratch the itch and fill the soul better than others. Friendship, though, that fills you no matter what you’re doing.)

• I share Susan Jean Robertson’s feelings on summer, particularly this year, as we can more easily move in and out of the outdoors. (We’ve been eating lunch and dinner outside almost every chance we get, it’s so lovely!)
• An interview with a gardener in a similar boat to ours, slowly reworking their space and building community in the process. I particularly love the celebration of yard and garden work as a community event, one that can spark curiosity and conversation, as well as one that increases your awareness of the rhythms of the community around you (e.g., getting to know the regular walkers). (T is absolutely the gardener between the two of us; I have helped only the tiniest bit, and all praise—which should be abundant, the place looks great—is due to her.)
• As someone who did a lot of napkin math costing over the years at CDS, I appreciate this differentiation between guesses and estimates, with praise for the “rough calculation”.
• A neat technical cryptography post on what encryption at rest actually protects against, and the many things it doesn’t.
• Waldo Jaquith with a strong argument against including policy compliance as contract requirement. Instead, work it into each deliverable / user story, sharing just the policy that’s relevant to that story. This way, it’s on you to know what policy to comply with, and the vendor to comply; versus outsourcing that knowledge to the vendor, which limits who can possibly work on your contracts, since not many vendors know which policies to comply with.
• brr.fyi continues sending out the archive of draft posts, this one discussing the water infrastructure of the South Pole. A few things that were wild to me: the size of pipe Versus the insulation for the pipe (plus electrical wiring); at South Pole, the pipes run in utility tunnels / corridors carved directly out of the snow, deep beneath the surface, and the water is all melted snow.

All the best for the week ahead! I’m off to make shavings and stuff.

Lucas

Note: The title of this post, the part I often struggle the most to write, was adapted from a list of suggestions generated by GPT-4o.