The Métis Nation of Alberta's new solar farm north of Métis Crossing is set to produce enough energy for 1,200 homes. The project came from the citizens of the nation, who said one of their top concerns is climate change. Citizens also helped name the project Salay Prayzaan, which means gift from the sun in Michif.
Good morning. Low temperatures have dipped into the upper 30s for much of Houston outside the urban core, and away from the coast. With chilly conditions expected for the remainder of November, it looks like this month will be the first one since May to record a below normal temperature.
The average temperature so far this month—calculated by adding the daily high and low, and dividing by two—is presently a little less than 63 degrees. That will slip a bit this week. It seems notable that while Houston recorded an exceptionally hot summer this year, the spring and fall have been rather temperate.
Much of November has seen cooler-than-normal temperatures. (National Weather Service)
We’re also in the final days of our annual fundraiser. The response so far this year has been tremendous—thank you so much. There’s still time to buy merchandise or donate if you would care to.
Monday
Our overall pattern this week is fairly straightforward. We face three chilly days and nights before transitioning to a warmer pattern with higher rain chances beginning Thursday. This morning is likely to be the coldest of the week, with lows in the upper 30s. With partly cloudy skies, temperatures will be slow to warm, but we should eventually get into the upper 50s today, with light northerly winds. Low temperatures on Monday night should be a degree or two warmer than Sunday night.
Tuesday
This is the one day this week when we’re pretty much guaranteed sunshine, so be sure and soak it up. The combination of sunny skies and a more easterly flow should allow highs to reach the low 60s. Tuesday night will, in turn, be a degree or two warmer than Monday night, with lows likely dropping into the low 40s for much of the metro area.
Wednesday
With winds becoming more southeasterly, we’ll see a more humid flow beginning later on Wednesday, but it will take some time for the air mass to modify. As a result, I expect partly sunny skies on Wednesday, with highs in the mid- to upper-60s. As the Gulf of Mexico air moves in, we should see more clouds on Wednesday night, with lows dropping only to around 60 degrees.
Thursday and Friday
A low-pressure system will driver higher rain chances toward the end of the week, with Thursday likely to be the wettest day. Much of the area could see 1 to 2 inches of accumulating rain on Thursday. This should not be enough to cause flooding, but it should make for a fairly dreary day. Highs will be about 70 degrees. Rain chances continue Thursday night, and still should be 30 to 50 percent on Friday. This will be another warm day with a decent amount of humidity, with highs around 70 degrees.
NOAA rain accumulation forecast for now through Friday. (Weather Bell)
Saturday and Sunday
The forecast for this weekend is somewhat uncertain as a cold front advances toward Houston on Friday, and then probably moves just off the coast. Our temperatures and rain chances are going to be dependent on the position of this front, and I’m just not entirely confident how far it pushes offshore. So for the time being, I’m going to predict high temperatures in the upper 60s this weekend, with lows somewhere in the 50s. Rain chances will be pretty decent for coastal areas, but likely less for inland areas. All of that is subject to change, of course.
Next week
Given the uncertainty over the weekend, I don’t feel strongly about next week’s outlook either. I do think we’ll probably see some clearing skies by Tuesday or so, and some slightly cooler weather thereafter. But we shall see!
WASHINGTON—In an attempt to provide a behind-the-scenes look at how his administration operated, President Biden reportedly invited a 5-year-old on a White House tour to join him Monday in vetoing a piece of legislation. “Hey, kiddo, come on into the Oval Office and let me show you how we do things around here,”…
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…
1. We have to give very personal slide presentations about ourselves
My office is planning a morning of team-building exercises for the end of the month. We’re all supposed to prepare a Pecha Kucha slide presentation to share. The directions are to answer 20 questions/prompts with images only. The questions/prompts run from “You, as a baby” and “You, as a teenager” to “Your favorite animal” to “What is your actual challenge?” and “How do you live and show your values?”
I am not excited about this. I’m fine with light questions about childhood heroes, but I don’t want to explain my vision for my life and what helps me reach it. I might be overthinking this, I just have to put up an image and talk about it for a few seconds, but it feels invasive. I suspect the solution is to just address the questions as lightly as possible, but I’m wondering if I’m out of touch with sharing expectations?
I think it’s invasive and inappropriate for work, but these sorts of exercises have been getting more popular in recent years.
You’re right, though, that the way to handle it is to treat it as lightly as possible. You don’t have to reveal anything terribly personal about yourself. Stick up a photo of a goth for “teenage you,” pick a work challenge to use for “actual challenge,” and offer up something bland about kindness and compassion for how you live your values.
Really, though, at what point are workplaces going to learn to remember that not everyone had childhoods and adolescences that they care to discuss at work?
I manage a team that is currently all female and the average age is late 40s. When hiring for an entry-level/new grad position, is it okay to favor non-female and/or younger candidates? We work with a diverse population so I would ideally like to have more of a balance of age ranges and genders. Where’s the line between valuing diversity and discriminating against a certain demographic?
Legally, you cannot give preference to candidates by sex or youth. You can do things to increase the diversity of your applicant pool like advertising the job in places where you think more diverse populations will see it, looking for ways to appeal to a wider range of applicants than you’ve traditionally had, etc., but when it comes to deciding who you hire, you can’t consider sex or youth. (The reason I’m saying “youth” and not “age” is because federal age discrimination laws protect people 40 and up so technically you could give preference to applicants 40 and older, but not younger ones.)
3. Should I have a no-weekend-work policy for my team?
I run a small consulting firm of about 20 staff, and we are mostly remote and spread around the country. This was true even before Covid, and we allow the majority of our team to WFH 100% of the time.
As a professional services firm, we operate on a pretty standard Monday-Friday schedule, but over the last year or so we have noticed quite a few people not being available during business hours and instead working across weekends to make up their time. While I get and can appreciate the flexibility this provides in accomplishing other activities not related to work, this “never unplugging” is resulting in some serious burnout which is showing up in a variety of ways, none of which is good for the company. It also means that our clients are having difficulty getting to team members during the business day, which is also a problem.
I am leaning towards a no-weekends policy and have been told by a staff person that people may leave because we would be limiting their flexibility. While I can understand this, it also just isn’t working for us as an organization. Am I wrong to want people to fully disconnect from their work on the weekends?
I think you’re focused on the wrong problem: the biggest issue is that your clients can’t reach people they need to reach during business hours. Focus there.
It’s entirely reasonable to expect people to work during core business hours, particularly when you have clients who expect to reach you then. Require people to work during business hours and then see if you still have an issue with weekend work burnout. (And if people leave over that, they weren’t a good match for your business needs. It’s more than okay to be up-front about what those fundamental needs are.)
4. Can my company deny me unpaid time off for surgery?
I am an hourly employee at a job that receives zero PTO (vacation or sick). Any time you take off is unpaid. Even though time off is unpaid, the company limits us to 40 hours per year of time off. Is this legal? I’m not saying you should take time off willy-nilly just because it’s unpaid, but can you be forced to come in if you’ve exceeded your unpaid time off “allowance” for the year?
I am having surgery soon and my doctor wrote a note saying I need two weeks off for recovery. But I was told I can only take two days off because that’s the amount of unpaid time off “allowance” I have left.
Yes, they can limit how much time off you’re allowed to take each year, even though it’s unpaid.
But it’s really ridiculous to do that in a situation like yours, where you need the time for medical reasons. Any chance you qualify for FMLA? To be eligible, you need to have worked at least 1,250 hours in the last 12 months and your company needs to have 50 or more employees … but if you are, it would get you the time you need while protecting your job. (And even if you don’t qualify, your state might have a similar program with a lower eligibility threshold. To check, try searching the name of your state plus “family medical leave” but without the quotation marks.)
Otherwise, you could try saying, “This surgery isn’t optional. It’s medically necessary and I have to get it. Are you saying I will lose my job afterwards, simply because of a short-term medical need?” and “How do I get an exception made?” Also, if the person who said you could only have two days is your manager, skip them and talk to HR instead.
Two occupants in the vehicle that exploded at the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, N.Y., are both dead, officials said. "At this time there is no indication of a terrorist attack," the governor said.
(Image credit: U.S. Customs and Border Protection via AP)
The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Ultramarine Linux is a Fedora-based distribution featuring extra package repositories such as RPM Fusion, the Budgie (or Cutefish) desktop, and multimedia codecs. The project's latest release, version 39, uses an in-house build system and can automatically install NVIDIA drivers when appropriate. "Changes: Rebase to Fedora 39. Build process....
Concorde crossed the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound, cutting travel time in half compared to a conventional passenger plane. The groundbreaking jet made its final flight on Nov. 26, 2003.
(Image credit: David Parker/BWP Media/Getty Images)
Five years ago, I met and befriended a young man from the eastern European country of Georgia. He had come to the Netherlands seeking asylum. This was because he is bisexual, which is just not accepted there and he was in fear of his life. The authorities looked at a piece of paper that says that it is safe for LGBT people in Georgia, and told him that he would be sent back. I helped him evade deportation and he tried again in another country. That, I have written about at the time. Unfortunately, they too looked at that same piece of paper and sent him back. He was deported to Georgia.
Jumber and I getting a drink together, just before he left the Netherlands
In Georgia, my friend had nothing to go back to. His family didn't accept him and, in fact, his father was one of the major reasons he had fled in the first place. His mother had tried to support him, but died shortly thereafter under suspicious circumstances. Although my friend could not say for certain, he has always suspected that his mother died at the hands of his father, just for trying to help her son. Though he had had a business before he left, that business was taken by his father. So, when he went back, he had no family, no place to live, and no income.
My friend kept in touch as best he could, sending me messages from internet cafes. This picture he sent, broke my heart. He was living on the streets of Tbilisi, with just a few pieces of cardboard and plastic to shield him from the cold. All day, he walked the streets looking for discarded bottles, which he could hand in to get the recycling deposit so that he'd have some money to buy a little food. When there weren't enough bottles, he had to resort to stealing food.
As soon as I could, I started sending him some money every month which enabled him to rent a small apartment in Tbilisi and to eat normally. Despite being depressed, he went looking for a job and took whatever work he could. The work was hard and physically exhausting and the pay was lousy. So lousy, in fact, that he remained dependent on what I sent him as it wasn't even enough to cover the rent of that small flat. But despite this, he was so glad and proud to be able to do something. And I was just as proud of him for not giving up.
Jumber in the hospital, after a brutal attack
It was not to last. After working this job for a few weeks, he was spotted by somebody who knew him and why he'd left Georgia in the first place. They returned with others and beat him up to within an inch of his life, damaging several internal organs. The photo above, taken in the hospital, is the last photo I have of him. To allow him to recover, I had set up a crowdfunding campaign, which took care of the medical bills for his care and hospital stay. Mentally, he didn't truly recover, and he remained afraid to ever leave home, terrified as he was of another attack. Despite this, he always looked for odd jobs to get some income and to feel useful.
We kept in touch, communicating via WhatsApp. When he attended protest marches against government corruption and the injustices in Georgian society, I was worried for his safety and he was arrested multiple times. I tried to get him to go to organisations standing up for LGBT people in Georgia, but as hate crimes were directed at such organisations and police looked the other way, he didn't dare. Especially after that attack, he never really trusted anybody other than me.
Jumber trying a Belgian waffle when we met up again in Brussels
Several times a week, we talked via WhatsApp. We talked about maybe getting to meet up again some day. We talked about finding a better life outside of Georgia. And we looked back fondly at the times we'd spent together during his failed attempts for asylum in the EU. It made me smile when he told me about little things that made him happy, like when he had the opportunity to enjoy an icecream cone on a hot summer day. I remember how proud he was that he'd managed to get a proper ID card again (and he sent me a photo of it). His messages were always full of love and hope and kindness.
In July of 2022, just after I'd sent him money for that month's rent, he told me not to send anything for the following month. I asked whether he was sure about that, whether he'd be able to make rent and buy food, and he told me not to worry. At 12:43 on July 8th 2022, he messaged me "thinking about you" and when I responded, he read it and reacted with a ❤️ emoji. Just over 5 hours later, at 18:11 on that same day, I inquired about his health. That message, was not just unread, but remained undelivered in WhatsApp. For more than a year, I sent messages to him every few days, over 200 in total, but never did that single grey checkmark turn into a double, let alone blue.
Yesterday morning, a friend suggested hiring a private investigator. That thought hadn't occurred to me before, but it was sound advice, which I promptly followed. I sent the detective the information that I had (the photo of that ID card came in handy) and it took them a little over a day to report back. The devastating reply: "I'm sorry but unfortunately this person died last year". Although more details will be sent later on, I'm virtually certain that they will confirm my fears and that my friend has taken his own life. Every time I had looked back at his final communication to me, it always felt like he didn't want to burden me and was saying goodbye.
Dear Jumber Kikacheishvili, you have suffered so much in the mere 32 years of your life, yet you never let hatred enter your heart. It was too full of kindness for that. You tried so hard to find a better life, giving up everything you had, and were rebuked. Regardless of the details of how you left this life, I feel you have been murdered by the system. This cruel world is a lesser place with you no longer in it. I hope with all my heart that I was able to let you know that there was at least one person who considered you a valuable human being. Even if nobody else cared about whether you lived or died, I did. My tears for you are real. For as long as I live, you will not be forgotten. I won't permit this world to be without evidence that you were here, and I'll remember you and tell your story to whomever will listen. Jumber, may you have found the rest and peace that you could never find in life. I remember the one Georgian word you taught me: ნახვამდის.
In memory of Jumber, I have set up a fundraiser for Amnesty International and have requested that my employer donate my 15 year work anniversary gift there instead. It is too late to save the life of my friend, but perhaps others may be spared his fate.
I found a number of usages of the jargon term “line of sight” in the Microsoft Azure documentation. Unfortunately, none of them appear to provide a definition.
“Hybrid Azure AD joined devices require network line of sight to your domain controllers periodically.”
“Non-domain-joined VMs or VMs that are joined to a different AD domain than the storage account can access Azure file shares if they have line-of-sight to the domain controllers and provide explicit credentials.”
When I asked Bing Chat what Azure “line of sight” meant, it told me,
In Azure, line-of-sight is used to refer to the ability of non-domain-joined VMs or VMs that are joined to a different AD domain than the storage account to access Azure file shares if they have line-of-sight to the domain controllers and provide explicit credentials.
It appears to have ingested the last reference and turned it into a circular definition: A VM has “line-of-sight” if it has line-of-sight to the domain controllers.
From what I can gather from context, “network line of sight” just means “network connectivity.”
The fact that the term is widely used in the documentation without ever being defined suggests that this was an internal jargon term that became so well established that when the team wrote their documentation, they used it freely on the assumption that everybody knows what it means. It might be true that everybody in the bubble of the Azure team knows what it means, but these documents were written for an outside audience, not for other Azure team members. The documentation was written with Azure-colored glasses.¹
Having direct line of sight connectivity means that the client can connect directly to the session host without being blocked by firewalls.
Notice that the phrase is not hyphenated here. I don’t know whether the hyphens are significant.
But given this new information, I think a better definition of “line of sight” is “unimpeded network connectivity.”
¹ Failing to write for your audience is an error I often see in engineering documents. Documents intended for a wide audience are written with the assumption that the reader is already familiar with the internal workings of the component under discussion. One way this manifests itself is in the use of imprecise terminology: The imprecision may be a handy shortcut for team members, who can mentally bridge the gap between what was said and what was meant. But people reading the document do not have this level of experience and context, and the casually imprecise phrasing just creates confusion. Another phenomenon is the substitution of an alternate term that the team uses as a synonym for the official term, without ever defining the alternate term. For example, a graphics team might use the terms “flip” and “swap” interchangeably, but only the term “flip” is in the glossary.
OTTAWA – Following an embarrassing incident in the House of Commons in which a confused Pierre Poilievre began ranting about a terrorist attack in relation to a deadly vehicular accident in Niagara Falls which has no known connection to terrorism, a concerned member of Poilievre’s family has used a pin code to lock the Conservative […]
CORPUS CHRISTI, TX—Going about their usual activities while the infant lay on his back in the middle of the living room carpet, local parents Dan and Heather Franklin confirmed Friday that their baby was at the age where it could totally just be left on the floor. “Noah isn’t mobile yet, so it’s fine—you can just plop…
LOS ANGELES—In a new paper published Friday in The Journal Of Razzle Dazzle, researchers at Tinseltown University have presented the results of an in-depth study that found either ya got it or ya don’t. “Listen here, doll—ya either got it, or ya don’t got it, and that’s all there is to it,” said Jack Stanton, a…
PORTLAND, ME—Praising the child for the maturity he had shown in coping with such a difficult life event, sources confirmed Friday that 7-year-old Bryce Sanders seemed to be internalizing and suppressing his emotions about his parents’ divorce surprisingly well. “Obviously, I was worried Bryce might have a rough…
CHICAGO—Nimbly maneuvering his larger-than-average body through inconceivably small spaces between vehicles, a beefy boy on an electric scooter was spotted Friday weaving through traffic like a graceful gazelle. According to sources, the hefty young man was somehow able to zoom on his scooter at over 10 mph while…
SAN FRANCISCO—Citing the importance of not making judgments on the basis of a stereotype, local progressive man Jesse Hammond told reporters Friday he was careful never to assume someone was a genie just because they had floated out of a golden lamp. “When you rub an ancient oil lamp and someone emerges from its spout…
Amid book bans, Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law, and vocal protests against drag brunches, one word keeps popping up again and again: grooming. The Onion asked right-wing parents to try to define the word they love to throw around so much, and this is what they said.
*watching old episodes of Murder, She Wrote with my mom* Me: That actress! She played Dr. Polaski on Star Trek! Mom: That's not her. You think everyone is Polaski.
Hovertext: St. Peter just taps the crudely drawn No Girls Allowed sign made by God.
Today's News:
Whoever made the A City on Mars wikipedia entry, bless you. Now when people argue against stuff that we didn't actually say, I'm just linking to the page.
