Cowboy Who?

After Western Digital My Book Live owners around the world reported that their devices were wiped remotely overnight, the company issued a statement blaming a specific vulnerability (CVE-2021-35941) for the event. An external investigation conducted by Ars Technica and Derek Abdine (CTO at security firm Censys) has revealed, however, that the bad actors exploited another undocumented vulnerability in a file aptly named system_factory_restore. 

Usually, users would have to type in their passwords to be able to perform factory resets on their devices. Indeed, the script in the file contains lines to password protect the reset command. However, someone in Western Digital "commented out" or, in non-technical parlance, canceled out the command by adding the double / character at the beginning of each line. HD Moore, a security expert, explained to Ars that this doesn't make things look good for the company. "It’s like they intentionally enabled the bypass," Moore said, since the attackers would have to know the format of the script that triggers the reset to exploit the vulnerability.

Devices that were hacked using the CVE-2021-35941 vulnerability were infected with malware, and in at least one case, it was malware that makes a device part of a botnet. Since turning My Book Live storage devices into botnets and then wiping them clean makes no sense, Abdine's theory is that one hacker exploited the CVE-2021-35941 vulnerability. After that, a second (possibly rival) hacker exploited the previously unknown reset vulnerability to gain control of the devices, which were then made part of a botnet, or to undo the first one's work. 

Either way, this event just goes to show that the My Book Live storage devices aren't as secure as anybody would like at this point. Those who still own it should heed Western Digital's advice and disconnect it from the internet as soon as possible. 

In 2001, Eric Berger was at a Bob Schneider concert in Houston when Tropical Storm Allison rolled in. Within minutes, the torrential rainfall drumming against the club’s roof drowned out the music. Berger tried to drive home, but flash flooding forced him to abandon his car on a median and walk the rest of the way, avoiding chest-high water in places. He arrived at his newly purchased house in Oak Forest, just outside Loop 610 in northwest Houston, to discover water lapping at the door, just feet from his $6,000 wide-screen television. Although his home was spared, Berger, then a science journalist at the Houston Chronicle, was determined never to be caught unprepared again.  “I had no idea Houston could flood like that,” Berger recalled.…View Original Post

The post Eric Berger Knows Which Way the Wind Blows appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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The problem with this comic is the economists who get it won't see why it's a joke.

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This post, can I keep mentioning my period at work? , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I work in tech, in a fairly close-knit, moderately progressive office, with a majority of male coworkers. Many months, I get really bad fatigue before or during my period. It can knock me out for anywhere from half a day to a day and a half. If I need to take time off, I’ll post a message in my team’s chat like “I was sick with my period so I had to leave early yesterday.” Or I’ll say something similar to an individual colleague that I’m working on a project with.

I purposely say “period” instead of a vague “not feeling well” because I want to normalize it, it shouldn’t be any different from saying “sick with the flu” or “had a bad cold.”

It’s review season, and our anonymous peer feedback came in, and one of the comments said that I occasionally share too much “personal/health/body information” and that this makes them uncomfortable.

They didn’t say “period” outright, but I am 99% certain that’s what it is (in the past year, since we’ve been working from home, I haven’t been sick with anything else that I would’ve mentioned).

I have said “fatigue,” I have said “headache,” but as best as I can recall (or find in chat history), I’ve never mentioned anything about blood, or digestive issues, or cramps, or gone into any sort of detail.

I’m torn as to what to do because, I presume this person would prefer it if I just dropped the p-word from my vocabulary from here on out. I don’t want to do that, because I shouldn’t be ashamed of it, and I don’t want it to be a completely taboo topic. But also, I don’t want to make anyone unnecessarily uncomfortable.

I just wish they’d brought it up to me directly, so I could maybe have had at least one sentence to explain to them why I say it, why I think it’s important that there’s not stigma around menstruation, but then I would tell them I would respect their wishes and try to avoid mentioning it to them specifically.

I talked to my immediate manager about this…he was really supportive, but like me, wasn’t sure how I should handle this, since we don’t know who wrote this feedback.

I support normalizing talking about periods, but I don’t think work is necessarily the place to do it right now.

Frankly, I want to normalize people not giving specifics at all when they’re out sick. I’d like us all to just say “I need to take a sick day” or “I’m under the weather” regardless of what’s going on.

That said, I know I’m not perfectly consistent in this because I wouldn’t blink an eye at someone saying “I’m out with a cold” or “I threw out my back,” whereas I would at “I have diarrhea.”

Which makes me think the dividing line is … what, things people are squeamish about? Things that just feel like they’ve crossed a line into overly personal? And where exactly is that line, and why?

(I really don’t want to hear about anyone’s diarrhea though, so I support having some sort of line. Is the line “things involving areas normally covered by underwear”?)

Plus, when you give details about any reason for a sick day, you run the risk of people judging that reason. Just as you get people who think you should suck it up and work when you just have a cold, you’re going to get people who think missing work because of your period is a bit much (especially if they don’t have personal experience with it being that disruptive). I’d don’t love opening the door to that kind of assessment or the risk that you’ll be seen as overly delicate or dramatic. (I’m not defending that viewpoint! Just acknowledging that it’s there, and sometimes among people who have influence over you professionally.)

And frankly, when you tell colleagues, “I was sick with my period so I had to leave early yesterday,” what would be lost if you just said, “”I was sick and had to leave early yesterday?” No work-relevant info is lost with the less detailed version … so are you only naming it to destigmatize it? If so, I wouldn’t. I’m skeptical that it’s having that effect, versus just making people think you’re a TMI-sharer.

But I have a strong feeling that there might be a generational divide on this. Commenters, when you share your thoughts in the comments, please include your age or generation so we can see if that’s true.

What’s the largest animal you’ve ever hit with a car?

What’s the age you thought you’d be when you’d get married? Now subtract the number of children you thought you’d have by now.

How old were you when you last believed in God?

Where were you when you found out that your parents’ marriage was an absolute sham?

What was the AIM screenname of the girl who bullied you in middle school?

According to Web MD, what obscure, self-diagnosed disease will eventually kill you?

What is the name of the person at your high school who was cast as Maria in The Sound of Music when you were Chorus Member #15?

Where do you keep the ashes of your deceased pets?

What’s the name of the discount hotel chain where you caught your partner cheating on you?

What’s the worst investment you’ve ever made — emotionally speaking, of course.

What’s the worst way you’ve let your grandparents down?

Which part of your body does your mother criticize the most?

This post, our babysitter ghosted us and now works at my office, replacing a beloved employee who died, and more , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Executive’s daughter ghosted us on babysitting without being paid and now she works here

About a year ago, the wife of an executive in my company, upon hearing I had a young child, suggested my wife and I could hire her 25-year-old daughter for part-time babysitting/nanny work. We agreed to give it a try and would pay the daughter at the end of the week. The first two days were okay, but the third day, she never showed up. My wife texted the daughter and then called her but never got a response. Finally, my wife texted several times to ask what we already owed and where to send a check but still never received a reply.

I later learned that it is a common occurrence with this executive’s daughter. She doesn’t regularly work but occasionally her mom will sign her up for some odd job which she’ll do until she loses interest. I tried talking to her mother directly about arranging payment, but she made it clear that it was completely between my wife and me and her daughter and that she would have nothing to do with it. I let it go because I didn’t even know how many hours were owed. This was a year ago, and I never saw the executive’s daughter again until now, when she’s gotten a job as an office assistant at my company. I also learned that she married and is in desperate need of money — i.e., her brother had to pay for getting her wedding dress adjusted because she came up short at the store. Should I attempt to bring up paying her again?

Can you and your wife estimate what she earned with the two days of work she did for you? It might not be exact, but you must have a rough idea of how many hours she worked? Ideally you’d just write a check for that amount and hand it to her, saying, “We weren’t able to figure out how to get this to you last year and we’ve really been wanting to pay you for your work! This should get us square.” That way you dispense with any back and forth about what’s owed, especially since she’s likely to feel embarrassed about ghosting you, which could lead her to tell you not to worry about paying her at all. In fact, if you have a way to just leave it on her desk in an envelope, with a short note saying something similar, that could be the easiest way for all.

And ugh, reading between the lines here, these are either very frustrated parents who are unsuccessfully trying to find a way to get their adult daughter to work, or excessively involved parents who have inadvertently enabled her in not working. But either way, they shouldn’t be asking colleagues to hire her when they know she’s unreliable.

2. Replacing a beloved employee who died

Earlier this year, an employee of mine (my only current direct report) suddenly and unexpectedly passed away (not from Covid). He was excellent at his job and extremely well-liked by the rest of our department. His partner also works in our department.

We are currently interviewing for someone to fill the now-empty role. At what point (if ever) is it appropriate to relay any of this to the candidates? So far, no one has asked why the job is open. While folks in the department are wonderful people for the most part, I have no idea whether any leftover resentment, awkwardness, or other weirdness may happen when our new person starts their job. There is some interaction between this position and the partner’s position, so I’d like to give the new person a heads-up on that level, at some point.

I don’t want to make things weird, but want to give the future/new employee an appropriate level of information so they can integrate well into the department. How do I go about this?

Yeah, you don’t want someone walking into this difficult situation unprepared and having to figure it out on their own. Be up-front with job candidates, at least once you have finalists: “The reason this position is open is a sad one: the person who used to be in this role passed away unexpectedly earlier this year. I want to be up-front with you that there might be some painful dynamics around that when you start; he was well-liked and it’s of course been hard. His partner works here as well, and you’ll have some interaction with them. I’ll be working to support you in the role, but I wouldn’t want you to come in without knowing that these are unusual circumstances that we’re all working to adjust to.”

A thoughtful candidate will have questions about what you expect that adjustment to look like, so make sure you really give some thought ahead of time to what it likely will look like. It’s understandable for things to be a little awkward or subdued when the new person starts, but if you think there will be noticeable resentment, that’s something you’d need to talk with your team about ahead of time (or at least be prepared to address immediately if it happens) because it’s got to be clear to everyone that that won’t work. (You need to be careful to avoid a situation like this, where a team made it impossible to keep any replacement for a colleague who had died.)

3. I referred a friend for a job but HR wants them for a different role

I referred a good friend for a specific open position in my department, and my friend would be a great fit for the role. My manager is thrilled and looking forward to interviewing them.

However, now that the interview process has started, HR began pushing for them to fill a high turnover customer service position because my friend doesn’t have experience in our field. I understand why this happened, but I’m still really angry considering my friend has decades of work experience and this job would be too low for them.

If my friend is hired, I would receive a referral bonus. However, do I have grounds to talk to HR about them interviewing my friend for the other job because of how it would affect my referral bonus? What else can I do? I don’t want to interfere but I don’t want my friend to get screwed out of the opportunity I helped them apply for.

The first thing is to back way off mentally, because you sound too emotionally involved! “Really angry” is too strong of a reaction for the situation — your friend isn’t entitled to a job there, and if there are stronger candidates, it makes sense that your employer would focus on those instead, especially if candidates for this role normally are expected to have experience. Has your manager reviewed your friend’s resume and does she think she’d be a strong candidate (as opposed to “sure, I’d be happy to talk with her”)? If so, she should tell HR that she considers the person a strong candidate and plans to interview them for the first job. But if your manager doesn’t feel that strongly about it, that’s really her call to make.

If that happens, your friend isn’t being “screwed out of a job.” She’s competing against other candidates, and being referred is no guarantee of being hired. You can vouch for her work to your boss (if indeed you really can vouch for her work — not just that she’s a good friend), but beyond that you’ve got to let the process play out. You can’t act as your friend’s agent in the process or you’ll look like you have a conflict of interest.

4. My job fired me and then said I could return

Am I wrong for not wanting to return to work? I have been recently tardy to work most days and got a verbal warning I had to sign. That’s fine and understandable, and I was given a period of time to correct my behavior and told the company has a three-step process of verbal warning, written warning, and then final warning. But I was late again today and instead of being given a written warning, I was fired an hour after I got in, during the middle of the work day. I was very upset as I packed my belongings to leave with no warning. However, after I asked for my employee records to file for unemployment, they realized they had violated company policy and and now they want me to return to work with a warning. Am I wrong for not wanting to go back?

I can see why you don’t want to go back after they fired you and then said, “oops, never mind”! I’d ask yourself two questions. First, can you financially afford not to go back? If not, it probably makes sense to go back but actively job search. Second, what’s going on with all the lateness, and can you address whatever’s behind it? Because if not, then you’re just delaying the day of reckoning by a small amount but you’re going to end up in the same spot again pretty soon. And you risk it being an issue with a new job too, so it would be a kindness to yourself to figure out what you can do to get it under control. (Although if it’s something like “this job is two hours away and I have to be there at 6 a.m., maybe it won’t be an issue with the next one.)

But if you can afford not to go back and it’s clear this isn’t going to work out anyway, one option is to say, “I appreciate you offering, but I’ve realized it’s not the right fit for me right now.” (That said, be aware that doing that might make you ineligible to collect unemployment … but being fired for chronic lateness also could make you ineligible in a lot of states. Either way, it’s worth looking into before you decide.)

5. How often should I try to add LinkedIn recommendations?

I’m a business analyst and I work as a contractor for different clients. I’m trying to build my LinkedIn profile slowly. I want to add recommendations from different people I’ve worked with. How often should I add a recommendation to my profile without making it seem like I’m trying too hard or overdoing it?

I wouldn’t put much energy into it at all! Most hiring managers don’t put much weight on LinkedIn recommendations for all the reasons here. It’s fine to try to round up two or three, but it doesn’t usually make sense to spend time trying to generate more than that (and you don’t need to worry about spacing out those two or three; it really doesn’t matter!).

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

Hmmmmmm shares a report from PC Gamer: Near, also known by their username Byuu, the creator of several groundbreaking videogame emulators and a recent celebrated translation of JRPG Bahamut Lagoon, has died by suicide. Near posted a thread on Twitter explaining how they were affected by a campaign of harassment organized against them on the Kiwi Farms forum. Subsequently, Hector Martin, an IT consultant and Linux hacker, posted a message about Near from a mutual friend (CW: contains explicit details of Near's method of suicide) and said that they had confirmed Near's death with police in a follow-up tweet. The linked document also focuses on the Kiwi Farms forum and the doxing and harassing of Near and their friends. Near's bsnes was the first Super Nintendo emulator with 100% compatibility, and higan is a multi-system emulator supporting 26 different devices including the NES, SNES, Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, Sega Master System and Genesis/Mega Drive, and PC Engine. If you've played any of the indie games influenced by EarthBound, aka Mother 2, then odds are good that game's designer had a copy of EarthBound open in higan for reference. Parts of the emulator created to keep Stephen Hawking's voice synthesizer working in the final years of the famous physicist's life were even borrowed from higan's open source code.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week the New York Times ran an article about three B-list celebrities who decided to use the COVID-19 lockdowns as an opportunity to move to Austin. Why did Becca Tobin (Glee), Jamie-Lynn Sigler (The Sopranos), and Haylie Duff (Hilary’s older sister) pick Austin? “We liked the idea of being in a progressive city, but not necessarily something so overly populated,” Tobin told reporter Mariella Rudi, who is based in Los Angeles. That one quote gets to the crux of Austin’s ongoing housing crisis. Folks with lots of money are moving to Austin but also don’t want the city to get any bigger. Many long-time residents don’t want the kind of density that might alleviate the supply crunch. You don’t have to be a Milton…View Original Post

The post Dear Austinites, You Have Permission to Move to an Affordable, Weird City: Houston appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Good news! I’ve completed the stress test involving seven filled peripheral slots to increase the data bus capacitance to its maximum, and Yellowstone is still performing OK. I tried this stress test on both the Apple IIgs and Apple IIe, with Yellowstone connected to an Apple 3.5 Drive, Unidisk 3.5, or Apple 5.25 Drive. With more peripheral cards and more bus capacitance, this test should produce the highest currents through Yellowstone’s 74LVC245 bus driver chip. If the card were ever going to malfunction due to high currents, ground bounce, or similar electrical problems, this test should have revealed it.

Despite all the various hardware modifications that I tried, the resolution was ultimately implemented entirely with FPGA logic changes designed to minimize current and avoid simultaneously switching current. Here’s the complex dance that happens now when the CPU reads a byte from Yellowstone’s RAM:

• t=0: IOSTROBE is asserted by the Apple II. The FPGA puts the value 10101010 on the input pins of the ‘245 bus driver, but the ‘245 is not yet enabled.
• t=140ns: The ‘245 bus driver gets enabled. This 140 ns delay avoids a period of bus-fighting due to the slow-turn around time of the motherboard’s data bus driver. The value 10101010 is driven onto the data bus.
• t=210ns: The FPGA disables its output pins, and enables the RAM. The actual RAM value is now driven onto the data bus.
• t=350ns: RAM gets disabled. Now nothing is driving the ‘245 inputs, but the FPGA’s keeper circuitry maintains the last value from RAM. This early RAM shutoff separates the change in supply current from further changes happening at the next step.
• t=420ns: The ‘245 bus driver gets disabled. Now nothing is driving the data bus, but bus capacitance maintains the last-driven value.
• t=490ns: (or t=630ns for long clock cycles) IOSTROBE is deasserted and the bus cycle ends.

So is this saga all done? Everything good? End of story? Not exactly.

Even though it may not be absolutely necessary, I’m going to replace the 74LVC245 bus driver with a 74LVCR2245. This is a drop-in replacement with integrated 26 ohm series resistors on the outputs to limit the current. Thanks to LIV2 for making me aware of this option. I’ll sleep better at night with the 74LVCR2245 replacement. Its only real drawbacks are that it increases the BOM count and cost slightly, and it’s not exactly the most common chip, so availability might become a problem in the future. But if that happens I can just switch back to 74LVC245 without needing any PCB modifications.

Now that I’ve opened this can of worms on signal integrity, I find it mentally difficult to close it again. My design has mainly focused on correctness of the digital logic, with little thought given to the low-level world of currents and voltages that implement the digital abstraction. Now I see that many of my design practices were not very good, and I want to improve them. I already needed to design a Yellowstone 2.1 PCB to fix an overlapping signal trace, and I’m including several other changes in 2.1 as well:

• widened all the power and ground traces as much as possible
• improved the ground fills, addressing some choke points and connecting dead-end areas
• spread out some signal traces that were unnecessarily crowded
• added a 0.1uF capacitor across 5V and GND at the card’s supply pins (there was already a 10uF here)
• moved the 0.1uF capacitor on the 3.3V regulator output to be closer to the regulator
• moved all the decoupling capacitors to be close to the chips’ VCC pins instead of their GND pins
• rerouted the data bus traces so they don’t all cross under the A0-A6 address traces

I’m not sure whether rerouting the data bus traces was really necessary. But if there’s a total instantaneous current through all eight data traces of 250 to 500 mA, with a sharp change in current, and all eight of the data traces pass under an address trace on the opposite side of a 2-layer board, is that enough to induce a glitch in the address? Maybe? If so, rerouting those traces should help.

In hindsight I’m not sure whether it was wise to move decoupling capacitors to be adjacent to VCC pins instead of GND pins. Most advice that I’ve read says to place them as close as possible to the supply pins, meaning both power and ground. But on a chip where the VCC and GND pins are in opposite corners, it’s a direct tradeoff: the closer the capacitor is to the VCC pin, the further it is from GND. Faced with this choice, is one location better than another?

My first thought was that it doesn’t matter, and what’s important is minimizing the total combined trace length from the capacitor to the VCC and GND pins. This makes some intuitive sense. But then I did some more reading, and I think capacitors close to the GND pin may actually be more effective at reducing ground bounce, while capacitors close to the VCC pin may be more effective at reducing VCC sag.

Consider the case of an open drain buffer, which at its simplest could just be a single transistor with its source connected to ground, its gate connected to the input signal, and its drain connected to the output. When the input is high, it will pull the output low, and when the input is low, the output floats:

A buffer like this would be susceptible to ground bounce, but there’s no VCC here at all. So what good would it do to locate a capacitor close to the buffer’s VCC pin, if it even had one? To minimize ground bounce, it seems to me that the capacitor should be located close to the ground pin, with the other terminal connected to any other supply source, which doesn’t necessarily need to be the VCC pin. But I’m having some difficulty imagining the current flows in this example, and maybe my reasoning is wrong.

I’ll keep tinkering with this stuff in the background, but now I can finally return to functional testing of Yellowstone and addressing high-level firmware bugs. It’s progress.

Hi! This is Alice. I’ll be helping out with some of the engineering work at BMOW.

Version 0.3.6 for the ADB-USB Wombat is now available. The Wombat is a bidirectional ADB-to-USB and USB-to-ADB converter for keyboards and mice. Connect modern USB keyboards and mice to a classic ADB-based Macintosh, Apple IIgs, or NeXT, or connect legacy ADB input hardware to a USB-based computer running Windows, OSX, or Linux.

The new version fixes a small bug with the Power Key in ADB to USB mode. This fix enables the Wombat to register the Power Key being held at the same time as another key, allowing it to be useful in different mappings such as a Fn key.

The Wombat is available now on the BMOW store!

Come gather ’round, readers, and I’ll tell ye a tale ’Bout a clown ’neath the water who swam like a whaleA rubber face, pointy eyebrows, and pupils askewA red nose and smile that seemed to say, “You’ll float too!”This jester was playful and silly and wildDefinitely not at all something that will traumatize a child San Marcos’s late, great amusement park Aquarena Springs was and remains famous for its many weird attractions. The mid-century tourist mecca at the headwaters of the San Marcos River boasted what it deemed the world’s only submarine theater, where underwater ballerinas called the Aquamaids performed to sold-out crowds several times a day. The shows made a splash with not only local but national audiences; when one of the Aquamaids got married…View Original Post

The post The Strange, Soggy Saga of Glurpo, San Marcos’s Underwater Clown appeared first on Texas Monthly.

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

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Entering year four of researching/writing this book on space settlements...

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How we all failed Britney Spears.

During Britney Spears’s explosive remarks about her longstanding conservatorship, made before a Los Angeles court on Wednesday afternoon, one of the most heartbreaking moments came toward the end.

Spears devoted much of her 20-minute statement to outlining her problems with the restrictions of the conservatorship: how she has an IUD she’s not allowed to remove; how she has been forced to perform against her will; how she was forced onto lithium against her will.

Then Spears took time to explain why she had never spoken about her conservatorship in public before. She offered a very simple reason: She thought people would make fun of her if she did.

“I didn’t want to say it openly, because I honestly don’t think anyone would believe me,” Spears said. “That’s why I didn’t want to say any of this to anybody, to the public. Because I thought people would make fun of me or laugh at me.”

Spears doesn’t need to say why she assumed people would laugh at her if she told them that she was having a hard time. We already know why she was concerned about that: because it happened to her before, in the 2000s. That’s part of what landed her in her conservatorship in the first place. When Spears shaved off all her hair and hit a paparazzo’s car with her umbrella, she was very clearly struggling, and the world responded by mocking her viciously.

“Britney Spears Needs A Makeover Almost As Bad As She Needs A Lobotomy,” said Jezebel in 2007. Perez Hilton drew sperm on photos of Spears’s face and declared her 2007 VMAs performance “disrespectful.” ABC quoted a bunch of publicists who called her fat.

So of course Spears expected that if she made herself vulnerable to the public, the public would respond by pointing and jeering. That’s how her life has always worked. So she hasn’t spoken about her conservatorship or about the strictures under which she is living for 13 years.

Since the release of Framing Britney Spears earlier this year, it has become a talking point that the culture has changed. We’ve gotten better about how we talk about famous women. Perez Hilton has stopped doodling semen over the faces of the women he blogs about. It’s become unthinkable that a major network news site would run a story about how a famous woman is now fat.

What Spears’s testimony made clear, however, is that the world has not changed as much as we would necessarily like to think it has. She describes being photographed by paparazzi as she walks crying out of her therapist’s office — not when the paparazzi were at the height of their power in the ’00s, but now, today.

“Yesterday, paparazzi showed me coming out of the place literally crying in therapy,” Spears said. “It’s embarrassing, and it’s demoralizing. I deserve privacy when I go and have therapy.”

In the wake of Spears’s testimony, the dominant media narrative is full of support for her. Planned Parenthood spoke out against her unwanted IUD, and her fellow celebrities are up in arms on her behalf. Even Ted Cruz tweeted out a #FreeBritney. But that doesn’t mean the mockery Spears dreaded isn’t happening, too.

While the comments on her social media pages are filled with fans offering her their support and crying out to #FreeBritney, they’re also filled with people making fun of her hair and makeup. “Is she allowed to wash her hair …?” one says. Some comments mock the videos Spears frequently posts of herself dancing, although it’s increasingly come to seem that the reason Spears posts them so often is that there isn’t much else she’s allowed to do with her life. “Reminds me of an episode of Seinfeld when Elaine dances,” says one.

The fact that making fun of women is no longer considered acceptable behavior in respectable media outlets does not mean our culture is no longer interested in making fun of women, or in invading their privacy, or in harassing them. It means that the harassment and mockery has become diffuse. People no longer need ABC to write an article about how Britney’s fat now because they can log on to Instagram and tell her that they think she’s fat themselves.

Britney Spears was not wrong to assume that people would make fun of her for telling the world what happened to her. People are still making fun of her because the mainstream media set a narrative for years that she was someone it was fun and entertaining to mock, and because we live in a culture that loves to make fun of women.

The world has been taught to think of Britney Spears in a particular way. The mainstream media has changed the way it talks about her — but will the world ever fully change its mind?

This post, should I warn our terrible managers that most of our team is about to leave? , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I work in a government department of about 25 people. Due to a poorly executed reorganization and COVID19, we lost about 5 people to other jobs, retirement, or budget cuts in the past year. Obviously, it’s never optimal to lose 20% of your staff, but that could be recovered from if it wasn’t for the incredibly horrible and downright disasterous management that has, from my count, at least 9 other people actively looking for jobs to leave by the end of the summer.

I don’t think I need to go into the reasons all of these people (myself included) are looking to leave, but a general overview would be expanded duties with less staff and no pay increase, lack of respect and outright disrespect of non-professional staff, punitive policies that change weekly, and the refusal of management to acknowledge any issues or even areas where staff are excelling. (Think being written up because I asked why they were tripling my job duties without telling me which of my original duties I could step back from. I was accused of being chronically negative and put on a “positivity plan”.) They just smile and say things like “you should be happy to have a job,” “all companies have communication issues,” and “you need to get on board and be a team player or maybe this isn’t the job for you.”

We are about to lose the backbone of our department and be left with almost no institutional knowledge, anybody to train incoming people, and worse, in my opinion, nobody to help this department carry out its mission. The people we support may very well fail because of this mass exodus of staff.

I know that nothing short of a complete management overhaul will get people to stay at this point, but I’m wondering if there’s a way to tell (incredibly toxic) management that this is about to happen and that they need to prepare (or completely change their initiatives and focus on staff morale)? I don’t want this department to fail and have the people we serve lose access to our resources just because our upper management is a glorified train wreck that is little talk and even less action.

They won’t listen.

These are managers who wrote you up because you asked what to take off your plate when your workload was tripling, and who tell you that you should be happy just to have a job. These are managers who threaten you when you express concerns.

If you warn them about what’s happening, they won’t listen. They might even find a way to blame you for it.

I know the angst that comes from seeing people you serve at risk of losing access to services they need or, more broadly, from seeing work you care about fall apart. I wish you could solve that, but you cannot.

Sometimes the only thing that prompts real change is letting things implode. It’s hard to do when you care, but the reality is that you don’t have the power in this situation to do anything else.

The Orient
Hillyer and Huey
1966

Submitter: While cleaning up the children’s section, we have been finding some out of date histories and wording with several books. Such as this one…Time to ship this one off to the recycling bin.

Holly: Waaaaiiiit a minute. I’ve seen this cover before. Yup – here it is.

I mean…the map below is for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That alone makes it weed-worthy.

The post The Orient appeared first on Awful Library Books.

Good morning. With high pressure more or less holding sway, our region will now see three hot and mostly sunny days before the forecast begins to change on Sunday. Most of next week still looks fairly cloudy and somewhat cooler, with healthy rain chances, although details remain very much to come.

Thursday

There are a few scattered showers along the coast this morning, and some of those may migrate inland before, or by around noon, and likely peter out south of Interstate 10. Otherwise, we’re looking at mostly sunny skies today, with highs in the low- to mid-90s, and light southerly winds. Combined with high dewpoints, this will be a hot and sticky day. Lows tonight won’t drop below 80 degrees for much of the area.

Friday

This should be a carbon copy of Thursday.

Saturday

Rain chances may increase to about 20 percent on Saturday, but for the most part this should again be a hot and mostly sunny day with highs in the low to mid-90s. If you have outdoor plans for Saturday, they should be good to go.

Sunday

I’m less sure about the second half of the weekend. High pressure will begin to retreat on Saturday, and this should open the door to more widespread showers on Sunday. While this should not lead to heavy rain on Sunday, you probably have about a 50 percent chance of seeing some showers on Sunday, with the possibility of a few thunderstorms. Skies will likely be partly sunny, with highs in the low 90s.

Next week

The upper atmosphere will be such that our region will see a series of disturbances move overhead next week, a pattern that could persist through the entire work week. This will lead to more cloud cover, and the absence of high pressure will lead to rain chances on the order of 40 to 60 percent each day, if not higher. I have little confidence in making an accumulation forecast this far out, but I suspect most areas will see at least 1 to 3 inches overall. This will help to keep high temperatures down to around 90 degrees.

Texans were asked to cut back on their electricity use for a week because of “tight” power grid conditions, according to ERCOT officials. They still haven’t said what caused the plant outages.

The role of Steve will now be played by a small red-faced boy

Oops. I’ve verified that the spikes I’m seeing on data signals are largely due to the embarrassingly poor ground connections on my oscilloscope probes, rather than issues with the signals themselves. I had the ground leads of all four scope probes clipped together, connected to a 12 inch wire, which was then plugged into a ground point on the Apple IIgs motherboard, which was about 8 inches away from the peripheral slot where the Yellowstone card was installed. That’s a very long return path. I hadn’t appreciated how important it is to have a good short ground lead connection for the scope probe when measuring signals with fast edges, even though nice people kept trying to explain it to me. Now I have some new data using better ground connections.

To begin, I removed the spring hook adapter from the probe, and also detached its standard ground lead (a 4 inch wire with an alligator clip). This left me with a sharp-tipped spike probe. Then I wrapped a small ground spring around the outside of the probe. This was included with my bag of oscilloscope parts, but I’d never used it before. The end result looked similar to the photo above. Now I was ready to take some new measurements.

To review, here’s another look at the scope capture from part 7, with the old bad probe grounding. This was the example where I captured signals from an unpopulated PCB, when the Yellowstone card was not installed in the computer. Yellow (Ch1) is the 5V supply voltage, measured at the 5V pin of the PCB. Notice how there are spikes of more than 1V peak-to-peak in the 5V supply.

Now here’s the same experiment again, but with the probe tip for 5V directly touching the 5V pin, and the ground spring touching an adjacent GND point a few millimeters away. The probes for the other signals were still connected in the old way.

Wow! The spikes on the 5V supply completely disappeared with this more careful measurement. But I quickly discovered that it’s very difficult to accurately position a spike probe and a ground spring in a live circuit. While taking these measurements I managed to accidentally short 5V and GND not once but twice. One of the episodes produced sparks. Yikes.

Next I reinstalled the Yellowstone card, and repeated some of my earlier measurements, but with a better ground setup. It wasn’t practical to use the spike probe and ground spring here, but I did the best I could. I hooked a short piece of wire to a ground point on the Yellowstone board, and connected the standard ground leads from all four probes to this wire. Here’s what I saw:

• Blue (Ch4) is address line A1. It’s a 5V input from the Apple II
• Purple (Ch3) is data bus D0 from the Apple II
• Yellow (Ch1) is the 3.3V supply voltage, measured at the VCC pin of the ‘245.
• Cyan (Ch2) is IOSTROBE from the Apple II, and marks the boundaries of the bus cycle.

Now I could see some supply noise again (yellow channel), but it looked fairly minor. Also some modest ringing on the data bus D0, though probably not enough to worry about. Unfortunately I still observed lots of spikes on A1 (dark blue channel). It appeared that whenever the data bus value changed (pink channel), it created spikes on A1. This was true regardless of whether Yellowstone was driving the data bus, during the low period of IOSTROBE (cyan channel), or if something else was driving the data bus, during the high period of IOSTROBE.

That degree of spikes on A1 looked concerning – possibly enough to cause a malfunction if the scope were showing a true representation of the signal. To get a better look, I needed a better ground lead for the probe. So I soldered a tiny coiled wire to the A1 pin to use as an anchor for the probe, and went back to my spike plus ground coil setup. Then I veeeery carefully applied the probe and took a measurement, without any sparks. This time I didn’t capture D0 or 3.3V, and A1 was on Yellow Ch1:

It’s harder to understand what’s happening here without the D0 trace for reference. There’s still some spiking on A1 during the bus cycle when IOSTROBE is low. This is the moment when Yellowstone’s 245 is enabled and driving the data bus. But the amplitude of the spikes during the bus cycle looks much smaller than before, only reaching about 400 mV at worst. That should probably be OK.

There’s worse spikes on A1 when its value changes, after the bus cycle ends, but I don’t think I can do anything about that since Yellowstone is inactive at this time.

Using the same probe setup, I took some other measurements of A1 (not shown) outside of Yellowstone bus cycles, during times when the data bus value changes due to something else driving the bus. I observed similar spikes of about +/- 300mV on A1 whenever the data bus changed. I’m not sure what’s causing that, but it seems to be unrelated to anything that Yellowstone is doing.

 
TLDNR

In short, after taking better measurements with better probe grounding, all the signals looked decently OK.

Given this, it’s probably time to try the stress test: fill all the peripheral slots with 1980s vintage cards, which should increase the bus capacitance to its maximum, which in turn should produce the highest currents through Yellowstone’s 245 bus driver chip. It shouldn’t really matter what those other cards are or what they’re doing, the only important thing is that they’re installed. If Yellowstone is ever going to fail due to high currents, ground bounce, or similar electrical problems, this should reveal it.

For this test I’ll use a new Yellowstone board with the normal chips, instead of the Frankenstein board with which I’ve been experimenting up until now, that’s been modified too many times to count. I’ll use the updated FPGA logic with pre-driving 10101010 and other changes I’ve made to help reduce peak current, but otherwise it will be identical to the board whose mysterious IIgs failures originally launched this whole glitching saga. If this test reveals any problems, I’ll look more into adding series resistors. Otherwise I’ll move on.