Officially disguised as a Canadian
For real. Don’t read it. Here goes. — The headache was deep into its third day. Dennis was sweating cold in his thick pyjamas. Slick sweat stained his sheets. Fever ravaged his body, muscles taught with pain, but the headache hurt the most. Was he dying? He decided that he didn’t care anymore. He justContinue reading I wrote a 500-word short story and it needs a trigger warning
My friend, mentor, and former housemate, Chris Esterhuyse, has died. Chris, who moved in with me at one of the most difficult times of my life, and saw me through breakups, near-bankruptcy, and finding new love. Chris, who kept me fed, even if it was Mystery Chicken Surprise. Chris, who introduced me to Gereth andContinue reading So long, Steel Drum Sally
A long time ago I used to host with Hetzner Africa. After moving to Canada I decided to go with a North American host for my customers and moved to Site5. Then I went to Liquid Web, (and for some time, WPEngine for bornsql.ca). Now I’m back with Hetzner, running on a dedicated box hostedContinue reading Back in the arms of Hetzner
This past weekend, M treated us to a show or two in Las Vegas. We saw RuPaul’s Drag Race Live, including a very welcome appearance by Lawrence Chaney (there were others as well, including Pangina). It was a good show, and was very well staged. All queens had a scene where they appear from theContinue reading Rolling in the weed
Two blog posts in a week! It’s like 2006 all over again. But seriously, I figured out a really annoying side-effect of moving back from WP Engine to my own hosting six months ago, and that is that file and folder permissions were set incorrectly (WPE for some reason uses 700 for folders, and 664Continue reading Broken links aren’t broken, after all
On 24 January 2022, I started what I suspect is the last stage* of my IT career, at Microsoft. I joined the Database Docs team, one of 8 people (including our manager), together responsible for over 16,000 articles on the Microsoft Learn platform. I am the owner of the SQL Server on Linux and SQLContinue reading I work at Microsoft
Recently, a friend (Janie Larson, A.K.A. the Red Queen Coder) asked me to take over hosting of her website. Unfortunately, because of boring technical reasons, she wasn’t able to back up the WordPress database, and so I used a tool called SiteSucker Pro to download it as-is as a static HTML entity. We would comeContinue reading Reverse engineering WordPress, kinda
While on holiday last year, a travel companion asked a question at dinner about kids these days and pronouns, that I wish I’d answered better. This is that answer. — Why do you wear clothes? Why do you wear those clothes? Is is out of habit? Have you ever wondered why you behave the wayContinue reading What’s in a pronoun?
(Originally posted on LinkedIn.) OpenAI’s ChatGPT is not intelligent. It is distilling knowledge fed into it by humans mining billions of data points. It’s a glorified chess computer. I am deeply concerned that this will increase the amount of misinformation floating around, because it has the confidence programmed into it by the very people whoContinue reading On the real meaning of intelligence
I have moved my work and personal WordPress sites from WP Engine because they use Cloudflare for their CDN, and I didn’t want to support a company that supports Cloudflare. Terrorism is bad. So now I have my own dedicated physical web server again.