TL;DR: Airports are spaceports full of beings new to this planet, awkwardness of tech interviews, smart plugs for e-bike charging automation, a Plex server corruption story, rediscovering old synthpop compilations, and the usual pile of AI coding discourse bookmarks. Oh, and election anxiety. Lots of that.

Airports Are Spaceports

I was at an airport this week and decided to pretend it's a spaceport and this is most beings' first day on this planet. Seems to fit observations and offers predictive power.

I think some of them are more accustomed to non-euclidean architecture, judging by the way they make sudden stops and turns in crowds.

Halloween Movie Marathon

The girl and I watched Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)—she's never seen it and I haven't seen it since probably the early 2000s when I had no idea of the notion of "camp."

Also finally got around to watching Color Out of Space (2019), the Nicolas Cage starring adaptation of the Lovecraft story. Verging on "people doing all the wrong dumb things" horror that I don't particularly like, but I guess an extraterrestrial psychedelic in the water table might induce a little impaired cognition. I can say it had me pretty spooked toward the end, even with Cage chewing the scenery as everything hit the fan.

The Voight-Kampff Test of Tech Interviewing

Been helping out with some tech interviews involving small coding exercises. They're kinda painful for me, because I really want to jump in and help the candidate when they get stuck. I feel like a jerk when I just let them sweat it out.

The good thing about how we're doing these coding exercises is that I try to present them as more of a conversation or pair programming than an exam—they can talk through the process, ask me questions, and hit up the web for docs.

I have had at least one candidate pull in an AI chatbot. But they were more or less querying for doc examples and then talked through writing the code themselves. I'd rather they're up front about that than doing the old copypasta shuffle off-stage.

I know some folks would be like "using a chatbot in an interview? straight to jail!" But we use a lot of genAI at work these days, so that would be rather pointless. Also, I am very tired.

Smart Home Tinkering

Tiny thing I finally got around to doing with Home Assistant this past weekend: Stuck a Sonoff S31 smart outlet in the shed for the e-bike charger.

Now I can see how much power it takes to top off the battery after a ride. And I set up an automation to disable charging when it's too cold or hot outside. I keep getting yelled at by the bike shop since that's bad for the battery and apparently logs an exception in the controller.

Though I'm also like: If the bike's electronics are smart enough to log a temperature exception while charging, why not disable charging from there? Probably complicated enough to just tell the user "don't do that."

The Plex Corruption Saga

We had a brief power outage and then another one about 90 seconds later. Turns out that was the perfect formula to end up corrupting some XML file in my Plex server for which I had no backup (ugh), so I had to reinstall it and let it reindex everything from scratch. Maybe there was a less drastic way to do it, but meh.

One fun thing about watching it gradually reindex all my music is that it reminded me of a bunch of CDs I'd ripped that I'd totally forgotten about. Like... I used to be obsessed with this "Synthpop Club Anthems" collection, circa 2002. I remember it living in my car stereo for like a week straight, listening to and from work.

And now I see that there were further editions of "Synthpop Club Anthems" from A Different Drum and I kinda need to get them. (Ooh, vol. 4 was a double-disc set!)

Miscellanea