jbarham

Case in point: https://www.switch.com/executive-team/

For anyone interested in contemporary piano reviews, Stu Harrison does fantastic reviews for both acoustic and digital pianos on the Merriam Music YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/MerriamPianos).

I run https://www.slickdns.com (DNS hosting) and https://www.youpatch.com (pixel quilt patterns).

Web backend: Django

DNS/Web API backends: Go, Flask, Tornado

DB: Postgres, SQLite

Cache: Redis

Frontend: htmx (via jQuery, Backbone.js and Vue.js)

Marketing site: Cloudflare Pages

Hosting: Mix of Heroku, Linode and Fly

Backups: Backupsy

Dev: Linux and Docker Compose

Payments: Stripe and PayPal (reluctantly)

When David Livingstone died in 1873 in what is now Zambia his attendants removed his heart and buried it under a tree. They then carried his body over 1000 miles to the coast near Dar es Salaam, where his remains were returned by ship to Britain and interned in Westminster Abbey. But Livingstone's heart belonged to Africa.

I think a lot of church congregations in Korea meet in spaces that are not purpose-built church buildings, e.g., the floor of a commercial high-rise building. I lived in Seoul on and off from 2004 - 2006 and one of the things I first noticed when taking the airport bus into the city from Incheon at night was how many otherwise ordinary buildings had illuminated red crosses on their roofs.

Yeah, but can you get a green card on an E3?

I have 30+ domains registered w/ Namecheap. I recently bought an ebook about UI design from a Russian. And I'm a longtime customer of JetBrains. While JetBrains is officially based in Prague (Czech Republic) I understand that many/most of their employees are in Russia. Similarly Namecheap is officially based in Arizona but many (most?) of their employees are in the Ukraine.

I'm definitely ambivalent about this move from Namecheap. I'd be curious to know whether this decision was made unilaterally by Namecheap's US-based CEO or whether it was pushed by their Ukrainian employees.

While Namecheap are understandably angry about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I'm skeptical that cutting of their Russian customers will do anything to help Ukraine. If anything it will only cause Namecheap to lose revenue and thereby force them to cut jobs in their Ukrainian based workforce. Long term it also creates reputational risk for Namecheap as a company that makes decisions based on short-term political factors.

Requiring Namecheap's Russian customers to transfer their domains to another registrar in the next week is also easier said than done given the financial sanctions against Russia will probably make it much more difficult for them to pay for transferring the domains to a different registrar. I think it's safe to say that the average tech-savvy Russian is probably more anti-Putin than the average Russian as they have to jump through hoops and mess w/ VPNs to access western based services such as Twitter etc. So in practice this move might lead to de facto censorship and loss of income for their Russian customers, many of whom would be against the war.

Installing Windows without a Microsoft account

Yes, "buzzy" or "tinny" is a good way to describe the sound I have in my implant ear. But I don't usually notice it with my other ear which has almost normal hearing up to 1500 Hz.

Definitely agree that the brain is quite malleable. I think it was an unexpected result at just how malleable the brain is in adult implant recipients.

FWIW I participated in a post-op research study and IIRC was told that more electrodes wouldn't necessarily improve the quality of the sound. I think what's much more important is the algorithms in the over-the-ear processor. (I have the Nucleus 7: https://www.cochlear.com/au/en/home/products-and-accessories...)

I just did a music test with & without my cochlear, using Postmodern Jukebox. ;)

Here's the reference song and timestamp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI1cGPfL-Bw&t=130s Without my implant I can barely hear anything the drummer does for the next 10 seconds, so it must be > 1500 Hz, which is the upper limit of my "good" ear. With my cochlear alone (i.e., plugging my "good" left ear) I can hear all the frequencies, but the song sounds "tinny" and lacks clarity. With both ears I'm not consciously missing much in terms of clarity if I had normal hearing, so the brain does a very good job at creating almost normal sound from my two very imperfect ears.

However, please note that outcomes for cochlear implant recipients vary. I've been told that my result is unusually good given that I scored 90%+ on standard audiology speech tests post-implant.

Great read. I'm a cochlear implant recipient. I live in Melbourne and had my operation at the Eye and Ear Hospital where Graeme Clark did his research, which I thought was pretty neat.

For unknown reasons my normal hearing deteriorated rapidly in my late 30s to the point where my right ear became "profoundly deaf". (My left ear only hears up to 1500 Hz or so.) I got the implant in my right ear in late 2015 and it was literally life changing.

With the combination of the implant and the residual low frequency hearing in my left ear, in most situations my hearing is almost normal. I can understand speech fine and appreciate music.

Personally my main takeaway from the article is less that renewable energy sources are a good alternative to the grid but more that the monopoly Hydro One connection fees are outrageously high. $25 - $80k connection fees seem like extortion in rural Ontario where the average annual income is probably around $80k.

I wonder if they'll do a follow-up article next year to report how the solar systems performed over the long Northern Ontario winter...

I have the Cochlear CI512 implant. Not sure how many channels it has (14?), but IIRC at this point increasing the number of channels doesn't have a significant difference in outcomes. Implants are designed to be simple and reliable so that they last for life. The real smarts are in the external processor, which is custom programmed or "mapped" for each recipient.

I recently upgraded to the Nucleus 7 processor, but it sounds identical to my previous Nucleus 6 processor. Main benefit is that the Nucleus 7 is smaller and lighter and the batteries last longer.

Keep in mind though that cochlear implants are generally a last resort since implanting them will usually remove any residual hearing you might have left. AFAIK your ear has to be "profoundly" or totally deaf before doctors will recommend implant surgery. Preferred treatment is to augment whatever hearing you still have with hearing aids before recommending implants. In my case my left ear is almost normal up to 1500Hz so it has a hearing aid that does some frequency transposition for higher frequencies. Implant is in my right ear which was almost totally deaf.

Hope that helps.

I have a cochlear implant and strongly disagree that it prevents me from enjoying music. So much so that I've taken up piano lessons again after a break of 20+ years.

One of my side projects is a DNS hosting service, SlickDNS (https://www.slickdns.com/).

I moved my authoritative DNS name servers over to Fly a few months ago. After some initial teething issues with Fly's UDP support (which were quickly resolved) it's been smooth sailing.

The Fly UX via the flyctl command-line app is excellent, very Heroku-like. Only downside is it makes me mad when I have to fight the horrendous AWS tooling in my day job.

https://idlewords.com/2006/04/argentina_on_two_steaks_a_day.... (by Maciej Cegłowski, the creator of Pinboard)

I recently started using Fly to host the anycast DNS name servers for my DNS hosting service SlickDNS (https://www.slickdns.com/).

There were some initial teething issues as Fly only recently added UDP support, but they were very responsive to the various bugs I reported and fixed them. My name servers have been running problem free for several weeks now.

The Fly UX via the flyctl command-line app is excellent, very Heroku-like.

For apps that need anycast the only real alternative to Fly that I found is AWS Global Accelerator, but it limits you to two anycast IP addresses, it's much more expensive than Fly and you're fighting the AWS API the whole time.

You're probably thinking of the Quebec Immigrant Investor Program (https://www.immigration.ca/quebec-immigrant-investor-program). In theory applicants should "intend to settle in the province of Quebec", in practice most of them end up in Vancouver or Toronto.

FYI your email isn't in your profile.

> On the software development side I learned enough COBOL to port some of our mainframe jobs to Python. I wrote packed-decimal libraries and EBCDIC encoders so we could use Python going forward to process batch jobs. A big deal in the payments industry.

Great read, but as someone else who has worked on mainframes and in Python I found this especially impressive.

Yes, I can distinguish between a C major chord and a C minor chord. I took piano lessons as a kid and learned some formal music theory.

Note though that I had perfectly normal hearing until my late 30s, and only have an implant in one ear. After my implant operation my brain "knew" what it should be hearing from the implant signal. This is apparently true of many adult CI recipients and the unexpected plasticity of adult brains to adjust to the CI signal is an active area of research.

I think that the typical outcomes for people who have cochlear implants when they are born deaf would be quite different to adult recipients like me who grew up with normal hearing.

After my cochlear implant operation I volunteered to participate in an in-depth research study to collect data on post-op outcomes for cochlear implant recipients (coincidentally at the Eye & Ear hospital in Melbourne where the multi-channel cochlear implant was invented and first implanted in 1978 by Graeme Clark).

I did a whole raft of audiology tests and for the speech comprehension tests in particular I scored 90%+ compared to people with normal hearing. (They're tough tests too, trying to pick out a sentence from a lot of background noise which is a worst-case scenario for hard of hearing people.)

I was told that my outcome was better than average, but I was a younger than average adult recipient given than I was in my early 40's, compared to most (in Australia at least) who are 60+.

And yes I can now distinguish all notes on a piano.

> Hearing aids (nor cochlear implants, for that matter) do not "restore hearing", except for light hearing loss

This claim is totally false for cochlear implants. I am a cochlear implant recipient and before the implant I had essentially no hearing in my right ear ("profoundly deaf"). With the implant in my right ear my hearing has been restored to 90%+ of normal hearing.

Location: Melbourne, Australia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Django, Go

Résumé/CV: https://www.wombatsoftware.com/john-barham-resume.html

GitHub: https://github.com/jbarham/

Email: john@wombatsoftware.com

My expertise is Django web app development and high performance distributed systems in Python and/or Go. I've also done embedded and desktop app development.

I created and operate SlickDNS (https://www.slickdns.com/), a DNS hosting service, and co-founded and developed the website for YouPatch (https://www.youpatch.com/), the world's most popular pixel quilt pattern generation service.

SEEKING WORK | Melbourne, Australia or REMOTE

Technologies: Python, Django, Go

Résumé/CV: https://www.wombatsoftware.com/john-barham-resume.html

GitHub: https://github.com/jbarham/

Email: john@wombatsoftware.com

My expertise is Django web app development and high performance distributed systems in Python and/or Go. I've also done embedded and desktop app development.

I created and operate SlickDNS (https://www.slickdns.com/), a DNS hosting service, and co-founded and developed the website for YouPatch (https://www.youpatch.com/), the world's most popular pixel quilt pattern generation service.

See also the Ball of Light series by South Australian based photographer Denis Smith: https://www.denissmith.com.au/ball-of-light

Location: Melbourne, Australia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Django, Go

Résumé/CV: https://www.wombatsoftware.com/john-barham-resume.html

GitHub: https://github.com/jbarham/

Email: john@wombatsoftware.com

My expertise is Django web app development and high performance distributed systems in Python and/or Go. I've also done embedded and desktop app development.

I created and operate SlickDNS (https://www.slickdns.com/), a DNS hosting service, and co-founded and developed the website for YouPatch (https://www.youpatch.com/), the world's most popular pixel quilt pattern generation service.

FWIW I run a website that allows you to interactively filter Micro Four Thirds lenses: https://www.m43lenses.com/

I've lived in LA. I've also lived in Seoul. I miss living in LA. I do not miss living in Seoul.

Seoul is a concrete jungle where the vast majority of people live in tiny concrete apartments. (Literally concrete, I destroyed a lot of masonry drill bits trying to hang pictures on the concrete walls of our apartment.) Sure the subway network in Seoul is extensive but it's still not exactly a fast way to travel.

Speaking from experience the fastest way to get around Seoul is on a scooter. That's because scooters routinely jump red lights, go the wrong way down one-way streets and take shortcuts on sidewalks with impunity. Lots of fun when you're young with no kids, as I was at the time, but it doesn't scale and would never be allowed in LA.

The easiest way to cut down on vehicle traffic is to stop forcing people commuting to workplaces where they sit down at an internet connected computer that they could just as easily do at home. As the current pandemic has forced so many of us to do, which is one big upside.