msisk6

Wizards of the Coast | Various Engineering Roles | Full-time | Onsite | Seattle, WA (Renton)

Wizards of the Coast is the world's largest publisher of adventure games, including Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. We're a division of toy-giant Hasbro and we're expanding further into digital gaming.

I recently came onboard as Director of Cloud & Date Engineering and I'm building out the teams to create a common gaming platform on AWS.

I have one DevOps engineer opening that can be hired at either a junior or senior level:

https://boards.greenhouse.io/wizardsofthecoast/jobs/52566610... https://boards.greenhouse.io/wizardsofthecoast/jobs/50367310...

I will also have several engineering manager positions open soon -- I don't have those posted yet, but if you're interested ping me. You can find my email in my profile.

We're currently working remote but plan on going back into the office when COVID allows, so you'll need to be in the Seattle area (our office is in Renton). We'll probably adopt a hybrid model so you won't need to be in the office everyday, but details are still being worked out.

We have the usual big-company stuff like decent health insurance and other benefits. You'll get lots of free Magic and D&D stuff. Plus you get 5 weeks of vacation a year, and I will make you take them.

My current batch of fuel containers are all from Justrite.

They're expensive, but I don't have any issues with leaks. I have a 1-gallon for 2-stoke fuel, a 5-gallon for the gas mower, and another 5-gallon in yellow for diesel.

https://www.justrite.com/type-ii-accuflow-steel-safety-can-f...

Good timing on that capture.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/09/16/b-2-rolled-of...

They don't really seem that big in person. And they're amazingly hard to see from any distance since they're essentially just a thin flat airfoil.

Here's a not-especially-good video I just uploaded of one flying over my farm from this summer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyXSuFj0naQ

They're often deployed elsewhere for missions and/or training, but the home base for all of them is Whiteman AFB. There's only 20 of them.

I do wonder how many megatons of nuclear weapons are stored there, about 20 miles from my house. Maybe best not to think on that too much. :)

I live on a farm very close to this area.

All the B-2s are based at nearby Whiteman Air Force Base. They fly over often -- one even fly over my farm today about an hour ago.

This one was probably on final approach during the summer when the winds are usually out of the south and was probably about 2,000 feet above the ground.

The ERCOT campus has their own generation capability along with sitting between two distribution grids. Same with their DR site in Bastrop. In the case of a black start condition (grid totally down), ERCOT would need to come up first to coordinate the grid restoration.

Taylor is an ideal place for a large manufacturing operation since it's close to major highways and railroads, not too far from Austin, and land is very cheap.

Yep, as late as earlier this year there's a ton of stuff inside the DHS that still requires IE and flash.

NextGate | DevOps Engineer | Remote in USA | Full Time | https://nextgate.com

NextGate is a small, well-established company in the Healthcare IT space.

Our identity management solutions connect the healthcare ecosystem to provide a comprehensive record of care across the enterprise. With our market-leading Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI), we help organizations overcome the clinical, operational and financial challenges that result from duplicate records and siloed systems for seamless data exchange, enhanced clinical decision-making and better care.

We're expanding our cloud team to help with day-to-day operations in AWS and new engineering work to build better CI/CD pipelines and more automation.

Job Requirements:

• 2+ years of hands-on operational experience with AWS in a DevOps manner. • Extensive hands-on experience with Linux systems (Ubuntu) required. • Demonstrated experience migrating on-premises solutions/applications to cloud-based offerings. • Ability to code and script in administrative type language (e.g. Python, PowerShell, Bash). • Experience with Configuration management tools, such as Ansible. • Experience with orchestration technologies (e.g. AWS CloudFormation, Terraform). • AWS Certifications a plus

I'm the Head of Cloud at NextGate and I'm the hiring manager. If you have questions or want to apply just email me at mike.sisk@nextgate.com

All US rail freight cars have a "bleed rod" that releases all the air in the brake system so you can move cars for switching.

Most large railroad yards nowadays are "hump yards" where a locomotive pushes cars over a small hill and they roll down the though a series of switches with a computer monitoring their progress and activating rail mounted brakes that squeeze the sides of the wheels so they roll into other cars at a controlled speed to make up trains.

Smaller yards, like in this story of the runaway, are "flat switched" where a locomotive and man power manually do all this work to put a train together. Back before railroads started reducing train crews the engineer wouldn't need to get out to align switches; they had a "switchman" who would get out and align the switches as needed.

It's definitely an American HO scale layout. The track looks like Atlas and I recognize several of the buildings as HO-scale Revell kits that were popular at the time.

Back in 1989 I hauled a Toshiba portable up to the top of San Jacinto via the Palm Springs aerial tramway to do some work on AutoCAD. I didn't get much work done; mostly I just had to explain what this computer thing was. Toshiba probably ended up with a few sales from that.

Computing was definitely a niche industry back then for most folks.

I kinda miss it.

Yeah, that was fun. I worked in the Rackspace Austin office (an old call center building with it's own problems) but I often had to be in San Antonio for meetings.

The noise was crazy. Even after taking steps to address the noise it was still an issue. Not much you can do with all the concrete a mall is typically made of.

And the 2nd floor shook and moved around a lot after folks moved in. It was actually nauseating.

We have 10-acres and have similar problems.

The amount of time and physical labor to get anything done is crazy. We have rodent problems, too, and our collection of six-towed barn cats do the best they can. Chickens do an amazing job on rodents, BTW. Chicken and duck eggs fresh from the farm are amazing.

We had an opossum get into the barn last night and killed some of our ducks. Normally these aren't hard to get rid of but this one was very aggressive and I had to shoot it. Earlier in the year it was raccoons and they were able to break into a cage and do an amazing amount of carnage.

Bugs got to our pear and apple trees this year before we did so that was a bust.

I've been trying to get bees going but mites are killing everything.

Oh, back-hoes. Mine is new but even new farm equipment has problems. I cut the end off one of my fingers working on our tractor/back-hoe earlier in the year. Which is fun since my day job is software.

So, yeah, farming isn't for the faint of heart.

Last I heard the whole Tres Amigas SuperStation deal totally fell apart.

That's exactly right, but the capacity is limited. ERCOT in Texas, for example, has 5 DC ties to the other grids: http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...

Yeah, I especially like it when I'm in the middle of a long email and some sort of click with my palm happens and it deletes most of what I've been typing. Just happened to me today. Be nice if there was a way to totally deactivate the trackpad if you were using a mouse or something.

I took a typing class back in high school in the 80's and it's probably the most useful class I ever took. I've been touch typing with the skills I learned on an IBM Selectric for over 30 years now with no RSI and a decent typing speed.

However, earlier this year I had an accident and lost about an inch off the middle finger on my right hand and that's really messed with my typing. That's the 'I', 'K', and ',' finger and that's made code and vim usage a bit tough. ;)

My wife and I had a small ranch just north of Austin and had a ton of fire ants. Often when clearing a field with the tractor and a brush cutter I'd hit a mound of fire ants. If the wind was just right they'd blow right into my face. Lots of fun.

We have since moved north and I was just commenting to my wife how tame it is here without the rattlesnakes, fire ants, and killer bees. Don't miss that time a rattlesnake got into the house one night.

Texas sure isn't boring.

Everyone has different needs, but having owned pretty much every type of RV available, I'd say a truck with a fifth-wheel is much easier to mange than a coach with a flat-tow car.

A fifth-wheel is easy to backup when needed. A coach with a flat-tow car attached can't back up at all.

And as long as you have enough truck for the size fifth-wheel you have they tow much better in wind and handle curvy roads well.

It depends on where you live in Texas, but you only have to hit a deer once to understand the utility of those ugly brushguards.

My son ran into a deer with our beater Aerostar minivan awhile back it totaled it. Airbag went off and everything.

Meanwhile I hit a deer with my Ram diesel pickup with a Ranchhand guard last week and no damage. So they do have some utility. ;)

I do agree these trucks are ridiculous; if I didn't have a farm and the need to haul a large trailer I probably wouldn't have it. As it is we mostly drive my wife's Subaru when we actually need to go somewhere unladened.

You'll probably like the product teardowns of youtube user AvE. He usually does tools, but also the random appliance or product from time to time. His teardown of the Juicero is a classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ

Automobiles are one of the few items in the USA that's nearly 100% recycled. There's a huge secondary market for parts, rebuilds, and scrap metal.

Youtube is full of videos of folks buying nearly used cars that were totaled by insurance (usually due to accidents that triggered the airbags) for pennies on the dollar and fixing them up.

There's a movie about that...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059065/

Well, there's a theory the earth is hollow and inhabited by dinosaurs and aliens, too. ;)

I think the best argument against abiogenic petroleum in the mantle is that if the theory had any merit Exxon would have figured out a way to bore into the mantle decades ago.

I worked with a guy once that was perfectly happy to let his OSX Mail.app icon "bounce" with new message notifications all day long. He was 10 feet away from me and that bouncing icon caught my eye all the time. I just don't understand how he could work with that thing bouncing at the bottom of his screen all day long.

Some folks just aren't bothered by such things.

Or have better focus than I do.

I have the previous gen 12.9" iPad Pro and my keyboard has just started giving me the not recognized messages and occasionally not working. It hasn't died completely yet but I'm giving it to my son and he'll mostly just use the pencil doing art stuff so it's not that big a deal personally.

Still, it's sad to see so much Apple tech being life-limited due to aging batteries or what not.

From the ARRL: http://www.arrl.org/news/restraint-urged-in-response-to-2-me...

This.

As someone responsible for the IT systems reliability of a grid operator I have to wonder if this really is a backhanded attempt to limit to the growth of renewables.

We run load frequency control on the grid every 4 seconds to keep the grid in balance. Hard to see how that'd work with manual controls on today's complex grid.

You can go here and download a spreadsheet of Fuel Mix Reports for the ERCOT grid: http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation

In ERCOT wind is 2nd in generation to Gas Combined-Cycle generation (basically jet engines running natural gas). Coal is slightly behind wind and solar and biomass is tiny.