How QM relates to what we can do with signals and information:

That is so cool. That’s from An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise by John R. Pierce

A Note on Reading Big, Difficult Books. I don’t think those books are particularly difficult.

These books, however, are difficult:

Constructing Reality: Quantum Theory and Particle Physics by John Marburger.

Supersymmetry in Quantum and Classical Mechanics by Bijan Kumar Bagchi.

How the Laws of Physics Lie by Nancy Cartwright.

Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard.

An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise by John R. Pierce.

But I recommend all five. I could only understand about half of the second one, Supersymmetry in Quantum and Classical Mechanics, on a first read, but that’s really not my area so if it’s yours maybe you’ll fare a bit better.

Jillian Michaels criticized for saying Lizzo’s body shouldn’t be ‘celebrated.’

I agree with Jillian Michaels. Shouldn’t be shamed but shouldn’t be celebrated. Being so overweight is not something to celebrate. It’s very harmful and leads to far worse health outcomes over time, and the normalization of this harms many more people.

The company where I currently work definitely appreciates me, so I am not complaining about that. I didn’t get made a CTO for nothing. However, I don’t think they really understand that they’d have to hire 4 or 5 people to replace me or how hard I have to work to keep up even with my own field.

Right now, I hold six different intermediate or professional-level certifications in different areas of technology, ranging from networking to security to cloud operations. These need to be renewed every so often, so I am constantly studying for certifications and exams. It’s never-ending, really. One day, I’ll get tired of it but haven’t yet.

And this is real knowledge, not just test peacocking. For instance, yesterday I worked on and completed a bit of combined t-sql and PowerShell that retrieves an xml feed from the web, parses it, and then inserts the data into a SQL table for later use. Note that this isn’t even an infrastructure task, but truly is light programming.

Today, I will be troubleshooting a broken site-to-site VPN connection. (I actually already know what’s wrong with it*. Convincing the other side of how they are misconfigured is always the hard part.)

Next week, I will be doing an Office365 email conversion. The week after, I will likely be advising on purchase and installation of physical and cloud infrastructure as well as doing most if not all of the implementation.

You get the idea! It sounds a little arrogant even to me, but if you can find someone else who can do all this, and as quickly as I do it, you better fucking hire them because I’ve met a few IT people better than me but hardly any as broadly knowledgeable or as blazing fast at troubleshooting.

*I know what’s wrong with it because I’ve done dozens and dozens of these, while most IT people haven’t, so I’ve seen every error and I can troubleshoot them almost instantly.