Zagaja.com

Yesterday I woke-up with a suspicious cough. Despite having already been infected and triple vaccinated, my COVID test came back positive. Yesterday was also Election Day and I had not voted yet. I was traveling during the usual early and absentee ballot window. Suddenly I was forced to ask: “how do I vote if I have an active COVID infection?”

From The Verge:

T-Mobile says it’s getting rid of mobile dead zones thanks to a new partnership with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet, at an event hosted by T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert and Elon Musk. With their “Coverage Above and Beyond” setup, mobile phones could connect to satellites and use a slice of a connection providing around 2 to 4 Megabits per second connection (total) across a given coverage area.

Over the past week I have been working on relaunching vote.ctnewsjunkie.com. This side project is a love note to the idea that candidates should share their positions on their issues with their constituents when they go up for election. Seasoned CTNewsJunkie journalists develop a questionnaire that we then email to all the candidates running for office. Over the next few weeks we will be reminding candidates to fill out their survey and sharing out their responses.

Last night I reviewed the pull requests from the last week with the backend team. Each request contained eight fields from the City of Boston property assessment database. Doing this over screen share allowed us to review common pitfalls folks encountered: syntax errors, syntax inconsistencies, and distinguishing String v. Symbol types. I then showed them how to use a linter to check their code syntax automatically. Working with folks new to Ruby helped me appreciate all the things that I take for granted. We concluded by making a plan for next weeks tasks since I will be gone. Next week they are going to import the data into the app and begin making it accessible via the Internet.

As more things become web applications with logins, logging in has become more painful. I have migrated from Gmail to Apple Mail because Google started logging me out every single week even though I use the same computer. Now it seems websites ranging from my credit card to my health provider all require two factor authentication, but do not offer using my authenticator app. This means I have to keep checking my email or text for a code after I login. Sometimes with a captcha to prove I am not a robot. GitHub even stopped accepting my two factor code and demanded I use their mobile app. These changes might improve security in some way, but they are hostile to user experience.