Sonia Connolly

I start a new job tomorrow! Here are a bunch of job search links.

Diversify Tech - sign up for their newsletter with job listings from companies who are actively seeking diverse and underrepresented candidates and post a profile to their Talent Directory.

4 Day Week - sign up for their newsletter with companies that have a 4 day work week, some at full pay, and also companies with other alternative or reduced schedules. International listings. The newsletter includes text ads for tech companies.

Virtual Coffee - tech community with twice-weekly conversations and online events.

Phyl.org - book Never Search Alone by Phyl Terry, and related Job Search Councils with peer support and a required set of steps for your job search. (via elainegrey)

CalCareers - jobs working for the state of California. Definitely watch their how to apply videos - applying for California state jobs is almost as involved as applying for a federal job.

CalJobs - not to be confused with the above, this is the site to help Californians on unemployment get a new job. Includes job listings and creating a profile.

Bonus link: Should you call people resources? by Emily Webber. Answer: No. Includes a handy small flow chart for what to say instead.

Maxine Singer: A laser-sharp intellect with a passion for science by Susanne Garvey. She was a friend's mom, and I'm sad I never got to meet her - she sounds amazing.

The Woman Who Died in the Heat on a San Antonio Sidewalk Was My Friend by Marisol Cortez. Heartbreaking.

The Biden/Harris administration has restarted the free Covid test program. Get yours here! https://covidtests.gov

This first one is a lovely true story that could so easily shift into a faerie story. I was addicted to a high-pressure job when a baby hare came into my life. How would raising it change me? by Chloe Dalton, via oursin.

This story just won the 2024 Sturgeon Award, and it's fantastic. I'm surprised I haven't seen it posted all over. Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200 by R.S.A. Garcia. Via her delighted post on wandering.shop. "I'm the first person from Trinidad and Tobago to win. What an incredible, blessed year! First the Nebula, then the Sturgeon!"

The Music Must Always Play by Marissa Linden, mrissa. A different kind of alien contact story.

Several stories from the 2024 Just Married exchange, recommended by Irina Rempt. I liked how In a Land Far Away by nununununu subverted expectations, and the care in another leg around you in the bed frame by DontStopHerNow, even though such overt hurt/comfort isn't quite my thing.

Many stories at the Queer Liberation Library! I just applied for membership.

Bonus Astronomy Picture of the Day that should be a book cover and a writing prompt A Night Sky over the Tatra Mountains photographed by Marcin Rosadziński.

Yesterday I walked over to the rose garden, which is a hilly mile away. I've been trying to avoid extra walking in hopes of helping my right achilles tendon stop being swollen, but it seems to be doing somewhat better, and it was a glorious sunny warm day, so off I went.

Along the way, I saw a car parked next to a large median in a wide intersection. The driver was out of the car pulling on a tree in the median, talking animatedly in Arabic with a woman still in the car. I pass through there all the time, and hadn't looked carefully at the tree until I wondered what the man was doing. Oh, it's a fig tree, full of figs. I politely looked away and kept walking.

The rose garden is in a little valley, carefully tended and manicured in the bowl, but with wilder areas around the edges, including sprawling blackberry brambles. It's late in the season, but I managed to forage a few tasty blackberries within my reach.

I sat on a bench for a while and admired the roses, and then walked home. I happened to take the same route back past the fig tree. The car was long gone, so I took a closer look at the tree, and pulled off one large fig. It wasn't fully ripe, but still delicious.

I love receiving the gifts of nature fresh from the plant. It's part of why I like shopping at Farmers Markets, one step closer to that.

I gave back a tiny bit by picking up a discarded plastic water bottle at the rose garden and finding a recycling container to drop it in. Now that I think about it, the garden is remarkably clean given all the people that use it - that's the first trash I remember seeing there.

My other good deed was also about recycling. One of my window blinds broke while it was still under warranty, and the first replacement they sent me was someone else's order - too narrow, too long, and beige rather than soft white. They didn't want it back, so I posted it a couple of times on TrashNothing.com. I was getting resigned to just dismantling it and putting the metal in the recycling when someone wrote and said they could use it. They picked it up yesterday. Yay for reuse rather than generating more trash!

There's a Friendzy friending meme over at silviarambles' journal. So many lovely people!

From Rodrigo, @mathsppblog@fosstodon.org, A crossword where all hints are regular expressions!

Regex isn't hard enough, so I present you with a crossword where all hints are regular expressions!

I confess at first it looked like the hints don't contain enough information to solve the puzzle but after some slow but steady progress I can confirm that they do 🤣

The original puzzle is from https://puzzles.mit.edu/2013/coinheist.com/rubik/a_regular_crossword/

I shared this on my blog: https://mathspp.com/blog/problems/regex-crossword

Direct link to the puzzle grid

I printed it out, and it took me a couple of enjoyable hours to solve. I did have to check my understanding of the finer points of regular expressions at https://regex101.com by typing in some of the clue expressions and then trying different values to see if they matched.

The Placeholder by Patricia Russo. A brief story about sources of support.

Shit Cassandra Saw That She Didn’t Tell the Trojans Because at that Point Fuck Them Anyway by Gwen E. Kirby. This is short and perfect.

Katya Vasilievna and the Second Drowning of Baba Rechka by Christine Hanolsy. I loved the details of the natural world and the lesbian romance in this story. The story is grounded in the Rusalka myths of Ukraine. Having learned a few songs about them gave the story added richness.

The Sort by Thomas Ha. A gentle story with great parenting. The stress is in trying to get along with society as it's trying to cope with the effects of climate change.

Did you wonder exactly when Milo starts his journey in The Phantom Tollbooth? Well, Leonard Richardson has figured it out! If you want to jump to the answer, he asserts, "Though published in 1961, The Phantom Tollbooth begins on Tuesday, April 11, 1967." The fun is in how he got there.

The Hobbit with illustrations by Tove Jansson! (In Norwegian.)

The Lotus Eaters by aldora89, via runpunkrun. Novel-length story where Kirk and Spock are stranded on a dangerous alien planet that disables much of their tech. Great writing, great plotting, and I didn't realize quite how long it was when I started! Enough suspense to be interesting, without extreme levels of violence.

Maneki Neko by Bruce Sterling. I love the underlying idea of this story, although the hard-boiled detective style it's written in isn't my favorite. I linked to it back in 2020 and said the same thing.

I said to a friend on Sunday that the worst case is still the worst case, but the best case just got a whole lot better. I'm excited to vote for Kamala Harris in a way that I wasn't for Joe Biden, although I definitely would have.

siderea pointed out a great moment in Kamala Harris's recent speech.

And John Scalzi pointed out that there was method behind the apparent Democratic flailing. "Biden’s news was quickly followed by his endorsement of Kamala Harris, which in turn was followed by a flood of endorsements for Harris across the Democratic political firmament, effectively slamming the door on any serious challenge to Harris at the upcoming Democratic National Convention."

I donated to Kamala Harris's campaign, I donated to the Movement Voter Project, and I downloaded 20 letters from Vote Forward's California campaign.

I plan to write: "I vote because I love California, and I want all our kids to have a safe and joyful future."