Photo of a sticker depicting a pizza box guy drawing holding a rose, with the text "New York City Democratic Socialists of America". The sticker is on the restroom wall of a Brooklyn bar and other stickers and graffiti are partially visible.
Oven fresh!

This week’s random photo comes from the wall of the men’s in an unnamed, Brooklyn bar. Regular readers will undoubtedly know the place. Glad to see that they used union printers for these stickers.

The holidays are now officially upon us. Just for fun, I’m going to keep a running count of how many times I hear All I Want for Christmas is You between now and the 25th—I think I’ll hear it at least 10 times. I broke a long-standing, personal tradition of buying nothing on Black Friday. The rationalization was that I saved hundreds of dollars on something that was truly needed (just not at this moment). While this made financial sense, dismounting my high horse is painful.

Given the long weekend, I hoped to make some progress on a couple projects. That didn’t happen, and not just because I was spending time spending money. Now, there is something to be said for rest and relaxation, but I feel like I squandered some time when I could have been establishing forward momentum.

I did manage to “fix” one thing that has been on my list though. Over the past few weeks, one or two of our jams were plagued with really poor audio quality—the musicianship was, of course, stellar. I’m not sure if it was the server configuration, or network congestion. Since I can’t do much about the latter, I updated my Jamulus server docker image with the hope that it might improve things. Rather than building from source, I’m now using a precompiled distribution. In theory, that really shouldn’t make a any difference. But, I wondered if I might be doing something wrong, especially with the dependencies. The initial test sounded great. The real test, however, comes when we all connect to jam. Wish us luck.


Links

Recently, Microsoft published Breaking down the infinite workday (via slashdot). It’s a short piece touting a larger research study. Two things really caught my attention:

Our telemetry data shows that, on average, employees using Microsoft 365 are interrupted every 2 minutes by a meeting, email, or notification.

Every 2 minutes? That’s terrible. How do people feel about the state of things?

For many, the workday now feels like navigating chaos—reacting to others’ priorities and losing focus on what matters most. In a time when every hour counts, that drift could quietly drain energy and stall business progress.

Sounds like a total shit show. This might be tolerable during work hours. But, increasingly, it doesn’t stop after punching the clock*. No matter the time or day, the notifications never cease.

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