The Doctor

When I worked for a telecom company I used to get stuck working double shifts (system maintenance cycle at night) because I had seniority. Rather than go into the office or the data center I worked from my apartment when I could get away with it.

At this point in life I lived maybe fifteen minutes off the DC Beltway in NOVA. This is somewhat relevant.

So, one night I’m waiting for Sylantro patches to install and the cluster to fail back over and I saw a bunch of shadows moving at speed through the window. The odd thing blowing in the breeze at night wasn’t unusual but this was a pack. Then I heard a crash upstairs and shouting in at least two languages, English being one of them. Never did find out what the other one was because it was too muffled.

I found out later that somebody living in my apartment building two or three floors up had been raided. I asked the folks I knew on the local police force, and they said it wasn’t them. I kinda suspect that it was the FBI. Anyway, he worked for somebody’s government and was in the States on a diplomatic visa, and he was also involved in human trafficking somehow. I never did find out specifics.

The UI’s a little bit sticky, possibly due to how busy lemmy.ml is right now. The set of communities is pretty thin as well, but that will probably change as time goes on.

I was writing code for Google Glass that implemented facial recognition. A friend of mine suffered a TBI in an automobile wreck and developed partial facial prosopagnosia as a result. I was basically writing software that would recognize faces within 15 feet of the wearer and compare it to images of their contacts in their Google account, and would throw up an AR subtitle identifying the person on a match. Not too long after I filed the developer applications and outlined my project, the Glass project flatlined.

Yep. And, as it turned out, lots of folks* thought that was a funny thing and loved it. This is the guy who GG’d himself into the CEO position.

• Probably sock puppets, tbh.

I still don’t think I should have told them I was working on a software prosthetic for it.

Not owning where one lives makes it highly difficult to migrate to solar power because landlords often don’t let you set it up. Definitely the case out here in the Bay Area.

Surprising no one who’s ever had to work with it for longer than sixty seconds.

Google happened to it. Right when some of us started doing practical things with it. Still haven’t forgiven them for that.