2015.06.26 Daily Dose: News Roundup, Your Area of Expertise, and the Weekend
The Daily Dose is a user-created discussion series where Snapzu members can check in with each other in a relaxed environment.
We are experimenting with different formats and ideas, so feedback is very welcome!
Hello, Snapzites!
As you can see, we're trying out a new name for this discussion series. Our community has members all over the world, many of whom don't even like coffee, so hopefully the Daily Dose is more accommodating. You can bring your poison of choice: coffee, tea, water, poison, and so on!
Once again, please excuse the timing of this post. I considered not posting once it became afternoon here, but I might as well for the sake of consistency.
News Roundup
Yesterday, we had a great discussion on reposts and how we should deal with them. There's still more discussion to be had, so chip in if you've got something to say.
The Supreme Court has legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
How do you stay motivated without deadlines? What's your favorite alcoholic beverage? Answer these questions and more over at /t/asksnapzu.
Your Area of Expertise
We have a community full of smart, capable people (for the most part). Let's share our talents and skillsets. What are you knowledgeable about? What are you really good at?
The Weekend
It's Friday. Friday! Gotta get down on Friday. What are your plans for the weekend?
A reminder that Book Club voting is open for July's nonfiction and fiction selections. Voting will be open through the last day of this month, after which the reading begins.
For those who haven't, check out new tribes or share your own over at /t/newtribes.
Join the Discussion
I personally didn't mind the previous naming convention but I totally understand why you decided to switch it. For those who have not yet joined in the discussion in regards to reposts, please visit the thread and leave your feedback, its important to us! I personally love technology, ai, science, algorithms and design. I really take pride in design work, so I guess thats one of the things I'm good at (at least in my mind!).
Let's see. For a career, i'm a Security Engineer. I basically take standards (HIPAA, PCI, SSAE-16) and turn them into reality for companies. Standard says we need a HIDS. I build it. Standard says backups should be a certain way, it gets deployed (or re-deployed) that way. Standard needs audits? Hey, I'm the internal auditor. Let's make some paperwork. Policies? Yep. All over it. Training? Hate training, but yeah, let's get something in place. I don't do a lot of face-to-face client work, but I do spend a lot of time crawling around their innards and interrogating their infrastructure. Throw in project management, change control and baby, you got a stew goin'.
Lots of programming, too. I'm reasonably fluent in several programming languages (C, Python, Perl, PHP, Bash, Powershell, SQL), and can probably find my way around several others. In my downtime, I program quite a bit for entertainment, play music (guitar, bass, drums, keyboard), hack on microcontrollers, on and on. Oh, and 5K's (16 last year) and now, just got a bike so I guess I'll be a bike gearhead, too.
This weekend is the 'donut 5k' on saturday. Taking the bikes out on a trail this Sunday and see how far I can push myself. Been playing a lot of games here lately (thanks Steam summer sale!), so all my other coding projects are on hold for the time being.
Wow. That's an intense job description.
Check out /t/arresteddevelopment when the new season premieres next summer (yes, a year from now; mark your calendar!)
Let's have a jam session sometime — I play those instruments as well (though my primary is electric guitar).
Hardly. I break more crap before 9 am than most people do their entire IT careers ;)
Always up for a jam! I've done remixes of others playing guitar before and they both ended up being some of my favorite songs on my Soundcloud.
As linux dev and package maintainer for a major distribution. I hear you on the breaking stuff before 9 am not to mention all the CVE's that have to be dealt with.
So much talents! Very impressive. And 5ks as in running wise? I started running a few months ago and have my first 5k, a color run coming up in 2 weeks. So nervous and excited!
I work in IT as a sys admin, and I crochet in my spare time. I guess those are the two things I am best at....
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It's been quite a news day!
I don't know if I'm talented or not, but I teach computer science and like to program for fun... Which is probably how I will spend a fair bit of my weekend :)
Well the good news about changing the name is it doesn't matter if it shows up in the morning anymore (plus depending where you are, it was never morning when the post went up anyway.) As a non-coffee drinker, I strongly approve of the change of verbiage.
Also, is there any reason why it's "Snapzite" instead of like "Snapzuvian" (ala Peruvian)?
As for my talents, well I've been writing software forever now, and I was "internet famous" due to it back in 2005. (Oh god that was a decade ago.) In my social circles, I'm probably most well known for my erm.. diplomatic.. abilities, especially when playing board games.
Sure takes a lot of the pressure off! Might have been one reason for the change :) Though, I'll continue trying to post it in the morning as most of us seem to be in North America.
Wow, I didn't think of 'Snapzuvian'. It's not bad. I was partial to 'Snapper' like /u/spaceghoti below, but 'Snapzite' is the official name.
I think we ought to call ourselves "snappers." On the other hand we don't always get to choose our own labels, right Trekkies? ;)
If only that stupid fish didn't exist.
/ahem
I resemble that remark. ;)
I personally don't like the name change. The Morning Coffee implied that it was basically the post to kick off the day. This new name just sort of implies that its just another daily post.
Great news about about the SCOTUS decision. Of course, it doesn't end the fight for the gay rights in the US, but it is a huge step in the right direction for us.
My Wi-Fi has been pretty shitty for the past month, though its been extra shitty this week. Very interesting. My Wi-Fi straight up stopped working yesterday.
My area of expertise is programming. I am a computer science major so that makes sense haha. I also think that I am pretty good at picking up languages. Though I'm not fluent in any langages sans English, primarily because I'm lazy, when I do pick them up, I do it with little effort, much faster than my peers. I remember in Spanish 3, I would literally never study, but somehow I became one of my teachers favorite students for how much I was improving. She tried to get my to become a language teacher, but I decided against it.
On a different note, it would be great to have that API out soon. That way, we can easily just write a script for these types of posts, that way, if you aren't available, you don't need to stress.
Yeah, I understand. But morning for us is not morning for everyone, so it doesn't even make sense for many users. If I actually manage to post these in the morning (lol) then maybe it'll feel like it kicks off the day for you and me.
Have you been putting your language acquisition skills to use? I know it could be very valuable to many employers.
Automating these posts would be cool, but as it's an unofficial series I wouldn't want to presume anything. Besides, I still need to come up with discussion topics every day. Maybe someday the admins will take over.
That's true. Though, if you monitor activity throughout today, snapzu definitively has a period of almost zero activity during the US nighttime, so I think it would still be a good timing for the community.
Not yet. I'm at about a B1 when it comes to spanish, so once I feel that I am at a B2 I'll start putting it on resumes. But as I said, I'm pretty lazy with my language learning attempts. Right now, I'm trying to learn French, German, and Esperanto.
I was thinking it could work sort of like this. There are mainly three basic things to each post. 1)Question. 2)General news 3)Site news. Number 1 could be premade. Just create a long list of questions. 2 could be web scraped. Grab popular posts from snapzu and the media. 3 could be added daily. However, if you aren't able to add it in time before it posts, there is no real harm because the other two sections are there so the post is still full.
But you're doing such a good job.
I'm not sure what my expertise is. If you want to know about living simply in Alaska, feel free to ask me anything.
I follow MLB pretty closely.
I am an inspector in road construction with a variety of different types of jobs under my belt.
I really consider myself kind of a jack of many trades, master of none. I don't really have an area of expertise, but I'm somewhat competent at lots of things.
My day job is a all-in-one developer for a bookstore chain, front end, back end, doesn't matter, if it needs to be fixed / created, I'm there for it.
After work job, general developer tinkering in everything and anything, language knowledge consists of C++, C#, PHP, JS, Perl, Obj-C, but I can pick up a language rather fast if needed.
Super secret shouldn't be saying it here job, I design and develop hostile profiles that later go on to be the public figure for why a country has to go to war. You don't think that organisations around the world actually develop their own public profile do you?
Not doing too much this weekend. Hair cut in the morning, take the wife to work tomorrow night and Sunday morning, relax + do nothing the rest of the time. I actually just started having issues right after I read a snap here about the wifi thing :( weird timing.
My expertise... isn't super specific yet. Graduated with BSEE degree and got into manufacturing last year in a mostly engineering role at a electronics manufacturing services company. Wish I could do some more designing though :(.
I'm officially a failed art student trying to seek out a career at a trade school. I guess that puts me in the younger set is people on this site. So that makes me pretty good at art techniques and bumming about.
And I have an Oa certificate. So I can do spreadsheets and stuff. Officially.
Yeah, I'm not that PC. The old name was fine, but go with whatever makes you happy. :)
I'm an IT grunt specializing in diagnosis and research. I'm trying to find excuses to expand my script programming (I found that my old MUD programming skills have a use after all!) but working on a Help Desk doesn't offer as many opportunities to create scripting solutions as you might think. I'm also an amateur writer and might one day finally finish the book that could promote me to the level of professional author. I'm not holding my breath, though. I studied political science and history in school and I'm a former junior pastor who did a lot of religious studies in my misspent youth. Presently I'm learning how to fence.
Practice fencing, do more preparation for our wedding and spray the apartment for bugs. Stupid bugs.
Word. I don't think anyone actually had a problem with it, but it just bugged me that it didn't make sense for a lot of users.
Interesting. What kind of book would you write?
And is fencing easy to get into? I imagine it's not.
I'm on chapter 9, not quite five hundred pages done. It's a science fiction/space opera story, vaguely inspired by Asimov's Foundation novels.
It depends on where you are. There aren't any formal schools in my area that I'm aware of, but I have some really cool friends. And it's surprisingly affordable.
I have had a bit of problem with my wifi but only on my cell phone. How strange.
I'm knowledgeable about art throry but I don't think I'm good at putting it into practice. I love animation and know a ton about it's history. I also have a giant music collection and know a lot about history, band and such. I also can do some woodworking.
I will be spending the weekend attempting to set up a site for my comic and other art. I don't know much HTML or CSS so wish me luck.
WordPress is a good solution, as /u/idlethreat said.
Squarespace is also another option. Check it out:
http://www.hugehana.com/archive/#viewer
http://answers.squarespace.com/questions/62456/webcomics-examples-and-implementations
My issue is I bought a site on Squarespace awhile back and they are great about so much. Except they don't have a template for web comics. I found this 3rd party template gonna see if I can get it working.
Thanks for the links. The Huge Hana site has a good layout. I'll see if I can make something up similar to that gallery.
If you go Wordpress just keep it up to date. A lot of people groan when you mention PHP, but Wordpress being built on PHP powers a fairly large amount of the internet. That being said, you have to be on top of updates since Wordpress' footprint is so large, there's more value in exploiting out of date Wordpress installs than there is in going after more obscure installs.
There's quite a good number of Wordpress themes which make writing (and organizing) a comic (or other photo-heavy) site pretty easy.
If you're not wanting to mess with something heavy like that, I discovered bootstrap a while back and it's pretty nice. They do a lot of the legwork for you already- just make a call to the correct div and it lines up the right way. I use it for one of my company projects.
My issue is I bought a site on Squarespace awhile back and they are great about so much. Except they don't have a template for web comics. I found this 3rd party template gonna see if I can get it working.
I can import Wordpress sites so if this fails I could create something there and port it over maybe. Thanks for the help.
Well, as far as my career is concerned, I'm a disgruntled entertainment/music industry employee. My real expertise is in music, which I've studied for half my life. I went to college and got my degree in music, but also had an option in Music Business. Personally, I chose it as sort of a back-up plan and thought it might be really great for me, but I've since discovered that being an artist and the business of art can be two very different things. Now it is just more of a way for me to meet the right kind of people and get my foot in the right doors. Thankfully, I'm pretty good at whatever job I take, so that helps out a lot too.
I've played guitar for half my life, both classical and contemporary. I extensively studied music theory in college and worked alongside some really great guitar teachers. I'm certainly not a prodigy, but I've worked pretty damn hard and I think I'm pretty fucking decent at it. My real dream would have been to study composition and even go get my Masters, but unfortunately that wasn't in the cards for me. Now I just spend my life figuring out how to make a career out of it!
I'm a professional brewer from the US, brewing in Lviv, Ukraine. On the side, my knowledge falls into most things related to fermentation (especially mead), beekeeping, male fashion, finding new bands, headphones, cryptocurriences, and finding/exploring abandoned buildings (lost of those in Ukraine, thankfully). Little Photoshop on the side as well!
Not sure I have any "expertise" haha. I am in a Ph.D. program in Sociology and studying global development, that kinda thing. I guess I can use Stata and pretend to use R, but not really because I just finished my first year and turns out they expect you to self-teach most of it and I'm struggling with that. I can write-ish. I'm awesome at writing dating profiles? If anyone ever needs help with boosting theirs, I'm the person to go to hahaha. Idk, I'm generally not a very talented person; thus I enjoy academia. If any Snapzites here are great statisticians, please befriend me and give me all your knowledge, kthnx. :)