... and credit where credit is due on the "no agenda, no attenda" motto:

https://financialpost.com/entrepreneur/fp-startups/hacks-to-help-you-avoid-the-unproductive-meeting-trap

This was brought to my attention by a colleague at #SNOLAB.

For the 2 weeks over Christmas + New Year, my work days were meeting-free. I got a lot of stuff done as a result. It was very freeing.

When I returned to a normal schedule this week, a sense of dread accompanied it. I considered why. It was meetings. Specifically, weekly obligatory pro forma have-em-because-they-are-on-the-calendar meetings. No-agenda meetings. The kind often organized by physics collaborations.

My resolutions for 2025: no agenda, no attenda. Only meetings with purpose.

@sundogplanets I wish you a wonderful first day of teaching!

@arturN No, I wasn't even aware of it. Migrating to NextCloud has been on my mind since it forked from ownCloud years ago. And, anyway, the migration is done. 😉

This has been quite a day. Part 4.

https://mastodon.social/@axios/113783775282801332

This has been quite a day. Part 3.

https://flipboard.com/@cbcnews/top-stories-01r3k2ttz/-/a-G3ayfXMeQWKq3XDqD3JEOw%3Aa%3A107108217-%2F0

This has been quite a day. Part 2.

https://flipboard.com/@cbcnews/politics-2qr4m137z/-/a-iRjvK3cdSC2C4rZlrIHn9A%3Aa%3A107108217-%2F0

This has been quite a day. Part 1.

https://flipboard.com/@time/top-stories-088ho5dkz/-/a-rAtx_O1yT86bnWvJuUcG6Q%3Aa%3A3195429-%2F0

It was a delight to delete wholesale the php7 packages after completing the migration. OwnCloud being tied to php7 was unconscionable.

NextCloud migration was successfully completed yesterday! Two things made this possible: NextCloud's amazing administrator dashboard, with its active tips to fix problems (including telling you what command to run) and it's even-more-amazing documentation; and ChatGPT, which provided a correct solution to a database problem I have personally never encountered before and for which there was only 1, and I mean 1, Google search result.

Migrated our family users to new clients, too!

@mgrahamwoods I suspect there are other organizations out there that need your generosity more (food banks, shelters, etc.). But if you have the spare change, a little to Wikipedia never hurts.

I think the key idea is that the playbook - against Wikipedia, against science standards in classrooms, against scientific input to policy-making - is the same.

Science, as an institution, has been under this attack in a myriad of ways in my lifetime. Massive human failures are generally preceded by a concerted effort to undermine experts and expertise. This is the path many democracies are on now, and they have proven stubbornly resilient against altering that path.

3/3

In the original context, this was about attacks on Wikipedia. But this has been applied in a myriad of large-scale ways in just the last 40 years: attacking the teaching of biological evolution; efforts to undermine the resolution of acid rain and industrial pollution; climate science and the reality of human-induced climate shifts. I can go on.

The bottom line: the playbook is the same. Are we wise enough, as a species, to see the road ahead and thwart it?

Newsletter: https://www.citationneeded.news/elon-musk-and-the-rights-war-on-wikipedia/

I really enjoyed the recent “Citation Needed” newsletter. In particular: “First come the claims of bias, supported by cherry-picked or misrepresented examples. Then the demands for ‘balance’, which in practice mean giving equal weight to fringe views or demonstrably false claims. When these demands are refused, the attacks shift to the platform's legitimacy itself: its funding, its governance, its leaders, and its very right to exist as an independent entity.”

1/2

Today is a slow, steady march of upgrades from NextCloud 25. You have to go one major release at a time. So the morning has been 25 -> 26 -> 27 and now 27 -> 28.

This also comes with a steady march of PHP versions. I’ve transitions from 7.4 -> 8.1 -> 8.2. I am excited to finally hit 8.3, which I think will be on the NextCloud upgrade from 28 -> 29.

Finally ... FINALLY ... migrating ownCloud to NextCloud.

I had no idea what shit ownCloud is compared to #NextCloud ... and I loved ownCloud.

Still migrating the database structure to the NextCloud framework, but all database data was already successfully migrated and verified with some basic tests.

You have to migrate from ownCloud 10.3 (I had 10.5) to NextCloud 25, so next I look forward to moving up to a current NextCloud version.

The steady OS upgrade march on my home systems continues! I have now successfully upgraded 4/7 (I undercounted by 1 machine in my previous post ... too many machines!), with only minor stumbles on each one. Nothing that rendered anything unbootable! (so far .... )

I am relieved to have shut down my account on X. I was sad when Twitter died, and what replaced it was not worth it. I have not posted on X in any serious way in well over a year. It was time for two realities to match.

I was always happier in the open social web, and I remain happy to be even more fully committed to it now!

Please share this pair of opportunities!

From SNOLAB's LinkedIn account:

#SNOLAB is hiring for two Research Scientist positions to join the groundbreaking science taking place 2 km underground! The ideal candidates will have a concentration in either #LowBackgroundScience or #QuantumScience.

Apply by January 31st, 2025. For more information, view the full job posting:

https://www.snolab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Research-Scientist-Job-Posting-1.pdf

It is always terrifying to do an Ubuntu OS upgrade, even when you are pretty sure that everything will work out OK.

That said, 2/3 of tonight's OS upgrades went off with no/few hitches. 1/3 failed before it even started since package is on the "update deny" list and I need to sort out why. That leaves 3 machines still to go after these. So ... 2/6 complete!