Who is ArcoJedi? A life-journeying Christian, ecstatic husband, proud father of four, web guru, all-around geek and Star Wars fanatic. Read these thoughts that he felt were worthwhile. Then wonder why he thought that way.
Check out my buddy and bandmate Zyi Li giving a summary and introduction of what he's been doing for the last few years with his music networking organization.
I may have mentioned this before, but Zyi is a powerhouse at bringing people together and making things happen. I have found that being in a band, the most important piece for success is organization and Zyi has been so good at keeping MO ECHO Brass Band organized. It's honestly very inspiring.
People will really believe anything. It's honestly very sad. But just in case you've innocently fallen victim to this bigoted hoax, here is some more information.
There are no litter boxes in local schools or ANY school anywhere in the USA. This was all just a lie to make transgender kids look bad. And give open cause for violence or bigotry against them. The rumor started because it came from an edited video of a teacher talking about how fucked up the US school system is, because she was given a bucket and litter for use in case a kid had to go to the bathroom during an active shooter situation.
There was a short period of time where I was once an Elon Musk fan, but that ended quickly after learning more about him. And over the last few years, I've become convinced that the uber-rich are inherently evil. And I do mean all of them.
Here's a fact you may not know. Most billionaires inherited, exploited or lucked into their money. No one becomes a billionaire through individual hard work or tenacity.
I've been arguing with folks on twitter about the value and worthiness of the billionaires of the world. I could expand on these ideas, but I'll just let Adam Conover explain it here:
I love the Internet, I really do. deep breathBut...
It does by it's nature allow a certain kind of terrible identity theft to take place. Please read through the following blog post and collection of investigative material. For clarity, the "me" in the headline is not referring to me personally.
The commonly understood version of identity theft as far as I'm aware of it, is that someone gets your personal information, like your address, birthdate and social security details and signs up for accounts or credit in your name. This steals money from the creditors and steals (or ruins) credit reputation for the victim. The goal is usually short-term and monetary.
However, the story described in the linked post seems much more insidious. In this era of remote development work that has been around since well before the pandemic, there have been many a developer or coder that has worked for a company and never actually met any of the stakeholders face-to-face. Online portfolio websites, online resumés, and public LinkedIn profiles have created an option for some nefarious actors to entirely pretend to be someone else specifically for the sole purpose of soliciting development work based on the reputation of the victim. The specific victim in the blog post linked above was luckily warned by a potential accomplice that was refused to be roped in.
Long story short, a supposed freelance development company (the bad actors here), were attempting to hire a developer named Andrew (the accomplice) to interview and interface with potential clients (so far, so good), all while pretending (uh-oh) to be a developer named Connor (the victim). Once Andrew got the full picture of what was going on, he backed out and contacted Connor directly to warn him. Connor was lucky.
So I previewed the document and it was scary. It was a document intended for someone to have a cheat sheet for an interview on how to act as me.
It included a subset of my personal information.
It included my education history.
It included my employment history.
It included my certifications.
It included a fake cover letter.
It included a fake email/address that was "near" mine.
It included information about the company interviewing for.
Connor was very lucky, and smart enough to follow up and investigate all the possible details of the bad actors, and put them on blast. It's a good job of shaming them publicly. But ultimately the criminals in this case can simply move on, rebrand and start working on gathering work on the reputation of the next victim. Ultimately, the independent developer victims lose money because they aren't really the ones getting hired, and their reputations are most likely hurt given that the work is shoddy.
This is very scary. The only way to combat this is to raise awareness of the existence of this scam. I don't exactly have a big reputation or portfolio footprint at this exact moment so it's unlikely I'd be a target. But it's important me and professionals like me to be aware. It's also important for corporations large and small to be aware and do a proper investigation of who it is they are hiring. Since the bad actors are getting hired as "independent contractors" there's no HR investigation or other due diligence, no verifications. Here's more from Connor...
So it seemed like I was starting to understand the picture now.
A person/company sets up fake Upwork profiles of real people.
They apply to jobs in hopes to get an interview using that fake profile.
They find suspecting victims on GitHub who are willing to go along with this.
That person uses the identity of someone else to land the job.
Connor's blog post was only first published a few weeks ago, and updated 9 days ago, so this is all very new and continues to develop. He will likely update the post as more details become available. Everyone be careful out there.
I wrote a most recent post of alphabetical websites I like for a reason that I'm struggling with. And it's tough to admit, but I'm very bored of the entire Internet. At least I'm bored of the stuff I visit almost daily. This is all entirely my fault of course. The modern web, the social web has evolved through design so that it maximizes the attention-grabbing dopamine triggers. And I gobble it up in my free time with ridiculous speed. The alphabetical list came about because I often found myself opening a new browser tab --usually on mobile-- and thumbing my through each letter one at a time and catching up on the latest updates, if there are any. But I found myself going in circles, bouncing around so much and getting nothing from it. You know that meme where it says something like "Browse Facebook for an hour until I get bored. Then I close Facebook. Wonder what else is going on,... so I open Facebook!" Ba-dum-tish!
But that struggle is real. And as I've mentioned before I'm not on Facebook (since Jan. 20, 2017) anymore. But I go to reddit.com, then imgur.com, then m.twitter.com, then tumblr.com and back around again. I go in circles a lot and it's sad and I'm not enjoying myself. I mean, I'm doomscrolling the latest news and it sometimes feels like it's important. But when I'm busy with these sites, do you know what I'm not doing?
I'm not learning anything new.
I'm not reading anything new or important.
I'm not building anything for myself.
This is all outside of work time and is my leisure time so it's okay to escape sometimes during this. But I'm starting to recognize that I don't have anything to show for it and it's not nearly as much fun as it used to be. This isn't a criticism of any of my actual friends on Twitter, or the quality of the content anywhere. I used to find the Internet, as a whole, inspiring and fun and full of possibility. Now I feel like it's all been collectively squandered and monetized and compartmentalized to such an ugly degree.
And yes I do recognize how fucking WHINY I sound right now.
I hesitated to write about this, because I know how it sounds. Part of it is the devisive politics of the last few years, of which I've wanted to write so much but instead just tweeted. Part of it is how much else I've got going on, most of it very good by comparison. A great number of the fun services that I've relied on in past years are folding up or no longer useful; Google Music, Flickr, and so on. And it bums me out.
What I want to do is turn all that negativity around and build stuff. Learn some new skills (career-relevant and/or not), reading more books (fiction and non-) and build back up some of the fun. Now to take that goal and divide it up into manageable pieces.
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