November Reading

No excuses, just pick it up again :)

• 11/30/2018: My First Game - GML - Attacking & Collisons - Space Rocks (Part 3) (16:37)
• This was good, although some of the glitches I ran into were rough.  I didn't quite get the "rooms" inheriting from "rooms" part until sleeping on it last night.  I might still be wrong when it comes to persistence between rooms, but I'm going to try it in a minute.  I also had issues with the restart logic on the ship.  I swear she just destroyed the whole game and restarted it, but that restarted lives and score, so I had to determine where to inject a life count and a restart on Enter.  It took forever because I had a misplaced }.  The problems in coding never, ever.....ever change.
• 11/30/2018: My First Game - GML - Score, Lives & Effects - Space Rocks (Part 4) (12:38)
• 11/30/2018: My First Game - GML - Sound Effects & Polish - Space Rocks (Part 5) (10:18)
• 11/29/2018: My First Game - GML - Setup & Movement - Space Rocks (Part 2) (14:25)
• 11/28/2018: My First Game - Intro to GameMaker - Space Rocks (Part I) (12:41)
• Learning a new framework.  2D (so less overhead than Unity).
• 11/27/2018: Service Now Request Fulfiler Training (30 minutes?)
• These five courses were part of a seven course series I started in 2017 to get approval access in Service Now for my projects.  I generally ignored finishing up so as not to step on dev toes during approval.  But with the layoffs, I inherited the legacy corporate wiki and I have to be able to approve patches and ponder whether I should be figuring out how to shut it down (now that we have MS equivalent tools, the timing is good >> I should determine how to cut it all over to Office 365).  These took much longer than they say because of the reading-out-loud nature and the frequent work interruptions.  I'd guess the five classes were closer to 6 hours total.  The only thing I really appreciated was the description of the GsF process which is used when there's a significant outage to do a root cause dig and retro.  One of my projects landed in that space due to an outage (which is ultimately related to significant org-led turnover in the last two years and missing a best practice after we took on Oracle DB maintenance ourselves (woo, devops) to expedite work.  There was a huge post incident dig with groups I'd never met before.  Now I know why.  As Mort said - it's exciting to have a real example, because you can take the training and never encounter the actual in-practice reality until 6-24 months after the course.
• 11/26/2018: Service Now Change Management Tool Training (40 minutes)
• 11/25/2018: Service Now Change Process Training (60 minute)
• 11/24/2018: Service Now Problem Management Tool Training (15 minutes)
• 11/23/2018: ServiceNow Problem Management Process Training (18 minutes) 
• 11/22/2018: Diary of a Concussion by Elizabeth Lopatto (2017 article originally on The Verge).
• Took a year+ for me to feel normal again.  I've heard the same from others.  They usually fib a bit to friends, family, and coworkers once they can spoof it.  Tweeted her and got a response.
• 11/21/2018: New – Predictive Scaling for EC2, Powered by Machine Learning - official AWS write up.
• 11/21/2018: AWS Adds The Most Anticipated Feature To Amazon EC2
• Whoa....predictive scaling.  Was utilization-based and schedule-based previously.
• AIOps
• re:Invent is November 26-30.
• 11/20/2018:  'N*****fishing' Is the New Form of Blackface: The word describes white women who change their appearance to look black or racially ambiguous. We spoke to someone accused of this, and to the women calling her out.
  • I had no idea this was a thing.
• 11/20/2018: Neo-Nazis Are Organizing Secretive Paramilitary Training Across America: The creation of a new social networking platform called “The Base” appears to be an effort to shift Naziism from a divided digital space to physical, violent insurgency.
• the majority of extremist-related killings in the last decade were committed by right-wing extremists.
• 11/20/2018: What is machine learning? We drew you another flowchart
• supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement (trial and error - e.g. entropy)
• 11/19/2018: Rare and diverse giant viruses unexpectedly found in a forest soil ecosystem
• 11/18/2018: Researchers capture first representative of most abundant giant viruses in the sea