Time Out For Kitties: Non-Election Fun Stuff Open Thread

I had a pretty good Saturday night out to celebrate Halloween with friends. My Fionna costume was better than I expected though I got a couple people who thought I was Tina from Bob’s Burgers (both have blue tops and bottoms of different hues). One of my friends made a jellyfish costume with loofas and lights; it got a lot of compliments. My other friends were a lobster, a mermaid, and a Grecian goddess (a repurposed Captain Planet Gaia costume). No one got lost or too wasted, and we all made it home in one piece.

I actually didn’t see many zombies. There were some people dressed as brain-dead Trump supporters moaning for brains though. I was also expecting more Harley Quinns, but I only saw one. We saw a couple of wood nymphs and various super heroes on the BART. There were some sharks like from Katy Perry’s Superbowl performance. Walking around in the Castro, we encountered someone dressed as Trump who I think was part of a couple costume with a woman who went as Alicia Machado who had a sash that read “Miss Piggy.” The Trump guy posed for pictures with someone who was dressed as a “Bad Hombre.” In line to the bar/club we met a lesbian Santa Claus, Sailor Moon, and Sailor Mercury. There was a gay couple who dressed as Corbin Dallas and (white) Ruby from The Fifth Element. I enjoyed people’s costumes for the most part.

Then I got to have Sunday brunch as my going away get together with some of my friends. (I made a reservation and then 30 minutes before, the restaurant calls to say it has issues that prevent them from opening for another 6 hours, so I had to scramble to find some place else to accommodate 12-16 people.) Props to my friends for coming out in the rain and given only four day’s notice.

@DandAHC I had one boyfriend for a long time and only just started dating at 30. I think like others said, it’s understandable to feel we as women should feel desired, especially with the messages we get in society. I’m also someone who doesn’t attract a lot of attention/male gaze. I’m definitely not going to turn heads. For the most part I’m not bothered by it because being pretty/attractive was not part of my identity or something people around me put an inordinate amount of value in. (It was way more important for me to be smart and nice.) I’ve had guys like me, and I’m pretty sure it’s mostly for my personality, so that’s a good thing.

I do, however, get insecure about my body at times. (I’m definitely not thin, though I don’t deal with much body shaming.) I felt like doing something active like a dance or fitness class helps. Doing zumba helped me feel more positive about my body. I think it just made me more aware of my body and appreciate that my body is for doing things and enjoying things not just an ornament to be admired.

I think I also mentioned that dating has been good to my self-esteem. I can’t guarantee that everyone will have the same experience, but with the variety of people and preferences out there, I think it’s likely someone will find you (general you) attractive (assuming you are a decent human, so this may not apply to some in the MRA-adjacent crowd).

My crayon of Shocked Cyan ran out 🙁

Also thank you very much for the reply EJ. Sorry, being polite is sometimes a challenge.

@EJ
Good point. Brony would do well in software QA even if he doesn’t have any tech background.

Brony, let me know if you’re interested in that kind of work and have questions about what it entails and what type of interview questions you might get.

Oops, should have refreshed. But QA doesn’t require any ability to code, so my offer still stands. 🙂

@Brony!

Congratulations on your drive to find a new path! Very exciting. Scary as well, I’m sure, but there is no joy without fear.

I’d like to second the suggestion that you give coding a try, even after your comment about it. I’m gonna suggest it for two reasons.

First reason is that the cost of entry is low in the field. Programming is one of the fields where employers are far, far more interested in what you can do over what education you’ve got. You can learn on your own, build a portfolio, and use that as your CV.

This holds especially true in the area you’re interested in, social analysis. This is a very new field, a slice of the Big Data pie, and there are no experts. Statisticians who have been doing this for years have face-planted – the old techniques don’t work when you’ve got a petabyte of Twitter staring you in the face.

Second reason is that your skillset is incredibly transferable to this field, and your interests can command a pretty penny from some very large companies.

Programming is intimidating at first, but it really is just a formal way of talking about processes. If you have the time available to you, head over to khan academy and take some intro programming courses – they’re free and each course isn’t very long. If you like it, feel free to poke me again and I can help you figure out the sort of thing you’d want in a portfolio.

(I mean, heck, howabout a service that digests a twitter timeline and provides an Index of Irrationality by modeling the persons’ thought processes? Or something that digests a forum thread and provides citations for the arguments found therein? All useful things that are well within reach)

If you try the courses and don’t like the process of programming, that’s also fine – like you said, you have a complicated relationship with symbolic logic, and I completely get that – I have that too. I do think that you’d really enjoy crystallizing your ideas into structures, and then providing those structures for others to use, though. That’s really the heart of modern data science.

Hey, so I know I asked for help some months ago, but if you guys could help out a friend of mine, I’d super appreciate it.

His name is Leo, and he’s a trans man hoping to pay off debts he owes as well as afford top surgery.

I’m not asking y’all to reach for your wallets, but if you could at least share this, I’d super appreciate it.

Now, back to kitties.

I don’t want to spill poisonous negativity all over this nice thread, but I am really angry and frustrated by the post-secondary disability services process and all these feelings are roiling underneath my cultivated pleasant exterior and I feel like I can’t really say anything to anyone! So I’ll say something to you all, and that can be the end of it.

In a nutshell, accessing academic accommodations, not to mention my goddamn student loan, should not be a detriment to my education! At very least, it should be no more painful than white-knuckling through with no assistance. It shouldn’t be harder. That defeats the entire purpose!

Thank you for the offer. I am curious, but I honestly don’t know what to think about it. What are software Q&A jobs like in required work experience and education? My next step is going to be to look at the courses Scildfreja recommended. I’m a little anxious about being able to do classes and work right now.

It can be entry level, depending on what they’re looking for. If they’re looking to get a project off the ground quickly they’d likely look for someone with related experience, but often they’re looking for talent rather than experience. Now, entry-level QA is not always great pay but once you prove yourself you can probably renegotiate.

The exact role varies from company to company but QA is generally the person, group, or team that owns the quality of the software. The pure QA roles are people who come up with a test plan and execute the manual tests. Sometimes they work with the SDETs, who are programmers that write automated testing, but QA doesn’t usually write or run the automation. In some cases they might be expected to do light scripting, though. They’re expected to understand two things: how to push products’ limits to find interesting ways to break them, which is important for finding bugs, and how to understand the user perspective and how the user might use the product, which is important for determining severity and impact.

The most important thing for you to be able to demonstrate in an interview and on your resume is an ability to break down a product and think of ways it might break. An example would be the interviewer handing you a whiteboard pen and asking you how you would test it. Or opening up an online store and asking you how you would test the add to cart button. You need to think about the different types of tests, like stress testing, security, etc. The more outside the “happy path” the better, and the more types the better. Think about how products break normally over time as well as how they might unexpectedly break.

Does that help?

@Brony,

I’m on the tablet so won’t be doing much block-quoting!

Don’t worry about not having much momentum. Momentum’s just applied anxiety, anyways. It’ll come when it comes 🙂

Marketable job skills in big data analytics are sort of nebulous, really – it’s all about demonstrating aptitude. You need a solid grasp on statistics and the scientific method, and an ability to cut to the heart of a question. You have all of those things.

The actual thing-you-need-to-do is to take a data set, see what’s important in that data set, and then do your statistics to it to pull out those important things in a quantifiable way. You need to do data-driven science, really – you start with a big data set and then pull information out of it. The mark of a good information scientist is that they can see when their inferences are valid right at the beginning – their experiments are well-formed. Attention to detail, and to the correct detail.

So, your marketable skills would be being able to write a script (30 to 100 lines of code), apply a data set to it, and then present useful, insightful outputs. There’s more, but that’s the core of it. The rest is technical.

What does an expert look like? An expert in data science knows statistics and the scientific method well. They may not be the best mathematicians, but they have a very strong feel for algorithms – for process. They also know a lot of general knowledge about the fields they examine. When they look at a problem, they ask how it can be broken down into smaller pieces. When they look at an information set, they ask how it was formed and what domain is it valid in. They’re scientists.

I understand that that’s all rather vague. Thing is, the job is rather vague! Data scientists, analysts, etc, are asked to perform magic – to solve impossible riddles, find pattern in noise, to plot a course through uncharted waters. It’s esoteric and very much an art as much as a science, but the way you approach problem solving and argumentation suggests that you’d be good at it to me. (Also, the starting wage for a data scientist is somewhere between $85k and $150k depending on where you live)

Look up the Python programming language, if Khan academy gives you a choice. It’s a popular language for writing scripts and a great learning language. Scala is also extremely useful, though I dunno if you’d want to start with it.

Don’t get discouraged! Even if this doesn’t turn out to be the right thing, I’m sure you’ll find something that fits.

asleep on a pile of paper (his favourite bedding, no idea)

Clearly a professional cat.

A while back I handed over an email address in order to get some free samples of posh chocs (which were delicious), and as a result once every five or six weeks I get an advertising email.

Today I got an xmas chocolate ad … but it is for “Our most decedent selection of gifts yet” (sic)

I haven’t the heart to ask why they are advertising chocolates especially for funerals.

I’ll think about your responses for a bit and look at those courses. Thank you for the suggestions. I may need a bit to process things as I’m also getting ready to go back to the unit since my toe just got done healing up. I discovered that I enjoyed acting as a clerk for HR while I was healing.

Paper is also pretty good at retaining smells, and the kitties do love their smelly smells.