I admin the.coolest.zone, the coolest site on the net for online social engagement.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Calorie counting through MyFitnessPal. I am unable to accurately gauge how many calories I’m consuming just by eyeballing it, and this is especially difficult given my TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) is about 1350 calories. (I’m short.) The only way I’ve been able to manage my weight is by turning it into concrete understandable numbers.

    I have a 3,312 day streak of calorie counting now. It’s the one habit I’ve managed to keep up, and while my weight has gone up and down I’ve kept track of it all. At my starting point, I weighed 150lb (obese by BMI), and I’m currently down to 118 (high end of normal by BMI).





  • Which language are you trying to learn? There are different answers depending on that.

    As someone learning Hindi, I’ve found that Duolingo is wholly insufficient in grammar and vocabulary (the entire course is far too short) and did not concentrate on listening comprehension. I’ve started using a combination of the following:

    • Clozemaster for vocabulary in context of (sometimes pretty wild) sentences. (I’ve got a lifetime subscription to Clozemaster, it goes on sale during holidays.) Clozemaster has grouped “common words” and a combination of reading/listening skill and multiple choice / vocab word transcription / entire sentence transcription. It feels very overwhelming at first as you’re just thrown in but keep at it - start with reading and multiple choice and once you know the words and sentences in your grouped section start typing them out via listening.
    • A combination of textbooks and websites to explain certain grammatical concepts.
    • A listening-based podcast, example Innovative Language, for listening comprehension. (This also goes on sale regularly.)



  • Somewhat unrelated, but I do find it funny that farts aren’t considered acceptable, but sneezes and coughs are. Like, farts have an extra barrier in the form of your clothing (assuming you’re not at a nudist colony or bathhouse) and won’t make other people sick. I guess it’s just because they’re stinky.

    I vote to normalize farting with an “excuse me”, and saying “bless you” to people when they fart.


  • While I get what you’re saying and I think sometimes emojis can absolutely be overused or used in place of textual clarification, I feel they also serve as an effective substitute for a lack of non-verbal communication. Generally speaking, “what people say” is only half the story, and “how they say it” (the nuances of facial/bodily expressions, tone of voice, etc) is the other half.

    When writing narratives, we get away from this by means of, well, narration. “… he said, cheerfully”; “… he replied, with just a twinge of annoyance to his voice”; “she said, while averting her eyes”.

    In first person communications like social media, we don’t really have an effective way to communicate that sort of nuance. We do have action asterisks shudders in horror, shorthand expressions to represent actions like LOL, and emoji 🤷‍♂️ as potential alternatives, as well as some community-driven linguistic nuance like Reddit’s usage of “/s” to indicate sarcasm.

    We could also go all old-timey letter writing and say things like “while I find myself hesitant to reply to you in fear that you will consider it an attack, I do find myself with some concerns in regards to your comment and will elaborate below. I hope that you will not take these concerns as dismissive of your opinion in any way, as I simply mean to clarify some doubts and seek your own opinion on my thoughts as presented above.” (This might be an example of “overly eloquent” and there is probably a happy medium.)

    I find the ever-evolving linguistics of internet communication to be really fascinating, if you can’t tell!





  • Re: this section:

    As a technical writer, you should stay close to the teams whose work you are documenting. Listen out for any code, SDK, or product changes that may require action. When you hear that a tool may be deprecated, start communicating.

    It just assumes that nobody will ever proactively reach out to the technical writer about deprecations, which is entirely true in practice, but just feels so sad to acknowledge. Please keep your content and document management team(s) in the loop!


  • people working at the San Francisco-based startup “look down on what they consider legacy companies” and “see themselves as innovators who are radically changing the world.”

    With the rumors that the ethics board was worried about OpenAI and Altman moving too fast to truly consider ethics… This checks out. Startups are truly a different beast to larger “legacy companies”, who move slower because they have checks and balances and a reputation to maintain.

    I do think Microsoft would have given them a lot of leeway though, given the gold mine they were about to be sitting on. Staying at the front of the copilot race is critically important right now, and as Microsoft continues to move all its Office 365 services to the web and cross-connect them, it’s even more important for them to have a copilot for Enterprise clients that spans and can pull data from all those services.


  • On the other side, as someone younger it’s hard to date people much older, as they start casually talking about what they did during various wars, or comparing the COVID pandemic to the black plague, and I’ve just got zero frame of reference to connect.

    Everyone much older I’ve met has been just delightful (I assume the rude ones eventually get murdered by their local townsfolk) but it’s just so hard to make that genuine connection when your life experiences are so different, you know?




  • Azure AD is now Entra ID. Please do not deadname the Microsoft cloud offering (even if we all think it chose kind of a dumb sounding new name 🤫).

    And Microsoft is heavily pushing their cloud services of course, but you can still set up on-prem AD as an option as well as other on-prem services.

    It’s just that all their cross service interoperability stuff won’t work as well if it’s not all in the cloud. Like, all their stuff is designed to work together in the cloud and keep you entrenched in the ecosystem, like any company I guess, except I actually like using Teams/Office/SharePoint combo, it’s executed well.