A friend of mine (a native Spanish speaker) just started teaching one of his friends Spanish, and the first thing I said was:
Explain to her that ser is essence/identity/characteristic and estar is status, and that’ll go SO much better than the “ser is permanent and estar is temporary” that makes us try to say “es muerto” and “estoy bautista” (because hey, conversion exists). Like, death is pretty permanent, but it’s still a status.
Hey, are you leaving Twitter? Are you worried that with 80% of the staff gone, it’s just a matter of time until there start being unreported breaches? (Heck, maybe there have already!) Want to ensure anyone breaking into your account doesn’t read your messages? Have a bulk-delete script, on the house!
To use this, go to the messages page on a computer. Right click somewhere on the page, and choose “inspect” (Chrome) or “inspect element” (Firefox) to get the developer tools to come up. (If you’ve never seen that before, welcome to how so many of us learned to do things on the web!) In there, go to the tab labeled “Console.” Paste the following in and hit the enter or return key:
This past Friday, I spoke at Code Beam America, and The Quaker World was published.
I haven’t spoken at many conferences in the last decade. I did the Elixir Wizards one virtually last year, and this is the first time in person since 2011.
It’s just a surprising coincidence that the book was published the same day. I wrote that chapter two years ago!
[updated 2023-01-28]
I’ve studied a silly number of languages in my life, starting with Spanish from age 6 to 14. I returned to studying Spanish in 2017, when I was working with an Argentine client. We spoke primarily in English (I was far too rusty for the alternative), but I quickly became frustrated with not knowing how to speak in the past tense in Spanish. I hurriedly crammed “yo …é, tú …aste, él …ó” into my head and tried to keep up.
Like much of Pittsburgh, I am ethnically Rusyn. I was raised mostly Roman Catholic (because my dad is). At Easter, though, I always attended Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church, where my mom’s family belongs.
Byzantine Catholics have very different Easter traditions than many other Christians, but I didn’t notice until I experienced culture shock the time we took our basket to be blessed at the Roman Catholic parish where I grew up, and my basket was decidedly different from the others. Theirs had plastic eggs and chocolate bunnies. Mine had kolbasi, ham, bacon, pascha, hrudka, chrin, butter, etc. You know, a traditional Easter basket with all the foods for Sunday’s fast-breaking.
I recently completed a job hunt. I was a lot more intentional this time about having a list of questions to ask the companies I was interviewing with. I highly recommend Key Values for generating a list of questions to ask. They explain why they’re worded the way they are, too.
I did ask one thing in a way they didn’t suggest, though. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a hot topic, and I know that asking specifically with those words is likely to get me a canned answer. I wanted to avoid that. And of course, I can look at a company’s “About Us” page on their website and scroll through their LinkedIn results to get a sense of their gender and racial diversity.
