I clicked on some Forbes clickbait about surprising jobs and their amazing salaries and came across this hilarious image for "Software Engineer Intern":

So many things wrong here, I can't even believe it.  Even if this image is outdated, it's still just wrong, wrong, wrong...and Forbes chose to use it.  Grade: F.  Just gaze in amazement at:

• Dusty/dirty monitor (looks like somebody maybe even tried to write something in the dust, though it's illegibile)
• Monitor viewing angle is wrong (tilted down so much that's it's probably not even viewable)
• Sweet VGA connector.
• Fake intern's left pinky finger is at least 2 but maybe 3 keys away from the 'A' key.
• Fake intern's wrist appears to be infected with 1-3 botfly larvae.  WTF!!  Maybe it's a HR corporate special intern-tracking implant device?
• Mario cosplayer is mashing his left hand down on the keyboard while fake intern is trying to hack the Gibson
• Mario cosplayer is scraping a screwdriver across the top of the monitor.  Not even using the tip, just the shank.
• Keyboard is at a 45° angle to the front of the desk.  Who works like that?
• Mario cosplayer (senior developer/mentor) is happily working on this challenging refactoring task, but still refuses to take off his uncomfortable shoulder satchel...
• Both eye gazes are on the spot where the screwdriver meets the monitor.  Yeah, fuck that code anyway.
• No mouse on the desk.  Maybe Yoshi ate it?
• Is this supposed to be pair programming?

At least they seem to be happy.

Software interns of the world:  If you show up at your internship to find a dusty VGA monitor with a tower case on the desk and no mouse, just so some Mario cosplayer can scrape his screwdriver back and forth across your monitor while mashing your keyboard with his other hand....please quit.  Trust me, there are better gigs.

I was pleased to learn that the Python Imaging Library (PIL) has a modernized fork called Pillow.  From the Pillow site:

The fork authors’ goal is to foster active development of PIL through:

• Continuous integration testing via Travis CI
• Publicized development activity on GitHub
• Regular releases to the Python Package Index

This is great news for me, because there are several projects (this site included) that use PIL, and I have been worried about its future.  In addition to the infrequent PIL releases, the lack of Python 3 support in PIL was starting to be a real drag...and it was the main thing that kept some of us on Python 2.7.

So yeah, it's nice to have a path forward...time to embrace the fork and move on.  I will miss the PIL acronym.

I've been getting into and exploring with Inkscape lately. Although I was first tipped off to it a couple (?) years ago (now already?), I hadn't actually installed/tried it until recently. Now that I have put it through some test runs, I'm quite impressed! Of course the main idea (at least to me), is to be able to draw nice bezier curves and have them be smooth and be able to arbitrarily scale them and to edit them later (which you can't do with traditional bitmap/raster editing software...even thought Photoshop and Gimp have incorporated "paths"). It does this beautifully...things are highly intiutive, I got up to speed pretty quickly I think...and although I hit the occasional quirk, it did just what I wanted. As with other software, like Gimp, I'm sure the Adobe design zealots will soon start ranting about how inferior it is and how it lacks all these great features that product has...but whatever...I've never claimed to be a designer, but I can recommend it. I used Inkscape to draw up a series of logos for DorkbotPDX and for the PDXbot event this year. You can view them on my dorkbot subpage. A week or so ago I tracked down the LM709 op-amp from HSC Electronics and hacked up a cracklebox of my very own. I haven't put up a proper page for it yet, but I have some content online and will bang a page out soon. Do superworms molt? I've got a bin of 20 of them in oatmeal and I've been adding potato chunks, but I'm worried that they're not doing well. I once read that they'll eat each other if they get desperate, and I've seen what now look like carcases, but it might just be exoskin or something. I haven't even had time to really take care of them properly, which also implies that I haven't yet had time to record them.