Dispatches from a happy Hullian

1. What is your work/school commute like?

Summer: by bike in my work clothes — Strava on, maybe do an errand on the way.

Winter: by express bus after dropping the kids at school. Sometimes with an ambition to read a book but often just noodling around on phone news, Wordle and e-mail.

2. What did you want to be when you grew up? Has it changed?

I had astronaut, engineer, architect, web designer, propagandist and science journalist in my sights over my career. Now I design algorithms and explain statistical processes and methods to people (including statistical laypeople). So different, but not shockingly so, aside from how far it is from astronaut.

3. What is your weirdest work/school/project related story?

Might be the time I flew up to the Lower North Shore to teach Web basics? Or went to a transgenic goat farm to take pictures for a website? I had to wear clinic booties over my shoes, touch nothing and wash my hands obsessively on the way in and out.

4. What is something you're closely familiar with that media always gets wrong?

The media's understanding of contract expiry dates and real pay has been perhaps deliberately wrong in many cases, but really, even friendly sources often flub details.

5. Describe the stuff on your desk/workspace.

Foreground: cables, coffee cup, phone, two laptops, bullet journal, pen. Background: union stuff storage, binders, basement laundry hanging area.

thefridayfive

I just set up OpenID at my woefully out-of-date but pithier URL of http://metawidget.net. Like my e-mail over there, the idea is to future-proof my online identity: I more or less own my own domain, whereas it is possible that Dreamwidth, myOpenID, Livejournal or whoever else will do something I don't like (or just be reduced to a smoking crater by a DDoS or an antitrust lawsuit or something). Through the miracle of OpenID delegation, if I get sick of whatever site is doing the OpenID listing, I just fire them, change these two lines, and keep my OpenID. Also, it might motivate me to clean up my site, archive some stuff, and all that.

Here are the two lines:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid/server">
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://metawidget.dreamwidth.org">

They go in the head element of index.html, or whatever other page loads by default when hitting the domain. The first line indicates where the server doing the heavy OpenID lifting** is located. The second line gives my OpenID over there, which if someone claiming to be me-as-metawidget.net wants to be authenticated, they will need to convince Dreamwidth's servers that I am me-as-metawidget.dreamwidth.org. If I get sick of being vouched for by Dreamwidth, I just change those two lines to a new provider (the form of the first URL varies from provider to provider, the form of the second is just the usual URL you use for OpenID). Note that I don't include my metawidget.net OpenID in those two lines: that is covered by the fact that those two lines can be found at metawidget.net. Also note that I don't have to register this delegation with Dreamwidth: the only place the delegation exists is on a page I control. The whole shebang relies on the assumption that only I can go and stick code in the head element of whatever comes up at the URL of the OpenID I'm claiming.

There is a presumably out-of-date (at least no longer mainained) PHP script that lets you set up a tiny single-user OpenID server on your own machine, but almost everyone who might want an OpenID on their own domain has another OpenID sitting somewhere.

This post is basically a re-hash with commentary of the technical information I found on Stack Exchange.

*assuming you have an OpenID somewhere else

**by which I mean “lifting I don't want to do”