Notices by Anna e só (anna@friend.camp)

We’re officially homeowners! 🎉

I painted my nails for the first time in a long time because today I'm going to sign one of the most important documents of my life.

@aral The last time I did some digging about it (4 years ago), it was because your user settings are stored on ~/.config/monitors.xml whereas GDM uses settings on /var/lib/gdm/.config/monitors.xml. Here’s an entry on the Arch Linux wiki about it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GDM#Setup_default_monitor_settings

I had a conversation with a professor yesterday about our technical residency (I’m a year and a half away from going through it myself). I was surprised to hear him describe me as an “anxious student” because I wanted to know more/be more prepared. Make it make sense.

Computer lab at my university with just three students and air con turned on. The course taking place here today has 40 students.

@aral Thank you, I appreciate the support! I study at the Universidade Federal de Goiás, a federal public university in my state. Our accessibility center is overwhelmed with requests from disabled students, so I’m used to trying to advocate for myself on my own and then reporting the results to them.

@Robb_Munson @aral I Iive in Brazil and study at a federal public university. It’s funded by the government, and it struggled in the last decade as more conservative presidents took office (Michel Temer after Dilma’s impeachment, Jair Bolsonaro). For years, the future of my university was unclear because they barely had money for utilities. This is the result of almost a decade of dismantling.

I’m considering talking to my university’s accessibility center about it and seeing if I have any recourse to make specific courses I need to take to graduate to be offered at the same building. But I need to do that before the next semester as my faculty isn’t the only one trying to organize their schedule—finding another classroom can be an impossible task after they’re all assigned.

My faculty no longer offers courses in blocks of 4 classes (a full night); instead, they offer courses in blocks of 2 classes (1/2 night). That means that if I want to have a full night of classes, I may risk enrolling in a Course A that’s offered at Building A and Course B that’s offered at Building B which is located 1,1 km away from A.

Walking wouldn’t be a problem if my university campus treated pedestrians as first class citizens, but they don’t!

Sidewalks aren’t well maintained. There are so few street lights my campus has been getting increasingly dangerous and difficult to walk around at night. And, worse of all, my city is known for having some really aggressive drivers. I hear and see people speeding all the time.

So I won’t be able to graduate until 2026 because my faculty keeps offering courses I need to take at different buildings that are so far apart a disabled person can’t safely walk from a building to the other. 🥲

My opinion about #FOSDEM: I had to experience it at least once, I think, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to be one of the keynoters.

But that smugness while saying “Yes, we’re a superspreader event, yes, you should probably wear a mask, but 🤷🏻 we ain’t making it a policy, you do you” killed me. I attended it once, but won’t attend it again (as I suspected).

Here’s a pattern of speech that really annoyed me during the opening talk: Acknowledgment of a common, valid criticism (venue choice, overcrowding, lack of a health policy) ➡️ Cynical dismissal (attitudes like “You’re probably sick, and if you aren’t, you probably will become sick”, “Yeah, we’re operating over capacity, but this event is even bigger and even more over capacity!”).

The problem is talking about these issues in this matter-of fact way, as if that wasn’t an outcome they can change. It doesn’t have to be this way — YOU are choosing to keep it this way!

“Oh, but _no one_ is doing it anymore.” Let’s ignore that lie for a second—well, lead the way, then! Make things better, not worse!

A couple of days before we traveled back home, my spouse and I received an email from our airline encouraging us to sign up for CGH’s facial recognition pilot program. They were arguing that this would make accessing terminals “faster and safer”.

The instructions imply that glasses and other accessories would prevent it from working.

Tell me, how is it faster and safer if I’d be forced to remove my mask in the middle of a pandemic at an airport clearly operating close to or beyond capacity?