Life of Audrey dot com

Preparing for disruption

2025-04-06T00:00:00-07:00

It’s a precarious time for those of us who live in the US. DOGE is gutting the federal government and taking over reliable software systems with hack jobs meant to give them full data access. This past week’s tariffs create an extraordinary level of economic uncertainty, where it’s difficult to find a modern comparison where it was an intentional act. In addition, political firings and the same DOGE attacks are impacting NSA, CISA, and US Cyber Command, at a time where foreign government-backed groups are known to be hacking into our infrastructure. The vulnerabilities are deep.

So with that in mind, I put together a set of disaster preparedness recommendations focused on these current areas of disruption. Being more prepared can free us from the urge to constantly track every detail in the news. Make a plan, and stick with it.

Supply chain

Why I’m concerned: as we saw only a few years ago, even a minor disruption in the global supply chain can take months to sort out. It’s a system that’s built for predictability. This past week’s tariff announcements throw a grenade in that. There’s likely more to come as other countries retaliate. The US may also cause further impacts with policies like port fees that could lead to shipping companies consolidating their stops down to the largest ports. It’s difficult to know in the short term exactly which things will go out of stock, or have a massive price hike, or take way longer to manufacture, so here’s some general guidelines.

Buy two, use one

As I said in the post about grocery habits, one of the easiest ways to stock up on things you regularly buy is to pick up an extra, and buy more when the first one is finished. You can do this with peanut butter, canned chickpeas, cat litter, or menstrual pads. Even an extra week’s supply will help smooth out gaps at the store.

Shorten the chain

You can also reduce the impacts of supply chain problems by picking things that don’t have as far to travel, or require fewer steps to get there. This might be picking apples (grown in Washington state) instead of bananas (which still make their way to the US on a modern banana boat.) If you enjoy research rabbit holes, this could be an interesting one to look into for non-food items.

Research local options

In the near term, buying things secondhand can help. Look around for thrift shops that tend to have a good supply of housewares. Used hardware stores exist too, and a locally-owned hardware shop is always a good resource. You also may have something like a local Fix-It Fair that can help you with thrifted items that need a bit of work.

For food — farmer’s market season is coming up, and we have at least one year-round market in Portland so maybe you do too!

Learn to repair

You can find tutorials online to fix just about anything, including mending clothing. Pick something that sounds interesting to try, and you could be a fix-it helper for other people in your community.

Internet

Why I’m concerned: the internet may be decentralized in a broad sense, but there are many concentrated points of failure like authentication systems and cloud providers. There is an ongoing effort by hacker groups sponsored by the Chinese government to seek vulnerabilities in every part of our technical infrastructure. Russia has been primarily focused on Ukraine and former Soviet Bloc countries in recent years, but they’re active in the US too. Since taking office, Trump and Elon Musk have disbanded the committee looking into Salt Typhoon activities, laid off a significant part of the staff at CISA, and fired the director of the NSA for flimsy political reasons. US companies depend on these resources to help identify threats and notify them of major vulnerabilities that need to be patched. Things are in a precarious state.

Communication

We depend on the internet for email, messaging, and phone services. Have a backup plan for what your household will do if you can’t contact each other. Will everyone meet up back at home, or another place? Have paper copies of important addresses and phone numbers. I recommend writing down the power and other utility companies’ info too.

Information

I wrote an earlier post about why radio is an essential tool for disaster communication and news. Go read that. Be aware that misinformation spreads fast. Stay focused on what you know for certain.

Get a paper map of the area. If you live near a coast, get a paper copy of the tide tables. Think about how to keep a copy of any other essential reference material you use regularly.

Work and school

Internet access is key for those of us who work from home, and many students. Ask your school or employer what their plan is if there’s an outage. The answer might be nothing, but at least you’ll know what to expect.

One of the stressful things about a longer outage can be finding yourself cut off from the ways that you like to relax and have fun. Especially if you have kids who won’t understand why they can’t watch their favorite videos, figure out what your options are for offline entertainment. The social part is harder when many of our interactions are spread out online, around the world. I don’t have an immediate suggestion about how to approach that issue, but if you do then please send me a note.

Power grid

Why I’m concerned: the hacker groups mentioned above don’t just go after internet infrastructure, they’ve also been found infiltrating the power grid. It would not be the first time something like this happened — there’s a well-known Russian hack of the Ukrainian grid that shut off power for several hours. A GAO report from 2022 notes significant steps that need to be taken — the US is in no position to make progress on this under the current administration.

The US power grid is actually a network between the US, Canada, and Mexico, which makes it vulnerable to trade war problems. In addition, natural disasters can exacerbate the problem of deferred maintenance and underinvestment in infrastructure, as people living in Puerto Rico know.

Do this first

The supply chain issues discussed above are going to hit things like batteries and solar panels hard. Everything from components to raw materials are sourced from China.

At a minimum, I recommend having a couple of small battery packs that you can use to recharge your phone. If you can afford it, a number of companies have “solar generator” systems that include a large battery and solar panels. For people who use a CPAP or other medical devices, you’ll have to check the power consumption requirements to make sure it has enough to get through the night. A regular generator can be useful too, but you’ll have to source fuel and there are safety and noise restrictions to deal with.

I’ve been recommending this upcoming power backup system from Biolite but it won’t be available until fall at the earliest, and tariffs will be certain to have an impact. Still, I think it’s a good option if it’s in your budget.

Rather than look for a battery option for my fridge, I’ve decided to go the old-school route with a hard-sided cooler and a stack of ice packs that stay in the freezer. For me, that will buy enough time to eat the perishables, and afterward the cooler can be used for cooking. I also have a couple of camp stoves and a propane grill.

Financial system

Why I’m concerned: have you looked at the stock market lately? It’s a rotten time for anyone dependent on their 401k funds. But also, financial systems are another key hacking target at all levels.

Cash on hand

Hard-core prepper types love to go on about cash transactions and converting to gold, but really you just need enough to buy gas and diapers, or fill your meds. This is one of those things where it’s important to remember that any big enough crisis will affect everyone. Do you want to be the guy with a trunk full of gold, or someone who can get by this week and has a decent relationship with their neighbors?

Start a budget

It will be easier to figure out how much cash you need to get through a couple days of “surprise! banking site outages!” if you have some way of tracking expenses. I like YNAB (referral link) and they have a bunch of resources to help you get started.

Barter

The last thing I hope you’ll start thinking about is non-cash options. If you know how to mend clothes or sharpen knives, you might have a neighbor or friend who would trade for something you need doing. If you can do even a bit of gardening, see if you can catch a neighbor out working on theirs and ask if they want to swap produce. This is one of the ways that we can build resilience, during these times of chaos and beyond.

I hope that’s enough to get you started, and if you have ideas or questions please let me know. Take care.

Volunteering with local disaster response

2025-02-10T00:00:00-08:00

I’ve mentioned in other posts that I volunteer with Portland NET. Folks have asked me to talk about that more, so here I’ll give an overview of the program, the activities we participate in, and how it fits into a larger disaster response context.

The Portland Neighborhood Emergency Team (NET) program trains volunteers to respond to local disasters, covering skills like medical triage and search and rescue basics. The program’s primary focus has been on preparing to respond to a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake, which would overwhelm the capacity of fire departments, hospitals, and other emergency responders. This event is expected to leave Portland geographically isolated and split us down the middle due to collapsing bridges and other infrastructure.

I joined in 2017 after concluding, like many of the people in my training cohort, that the political situation was likely to impact our access to outside aid if such a disaster occurred. At the time, my neighborhood didn’t have an active team because the previous team lead (TL) had moved away. The requirements to restart the team were that five people had to attend a meeting to vote in person for a new TL. Since that seemed like something I might be able to do, I volunteered. And here we are today. 😄

To become a NET volunteer, you take the Basic NET training which is typically scheduled as three Saturdays of classroom time plus a hands-on final field exercise (FFE)¹ on a following weekend. Most of the curriculum follows FEMA’s CERT program, but we do some additional radio communications training along with it.² Once you complete your training, you’re issued a badge, safety vest, and hard hat. If there’s an active team in your neighborhood, you’ll attend meetings (usually monthly or bi-monthly). Our program coordinators at PBEM (Portland Bureau of Emergency Management) send out regular emails with training opportunities and deployment requests. Typical deployments include down power line perimeter management, volunteering at shelters during extreme cold or hot weather, and clearing storm drains before a weather event. After a major winter storm event in January 2024 the city asked us to help document storm damage. We also usually get a standby notice before a major weather event to let us know that deployments might be happening. During the response to the COVID pandemic, we worked at the EOC in a number of roles including logistics and admin support.³ We also helped staff vaccination clinics.

There’s only one situation where NETs are allowed to self-deploy without authorization from PBEM: when a major disaster presents a clear city-wide emergency and we’re unable to make contact with the EOC. This is unlikely to happen outside of the Cascadia earthquake scenario.

One of the best reasons to join NET, in my opinion, is the access to free training. Aside from the topics covered in Basic NET there’s Wilderness First Aid, Mental Health First Aid, HAZMAT awareness,⁴ deescalation, crowd management, ICS (the incident command system), and damage assessment. FEMA also runs webinars⁵ to share the latest research with CERT volunteers and community organizations.

As a TL, I organize our monthly meetings and act as the team’s exercise coordinator for biannual citywide deployment exercises (CDEs). The good/bad thing about our team system is that TLs have a lot of leeway to decide how to run things, what activities to organize, etc. It’s great for someone like me who had prior organizing experience but can leave new TLs feeling a little lost. We’ve started having regular TL meetings to check in and share ideas, which I think will help a lot.

My feelings about being a part of the program have changed throughout these past eight years. I’ve always felt there was a lot of potential in what we’re doing, but most NETs are white college-educated homeowners rather than a reflection of the communities most vulnerable to disasters. There’s a desire to change this, but not a whole lot of funding for recruitment. We had our first Spanish-language training cohort only in the last year or so. Disability access follows the ADA model where people have to ask for accommodations. As a result, it’s not always clear what sorts of things can be requested. There’s also an increasing gap between the things we learn in Basic NET and the deployments we participate in as climate change causes more and more extreme weather.

In the end, I realized that I can do a lot of good as a TL who’s focused on supporting team health and longevity for a group of people who feel called to help others during emergencies. People join the program with a lot of energy and enthusiasm, which drops off over time for a number of reasons. So I try to normalize conversations about how our interest may wax and wane, encourage them to pick an area to focus on, and talk openly about the impacts of aging and disability. I also emphasize health and safety issues like preventing the spread of covid and other respiratory illnesses. In the winter the team meets over Zoom, and the rest of the time we’re outdoors.⁶

If you’re in Portland, you can get involved by going through NET basic training, becoming an ARO (amateur radio operator), or as an ATV (affiliated trained volunteer).⁷ In other parts of the US, you may have a local CERT program through your city or county. The scope of activities for CERT programs can vary a lot, depending on who’s running it and the hazards that affect your area. You can also take trainings directly from FEMA, particularly on ICS skills.⁸

Beyond that, I think there’s a real need for people to organize at whatever level they’re interested in around the issue of community resilience and ability to help each other during emergencies. In my dream world, we’d have a full continuum of disaster response from the state and federal level on down to the mutual aid groups working inside their own communities. That’s clearly not going to start from the top down, so it’s up to the rest of us to be working with our communities in a safe, thoughtful, and organized way where we can collaborate across the scope of disaster situations. NET is one way to learn the skills that can help.

Disaster response involves a lot of acronyms, FYI. ↩
The State of Oregon decided that radio communication capacity during disasters was essential after a storm in 2007 cut off access and communications with the north section of the Oregon coast. Ham operators were able to pass messages from the Clatsop County commissioners to the governor in order to request a disaster declaration. (The state can’t issue a declaration without that request from local government.) As a result, fire stations in Portland have radio equipment on site, and Portland NET trains radio operators to ensure we can communicate between teams and the city’s emergency operations center (EOC). ↩
It was a weird feeling to realize that the most helpful thing I could do in that moment was taking a two day a week volunteer job as an assistant to the operations director. I took notes, sent emails, and learned a whole lot about how things work.⁹ It was an odd mix of folks representing different bureaus, fire department captains (who already knew the ICS system), PBOT employees (making up most of the planning section), and NETs. Then and now, the city doesn’t have the dedicated staff needed to run an extended incident like this, which validates the utility of a volunteer corps and also makes some of us think that we really, really need to be training people in every bureau on basic disaster ops. ↩
My favorite training so far — lots of interesting examples from incidents like wildfires vs. the chlorine tanks at a water treatment plant, and the wild things people will store in their sheds. ↩
I mean, they did. Who knows what’s going to happen with those programs now. ↩
Mostly — we’ve had to change plans due to unsafe conditions at other times of year too. Listing off the reasons an in-person meeting has been moved to Zoom turned out to be a good starting point for talking about current disasters. ↩
If you live in SE Portland, particularly Brentwood-Darlington, Creston-Kennelworth, Foster/Powell, Mt. Scott-Arleta, or Woodstock I encourage you to get in touch about our team and how you could be involved as an ATV or ARO. ↩
Their online training materials are unfortunately pretty dry, so if you have ADHD you may need to plan accordingly. ↩
FEMA is basically a system where you put paperwork in one end and get a partial reimbursement for the money that was spent to deal with a disaster out the other. So much paperwork. ↩

Changing my grocery habits

2025-02-09T00:00:00-08:00

In a previous post on disaster preparedness I suggested putting the issue of food storage aside until you’ve dealt with other priorities. But now that you have your radio, first aid kit, and water at hand, what’s the next step?

I’ve been working to shift more of my grocery shopping toward basic foods that are some degree of ‘shelf stable’. The goal is to make having more food on hand in case of unexpected situations a regular habit, and keep it aligned with what I want to eat on a regular basis. As I said in that earlier post, I think it’s more realistic to buy an extra jar of peanut butter than plan out an entire survivalist pantry. Shifting what you buy a little at a time will let you stay focused on eating what you have on hand. I’ve overdone this in the past, which is how I know that there’s a line between stocking up and hoarding.

In a way, this is going back to my roots. When I was in grade school, a weeknight dinner might have green beans (canned), rice (boil in bag), and lentil or tuna burgers.¹ I never really liked meat so these sorts of budget meals were fine by me. We also ate a lot of soup.²

Your own food preferences might be quite different than mine, so I encourage you to look at your grocery list and think about 1) what you could buy a little extra of on your next trip and 2) comes in an option that doesn’t require refrigeration.³ This doesn’t mean you have to start cooking from scratch all the time — peanut butter and crackers with a cup of applesauce will fit the bill too.

We can also look to the past to help us plan for the future when it comes to food. It might even be the recent past, if the pandemic forced you to be creative about ingredients. Some other starting points: working mothers,⁴ wartime cooking,⁵ and the Great Depression.⁶

Resilience isn’t just about stocking your own pantry, it’s also built on how we connect with others. Go shopping with a friend and compare notes. Or take turns making a big batch of soup you can split up for the week. If you know someone who has a harder time cooking for themselves, offering to bring them extra of what you made could be a big help.⁷ For most of human history, food has been a communal activity.

Tips

If you need some ideas:

Canned fruit can be added to your overnight oats, or used to make fruit desserts like pies and crumbles. Look for low-sugar options if that’s a concern — I usually get the kind canned in juice.
Pickles are really good in soup.
My favorite vegan creamer, Nut Pods, has a shelf-stable version that’s indistinguishable from the larger refrigerated cartons. In Portland, I can usually find it at Winco, but they also sell it on the website and at at the moment all the seasonal flavors seem to be in stock.
If you can eat soy and haven’t tried soy curls, go get a package ASAP. They’re extremely versatile and fast to prepare.
Those charity cookbooks that show up in thrift stores often have interesting ideas, if you really want to get creative with your canned goods. Look for anything pre-1990 or so.

Do you have any tips or sources of inspiration to share? Let me know and I’ll add them here.

The basic formula is to mix your cooked lentils or can of tuna with some breadcrumbs and an egg to hold it together. These days I prefer chickpea cutlets. ↩
I’m tempted to include a full digression on the soup to casserole continuum — once you have the basic formula, both are good ways to use up pantry ingredients and the main difference is really just whether you want the base to be broth or a sauce. Curries also fall into this spectrum. The difference between a casserole and a “bowl” is whether you mix everything together or layer the ingredients. Try the bowl option if food texture is often an issue for you. ↩
Frozen ingredients are also a good choice. I eat a lot more frozen vegetables than fresh ones. Less prep work, and I’ve rarely had things become inedible even after ~2 years or so. In terms of disaster preparedness, this shouldn’t be your only option, but for the grinding catastrophe we’re currently experiencing it’s fine. ↩
The I Hate to Cook Book is a delightful example. My mom’s version of this was a cookbook from the La Leche League. I think that might be where the lentil burgers came from. The book also had a recipe for quiche with a hash brown crust (look up how to make oven hash browns, it’s basically the same thing but in a pie pan). We ate that often enough that I was surprised to learn that quiche usually has pastry instead. ↩
How to Cook a Wolf blew my mind when I first read it as a broke college student. ↩
In the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project attempted to document American cuisine through a project called America Eats. It’s a mix of articles, recipes, and various commentary (including a lady from Portland who ranted about mashed potatoes 🤨). If you want to see for yourself, there are a few books on the topic — I found The Food of a Younger Land in Libby. There’s also a neat archive of photos from the project at the Library of Congress. ↩
Please be kind if they turn out to have different needs than what you normally cook — food is a is complex and personal topic. ↩

Why you need a radio (yes, you!)

2025-02-07T00:00:00-08:00

Broadcast radio may seem like a thing of the past, now that we have smartphones and widespread internet access. But it remains hugely important during disasters, as well in any part of the world that has less reliable access to electricity and internet service. Regardless of where you live, a basic AM/FM radio will make sure you have access to important information during emergencies like wildfire evacuations, the aftermath of a tornado storm, or just keep you company while waiting for the power to come back on after the neighbor’s tree knocks out the line on your block.

Radios are usually listed on disaster preparedness checklists, but don’t get as much attention to explain why and how it can be useful. The examples here are US-specific, but similar options should be available in many parts of the world. Below I’ve outlined several use cases and what you’ll need to try it. I also included important two-way radio options that can be used to stay safe and help others.

Stay cozy during a power outage

With a battery-powered AM/FM radio, you’ll be able to pick up music, news, and other local channels even if your power and internet are out. I like to leave mine tuned to 89.9FM, our local classical station. The signal tends to be strong, and it’s the kind of thing I can leave on all night if I want to block out the noise of a storm.

Wikipedia has lists of radio stations by state or region, if you want to see what’s out there before you start scrolling. But for me, part of the fun is searching the dial for something new. Smaller radio stations tend to come and go, particularly on AM. Also a cool thing about AM is that the signal can carry over long distances at night — so try tuning in a channel from the next city over and see what you pick up. Maybe it’ll be the same talk radio crud as you have in your town, but AM is also where you’ll find non-English language content and maybe even a station run by the local high school.

And also — at a time when every action we take is being surveilled and sold to advertisers, especially our media consumption, it’s pretty great to have an option where absolutely no one knows what you’re listening to unless they’re close enough to hear it.

Keep a channel open with your partner when they’re out in the storm

In severe weather, it can be really useful to have a way to communicate with someone who’s in the house while you’re outside, or even down the block. With a pair of FRS/GMRS radios, you can leave them on and tuned to the same channel, so whoever’s out there trying to shovel a path can easily check in or ask for help. This way you can save your phone battery and won’t be limited by cell service.

One of my NET teammates brings their radios camping so the kids get in the habit of checking in while they’re out running around. I recommend trying to work in some practice with whatever your regular activities are too. Speaking into the radio can feel a little weird at first, but once you know the basics it’s pretty straightforward.

There are a bunch of options out there — anything from Motorola or Midland should be fine. I recommend getting one that covers the GMRS channels and not just the cheaper FRS-only options. Our NET teams use them to stay in touch around the neighborhood, and depending on terrain that could be a mile or more. The FCC requires you to register for a $35 license to use those channels, but I’ve never heard of it being enforced.

Get the current weather forecast

One of the nifty things our National Weather Service does is run a 24/7 radio broadcast of weather forecasts and current conditions. You’ll need a radio that specifically can pick up these channels. It’s one of the options on my GMRS radio, and I also have one of those all-in-one emergency radios from Midland that has a weather mode.

It’s going to be a complete clusterfuck if the current administration were to shut this service down, but I feel I should mention that the NWS is part of NOAA and at this point who knows what they’ll take a hammer to. Still, I think a weather radio is a good piece of kit to have and could be crucial for staying safe during emergencies.

Receive emergency alerts

Another feature of the weather radio system is emergency alert broadcasts. According to NOAA, this is an all-hazards system that ties into the FCC Emergency Alert System. So it’s not just for tornados and flash flood warnings. Weather radio sets typically have a button to turn the alert mode on. This leaves the radio off unless an alert comes through. I haven’t used this mode much, but plan to give it a test the next time we have storms or wildfires that might trigger alert messages.

Monitor breaking news

Throughout the US, a network of public radio stations offers international and national news reporting, along with local journalism and other public interest programming. Even if you’re outside a metro area, stations run repeaters to extend coverage throughout their region. Most are on FM frequencies, although a few older AM stations remain.

Stations purchase the programs they run from the national NPR organization, as well as other public radio networks like APM. Typically, stations will run a 5 minute news break at the top of the hour, which means you can leave a radio on in the background and turn it up when you hear the news come on. During disasters and other major emergencies, scheduled programming will be bumped for breaking news coverage, much like you might see on local TV stations.

If your local NPR affiliate isn’t enough, there are also independent community radio stations that offer a wide mix of content. In Portland we have KBOO, which carries Democracy Now! along with programs on indigeneous issues, incarceration, and other marginalized communities. Many of these programs are distributed through the Pacifica radio network. Shows are also available as podcasts, if you’d like to sample a few. Searching for community radio podcasts is how I found The Ship Report, which is a great source of information on Columbia River maritime issues. If I ever spend the night in Astoria I’ll have to try to catch it on the air.

Follow local sports

You likely think of AM radio as a cesspool of right-wing talk radio (which is definitely an issue) but it’s also where you can find sports radio stations broadcasting baseball, soccer, football, and hockey games. Some sports work better than others in an audio-only format in my experience, but given the mess of tv and streaming packages you need to catch all the games from a local team, it’s neat to have another option that’s completely free. Things tend to be spread out over several channels, so try searching for a team name and ‘radio schedule’ to find out where to tune in. Maybe we’ll even see NWSL games get picked up.

Meet fellow radio enthusiasts and improve your skills

Amateur radio (aka ham) gives anyone who can pass the technician-level exam the opportunity to talk to people across town or even around the world, completely independent of internet access or phone service. It isn’t private, but that’s part of what makes this a community. Hams tend to be very eager to help newcomers learn the ropes. You don’t need a lot of fancy gear to get started, a basic handheld transceiver is around $70.

If you want hands-on assistance, look for a local radio club through ARRL. I recommend Ham Study for exam prep — don’t feel like you have to understand everything in the questions, a lot of people get through the technician exam by rote then find it makes more sense once they have some experience.

Call for help

There’s countless examples of how ham radio is used to help people during disasters. Especially if you live in a remote area or have limited mobility, this could be an essential communication option. Your local radio club may run a net or repeater where people typically make contact.

Assist in disasters

If you want to get more involved with the disaster response side of things, ARES is a national program that trains people for emergency communication. There may also be opportunities through your local CERT program (which is part of FEMA, but run by local cities and counties). In Portland, you can join a NET team as their ARO (amateur radio operator) and participate in training exercises, plus be a key link in passing information between the emergency operations center and people on the ground in our community.

Learn what else is happening in the world

Here’s the really fun part, in my opinion. Much like AM and FM broadcasts, there’s another range of frequencies called shortwave that can be picked up over long distances. You’ll need a radio that can pick up these frequencies specifically — I have a Tecsun PL-880 that I’m very happy with. It includes a long wire antenna which is important for picking up long range broadcasts (also called Dxing).

While shortwave broadcasting has been in decline for years, it’s still used in parts of the world where there’s less infrastructure or large distances between towns. That includes maritime communities like the Pacific islands. In the US, most broadcasting is either weird religious dudes or remanants of the cold war — I recommend the latter because they have better taste in music.

What you can pick up will depend on your location, the time of day, season, weather, and conditions in the ionosphere. It’s a good idea to keep a log of what you find. It can help you track when the best time to tune in is, and it’s fun to have a list of some of the unexpected stations that come in.

Over the past few years, I’ve been able to pick up news broadcasts from Radio New Zealand, a Voice of America repeater in Botswana, music from Radio Nacional Amazonia, Cuban stations (when they’re online, power outages have sidelined the usual stations for a while), assorted broadcasts from Japan, China, and both North and South Korea, plus the various broadcasters in the US running hours of creepy preachers (seriously, don’t look them up unless you want to read about grifting and abuse). And of course, there’s also China’s Firedrake jammer getting in the middle of anything they see as foreign propoganda, which leads to a lot of noise for those of us on a line of transmission between East Asia and Cuba.

If this is enough to get you interested, try listening in on a web SDR like the ones from Northern Utah. Current schedules can be found at EiBi, and Glenn Hauser’s World of Radio podcast and weekly logs are the best way to find out what else is going on. You’ll get a sense of what sorts of things are out there, and see if you’d like to pick up your own receiver. I sincerely hope that there’s never a situation where the only news I can get is from shortwave signals traveling halfway around the world — but I’m glad I have the option, and it’s been a fun hobby in the meantime.

Staying safe during civil unrest

2025-01-18T00:00:00-08:00

I’m writing this just two days before Trump takes office, for the second time. There’s a whole slew of reasons this makes many people in the US concerned for their safety. In this post I’m going to talk about the set of situations I’m loosely calling ‘civil unrest’ — everything from police crackdowns of street protests to right-wing rallies meant to instigate violence. My aim is to help people who are concerned about getting caught up in the middle of something they’re unprepared for.

My background on this includes two key sets of events spanning twenty years. The more recent one was the racial justice protests in Portland that took place in 2020, where I spent months documenting nightly events through the work of independent reporters and local media. I also found myself right in the middle of the Seattle WTO protests in 1999. I wrote about how that experience affected me here.

The first thing to know is that events can be very local. In downtown Portland, the area around City Hall, the federal building, central police station, and federal courthouse spans three square blocks. Other parts of downtown were affected in 2020, as well as neighborhoods around police stations, but the majority of Portland wasn’t in earshot or tear gas range of what was happening. In Seattle in 1999, protests and police violence affected a larger geographic area but still in the central city. People in most neighborhoods could get around without encountering issues as long as they didn’t need to go downtown. (Also the restricted area increased when Clinton arrived, which I found really annoying.)

National media will pretty much always get things wrong. Either because they don’t know the geography (and this is a particular gripe for me since that was my field of study), they’ve fallen prone to sweeping narratives, or they’re repeating what police and local government are saying without checking it out. The last one is actually why I ended up starting the protest blog — I was astonished by how easy it was for the mayor to lie about what protesters were doing and have everyone repeat it.

This creates an environment where it’s easy for all kinds of misinformation to thrive. Rumors take off fast, and there’s often no way to verify them unless you know someone who’s right there in the midst of things. It’s important to cultivate a skill of asking how we know what we’re hearing is right. If that rumor has no provenance, then it might be a good idea to hold off on sharing it.

So given this set of challenges, what’s the best way to stay safe?

One — find on the ground sources you can trust. That might be local media. Have a look at their current reporting on crime and community safety to get a sense of how they handle things. It might be independent reporters on social media. Again, look at their work and see how well it holds up against other sources of information. Or it can be from friends, if you know people who have direct contact with the places things are happening, or the people affected (I’m thinking of immigration raids here). For the protest blog, I tried to always find two sources for any significant piece of information. That’s easier when there’s a lot of people on the ground, but a good aim overall.

Next, have a good look at the map. Where are your local police stations, government offices, and courthouses? Where are parks or public spaces where people often gather for rallies? Figure out if any of these places are on a route between where you live and places you regularly go, like work, schools, and grocery stores. If that’s the case, identify alternate routes. And if one of those locations is particularly close to your home, it may be useful to think about where you can go if a situation heats up. Police will use chemical weapons like tear gas indiscriminately and do not care whether they’re in a residential neighborhood. I’m not going to get into PPE recommendations for that today, but let me know if you want to see it in a future post.

There could be other hot spots too, local businesses, churches, anywhere that people gather. The things I wrote about community safety in 2020 apply here. I covered the supplies you need to shelter in place as well as being ready to evacuate.

Last, know who you can call on for help. Even if the threat isn’t right on your doorstep, it can be a relief to just let someone else watch the news for a while so you can put your phone down and get some rest. There are a lot of ways we can support each other.

These are difficult times and it’s so important to remember that we’re in it together. I don’t know what will happen in the next few weeks or this year, but I can tell you that being more prepared for disasters will help you through all kinds of situations, and cultivating the skills to make sense of what’s happening and know when you need to act will help you avoid panic and make the best decisions to look out for yourself and the people you care about.

Stay safe.

Recommended resources

Mariame Kaba’s new zine on the history and use of tear gas looks at how it came to be normalized as a police tactic.

Stop the Bleed offers trainings on the key first aid skills needed to save lives after a traumatic injury. With the increase in street violence we’re likely to see this summer I strongly recommend that anyone who can takes this course.

Preparing for, Protecting Against, and Treating Tear Gas and Other Chemical Irritant Exposure: A Protestor’s Guide covers the steps to take before and after potential exposures to chemical agents.

The disasters we already experience

2025-01-09T00:00:00-08:00

This post is a grab bag with notes from various disaster-related activities I’ve been doing since I wrote Community preparedness in uncertain times.

One of the big areas I’ve been focusing on is how we can learn from the extreme weather and climate disaster situations that already impact every one of us. In some places that might be hurricanes, tornados, and extended periods of severe cold. Here in Portland, I polled my NET team about what emergency situations had directly impacted our neighborhood. Power outages were a key item, often caused by severe winter storms. Some of our team members were without running water when their pipes froze. We could see the ways that our preparation for big events led us to be ready to handle the ones that could happen every year.

I also remember the intensity of over a week of fires and smoke we dealt with in 2020. Thankfully fires didn’t spread into Portland directly, but NETs were asked to help with an evacuation hub in our neighboring county. I’ve been thinking about that experience a lot the past couple days as I read about the fires in Los Angeles. Wildfire smoke is exceptionally toxic.

Disasters are such a big topic, and I think it’s important to find a focus that will help guide you. For some people that’s medical training like wilderness first aid, or radio communications, or outreach to neighbors about the basic steps that can take to be more prepared. Everything else can be someone else’s project. We survive together.

Go bags

You need a go bag that is ready to grab at any time. Here’s what happens for people who don’t have this ready during an evacuation:

First, you have to find a backpack or suitcase that you can use. Then, look for clean clothes. Try to remember if there are important documents to bring, and personal items you can’t replace. Maybe your travel toiletries are under the sink. Do you have cash? What about the photos? In that rush, people forget the important things and often find themselves trying to haul more than they can carry on foot. You don’t know how much time you have before the situation could become fatal.

A half-assed go bag that’s already prepared is better than nothing. Mine has ratty clothes and extra socks, my passport, two radios (I wrote more about that), my travel toiletry pouch, a first aid kit, and an index card on top that lists the things I can’t pack in advance. It also has collars for the cats with their rabies tags, since they’re indoor only and don’t wear a collar most of the time. Everything is packed in a duffel bag I got free from a former employer, which is both light enough for me to carry and a convenient shape for throwing in someone’s car. There are some things I know are missing, like a spare pair of glasses, but I could get through 24-48 hours with just this bag if I really had to.

Start now with whatever you have on hand. You can keep adding to it.

One more thing that may help: most of the time when you evacuate, you’ll be going to somewhere. Depending on where you live and the situation, that might look like a week in a motel room, staying at a Red Cross shelter, a last-minute camping trip, or driving straight to an airport. It may help to think about packing a bag for your most likely destination as a starting point.

What supplies to store first

There are a bunch of complete lists out there of what to have on hand for disasters. If you’re the kind of person who can take one of those and work through it week by week, that’s awesome. On the other hand, if you took one glance and found it overwhelming, here’s three things that will get you started.

Water

You need water, ideally enough for at least 72 hours. The standard recommendation is 1 gallon per person/day. But during last winter’s big ice storm I realized that we can focus on what will help the most for different scales of emergencies.

First, there’s the short term interruption, like a water main shutoff. I keep a couple of refillable water bottles in the fridge which adds up to about 2 liters. I also have a filter pitcher in there, and a water boiler that holds up to 3 liters. As long as I keep those full and top off the pets’ water dishes, I can get through a full day easily.

Next, I have some larger 3-5 gallon water containers that are a little heavy to lift but durable. That’s my backup for situations like a week of frozen pipes. I should drain and refill them more often than I do, but stored water lasts a long time as long as it was clean to start.

For a bigger disaster, I have a hang tag on my water heater that explains how to drain it for drinking water. I wouldn’t try this in most situations, but it’s there for the kinds of emergencies that could drag on for weeks.

AM/FM radio

We’re very used to getting information from our phones, but many disaster situations can leave us without power, internet, and cell service. Throughout the US there are radio stations designated as emergency broadcasters, and any battery-powered AM/FM radio will be able to pick them up. AM is an important option, because it can carry over longer distances especially at night. Hand-cranked radios are snazzy and can also charge your phone, but something that uses AA batteries is fine too. Take the batteries out of the radio when you’re not using it and store them in a plastic bag to prevent corrosion.

I’m planning to write more about radios soon.

First aid kit

The easiest option is to pick up a basic wilderness first aid from from someplace like REI. You’re looking for something with bandages, gauze, tape, and scissors. Do not buy gear you don’t know how to use. The core of wilderness first aid is about providing adequate treatment until the person can be moved to the next higher level of care. Training will do more for you than any fancy supplies. Stop the Bleed courses are a great starting point. A multi-day wilderness first aid course is the most helpful, but I don’t recommend it for anyone who’s uncomfortable with the sight of gore. My instructor had a whole slideshow of improperly treated wounds 😱

To go with the basic first aid kit, you also need N95 masks and nitrile gloves. The cheapest place I’ve found for gloves is Costco. Home Depot regularly has masks in stock. I also recommend getting a P100 respirator for wildfire smoke.

What about …

Yes, you need to have food, but you probably already buy groceries on a regular basis. If there’s something you always get, like peanut butter, buy an extra jar and consider it “empty” when the first one is done, so you always have an extra. It would be great if everyone could have weeks of shelf-stable food on hand, but it’s not a realistic goal for many of us. Like with the water, I try to think about it in tiers — what do I need if I can’t go to the store tomorrow, if I have to make things stretch an extra week, and if I’m holed up inside for longer? Start with the first one and work from there.

One other food tip: if you want to store things like canned beans but you don’t eat them often normally, use your local food pantry to help rotate the stock. Most will take shelf-stable foods with 3-6 months left before the expiration date.

The other big area is around sanitization, but I think that would need a separate blog post. Let me know if you’d like to see that.

Essential info for wildfires and earthquakes

There are two apps I strongly recommend installing if you live on the west coast of the US. My Shake sends out notifications from the USGS early warning system, and Watch Duty has wildfire maps, evacuation zones, and frequent status updates for each incident.

Power

As I noted above, power outages turn out to be one of the biggest disruptions that regularly impact us. I know a lot of people who’ve had to throw out everything in their fridge over the past year. Backup power systems can get very expensive, so a good starting point is just a basic phone charging battery. If you have a cooler, you can move the most perishable items out of the fridge along with whatever happens to be in the freezer to help keep it cold.

The next area I prioritize is lighting. I have flashlights stashed in various places around the house, a bunch of camping lanterns (somehow I keep collecting them), and recently I started adding some string lights. Ambient lighting like that goes a long way to helping people feel more comfortable.

After that, I have various ways to boil water and heat up food, like camping stoves and a propane grill. Do not use any of these indoors, carbon monoxide poisoning kills people every year. This is another one of those areas where you don’t need to get fancy, though I do have this stove from Biolite on my wishlist.

One more thing about the power grid: it can be really scary when the lights flicker repeatedly during a storm, but it’s actually a sign that things are working correctly. The fault-detection systems involved are pretty neat. So don’t panic, just go charge your phone and make sure you have a flashlight handy.

That’s it for this time. If there are more things you’d like me to cover, or questions I can help answer, let me know.

Surviving a tech job market recession

2024-05-22T00:00:00-07:00

I lost my job in March and I’ve been slowly starting to look for my next thing. I’ve been talking to other folks who’ve been laid off to get a sense of the job market — and the stories they’re sharing give me flashbacks to twenty years ago. Postings for jobs that don’t seem to exist, all sorts of shenanigans to hide that fact, recruiters who don’t even want to forward prospects to the client, and a new level of hell from the tech interview process.

Back in 2019, Heidi Waterhouse and I did an impromptu session at Write Speak Code about being ready for the next recession. Many of the attendees were still earlier in their careers, and the topic came up in our conversations. Much like the dot com bust, there’s a lot of things happening in the industry that seem entirely self-inflicted and of course the people who suffer most had nothing to do with how we got here. It’s going to take time for this to shake out, and I hate that for all of us.

Here’s some of what we talked about at that event, I hope it helps you all find a way to get through this.

If you still have a job, don’t panic. This is a good time to get your finances in order, take advantange of medical insurance and other benefits, and check in with friends to see how they’re faring. Know what your situation is going to be if you do get hit by layoffs. Don’t kill yourself trying to cover for all the staffing gaps.

For those of you at the start of your career — it’s going to take longer to get off the ground. Don’t feel like you’re setting things back by taking other kinds of work (it took me months and months just to get one-day temp jobs answering phones). Sooner or later the industry will get its head out of its ass about this AI stuff and need people to help clean up.

If you’re further along in your career, jobs do exist it’s just going to take way, way longer to land something that fits your skills. It’s not you, it’s them. Do what you need to. But it’s ok to take this as an opportunity for a career change, and you might be able to find local programs that help you with that. Changing directions doesn’t mean you failed.

Keep in touch with your former coworkers, and other friends in the industry. When hiring picks up again (and it will), we’ll all be working together to get folks into new roles.

Also — file for unemployment, get on SNAP if you need to, sign up for the health insurance credits at healthcare.gov, and take advantage of any programs that will help keep you afloat. Those resources are for everyone.

Late-Night Radio set notes

2023-11-25T00:00:00-08:00

Earlier this year I decided to take my electronic music live and started streaming on Twitch with a group called Golden Shrimp Guild. They’re an awesome resource for anyone who wants to try this out.

GSG puts on a regular event called SYNTHON! and this month’s theme is voice. People have been singing, speaking, doing live effects and loops, and sampling all sorts of vocal audio. For my set, I wanted to do something inspired by the experience of listening to community radio late at night with all the weird and random things that get played.

In the first section I layered some clips I’ve recorded from shortwave radio over the last year and a half. You can read about how I got interested in shortwave on News Not Doom — but the gist of it was that I saw something in the news, started to research it, and decided to check it out for myself.

As a musician, one of the things I find interesting is how many different patterns you can hear in the static and signals that come in. There’s a push-pull feeling to the audio, especially over longer distances. Even a fairly clear signal will seem to surge in intensity, then drop back. Sometimes when I can’t get much to tune I’ll still spend a while listening for different types of noise.

If you want to explore shortwave for yourself, you can get started by checking out the online receivers. But if you can, I recommend getting your own portable receiver — part of what I enjoy about the experience is knowing what signals I can tune in right here at home.

I have a Tecsun PL-880 I ordered from eBay. It comes with a detachable wire antenna that you can clip to something outside (having a porch or patio will help, or anywhere else you can run the antenna wire through a window or door). The main thing is to get the tip of it as high as possible and let the rest hang down vertically. And yes, it really does need to be outside if you want to try picking up long-distance signals.

I mentioned on the stream that Portland turns out to be in an interesting location for picking things up. Unlike AM and FM, shortwave broadcast antennas are directional. In addition, the distance of the signal is extended by angling the antenna so the signal will skip off the ionosphere. As a result, in order to pick up a signal you need to be in the same direction as the antenna is pointed, and within the area that signal will hit when it’s reflected back to us on one of those skips.

So the signals you pick up aren’t just the ones that might be aimed at your location, but also anything where you’re on the line of travel and happen to be the right multiple of skips. That’s how I came to notice a sort of line of transit from Korea to Cuba and back again, with China trying to block out Taiwan and the US playing music back at Cuba for the sake of democracy or something. It’s a completely different way of looking at the shape of the world.

To find out who’s broadcasting when and where, there are schedules by frequency and time. These get updated twice a year (winter and summer, roughly). Glenn Hauser also keeps a very old-school website to go with his weekly World of Radio program. The weekly anomaly alerts will tell you about things that don’t show up on the schedules, including pirate broadcasters and other hijinks.

I could go on about this for a while, but I hope that’s enough to give you a sense of why I find this interesting material! Feel free to email me if you have questions. Also Wikipedia is helpful if you run into terminology you don’t understand.

Other sources I used — the answering machine tapes, and self-help and MLM cassettes came from archive.org. Most of the rest is from the 365 Days Project.

I will definitely be doing the Late-Night Radio format of experimental music and found audio again. Stay tuned!

It's time! I'm looking for a new job

2022-02-09T00:00:00-08:00

Update: I’m no longer looking. Thanks for all the leads!

After a restful sabbatical, I’m ready to look for my next job. I’m interested in a staff or senior-level software engineering role. In the past I’ve worked on developer tooling like package managers and language servers, software installers and platforms, as well as other backend systems and APIs.

I’d like to find a small or medium-sized company – big enough to have HR policies and decent health insurance, but likely pre-IPO/buyout. I enjoy working on projects that are making the transition between a successful proof of concept and becoming systematized in order to expand and scale.

I have experience with Ruby, JavaScript/Node (and TypeScript), as well as some work in Go and Python. I’d be happy to add more languages to that list. My goal is always to have something new to learn. I’m often the one to take on puzzles like debugging regexps and detangling the dependency hell. I like finding order in the midst of chaos.

I enjoy mentorship and helping build a team’s body of practice. My ethos is strongly oriented around learning something, teaching it to the next person, and making space for others to grow.

I’ve decided to say no to any kind of live coding exercises or timed tests for this job search. I have years of open source code on GitHub that we can discuss instead. Please don’t contact me thinking I’ll be flexible about this – I will end the interview early if you try to surprise me.

I won’t be doing any professional travel in 2022 and am only interested in remote positions. I’m looking forward to attending in-person offsites and conferences again someday, but currently that’s outside my personal risk tolerance.

Any other questions? Email me – I look forward to chatting with you.

Revisiting past work

2022-01-07T00:00:00-08:00

Lately I’ve been thinking about my professional identity and how my earlier work relates to the things that are possible and interesting today. It’s been cool to take another look at talks from a decade ago, unpublished drafts, and so on. Here’s a couple pieces on a common theme:

I wrote a new article about “The Fine Line Between Creepy and Fun”, a talk about social boundaries, data collection, and the internet from 2010. The context for this talk and the assumptions I had are so different than what I would start from now.

I also published a blog draft from 2012 that follows up on that talk with a discussion of the increasing impact of algorithms. So much of this has been normalized without really addressing the underlying problems.

Another item from 2012, just for fun: a recipe for vegan cheesy crackers (I guess I was thinking about having a section for recipes on here?). I probably haven’t made it since I wrote that up, so maybe that’s my weekend project.