Personal blogs

This will be one of the most boring blog posts I've ever written, but bear with me as it's mainly an aide memoir for me. A few years ago we bought a light fitting for …

Histoire naturelle des cétacées, 1804I find enterprise software fascinating because it operates the entire economy and yet it frequently neglects every single principle of quality that software people may espouse. Slack is/has been the anti-enterprise …

I loved this interview with author Steven Johnson. It covers a lot about the way he writes and how he structures his books and articles. It also reminded me about the piece he wrote back …

Having boarded our flight to Türkiye (estimated flight time of three and a half hours) with a two- and a four-year old, E—— received a text from the airline telling us our flight had been …

Went to Lewes Depot this evening to watch a screening of Point Break (1991). Definitely one to file under ‘so bad it’s good’, with plenty of pithy one-liners to share for years to come.

Was able to get some time this week to catchup with Bryan Boyer. We talked about some of the work he was doing with his students, particularly challenging them to think about design interventions and …

A trait that seems to be core to my personality, but has definitely gotten me in trouble, is that I’m not one to ‘take sides.’ While I have affiliations (Oaklander, GenXer, Democrat), I don’t have …

Back at home all this week. The usual routine of a day or two of constant delight at being home, with all our own spaces and things and routines, followed by, well, less delight. Stupid …

Earlier today I got a surprise invitation to Google Foobar,1 a series of coding tests presented as a text adventure. You’re presented with a normal terminal interface, and a few familiar commands like ls, cd, …

I had They See Your Photos use the Google Vision API to analyze my most recent selfie. The foreground shows a man relaxing on a portable camping chair next to his touring bicycle. The bike …

Whelp. Tuesday did not at all go how I had hoped. A friend of mine lives next to a high school history teacher who posted the text below on one of the big social media …

After previously implementing support for image value remapping in my image-processing infrastructure, I’ve been looking into generating better gradient colour mapping schemes / palettes than the initial hard-coded HSV ramp I used. The thermal camera …

About nine months ago, I ran into Evan Prodromou at an event at Meta. The social media giant was telling an audience of Fediverse and decentralized social veterans about its plans for its social network …

Pnårp put down his nose hairbrush and went to work on the week’s machinations, ruminations, and tintinnabulations. Then, ocelots happened again.

I popped down to London this week to meet up with some other ISOC UK staff for an impromptu Christmas lunch. It's good to chat face-to-face with people instead of via Zoom occasionally. Not too …

We both took Monday off and went to see the 80s photographic exhibition at Tate Britain. It’s an interesting mixture of big events (the miners’ strikes feature large), everyday life, and images of minority and …

Sometimes, I’ve just felt a meeting or pitch slipping away from me. In desperation, I start to thrash around for a way out – throwing new ideas or angles into the conversation, trying to dig …

A few years ago, I thought it would be funny to have sudo cd work to cd into nonexistent directories, and so I manifested: # in .zshrc function sudo() { if [[ "$1" == "cd" …

I like Charlie Stross in general, I really enjoyed Accelerando, and many people talked positively about The Laundry Files, so I decided to give it a go. I like the universe, where unspeakable horrors exist …

What do you call one health insurance CEO shot dead in front of a Manhattan hotel? A damn good start. Jokes aside, I’m not going to pussyfoot here. The only objection I have to the …