Recently updated blogs

Every year on the 24th October I've written a reflection on the last year of my independent consulting. This would have been my 10th issue, but is instead a special issue, for reasons that will become apparent.

Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay, based on a recent talk from AirBnB founder Brian Chesky, has been getting quite a lot of attention over the past few days. It has prompted many a quote tweet, and founders, such as Bryan Cantrill of Oxide Computer, have started contributing their own thoughts to what founder mode means to them. Having held positions of influence at a few companies, but never having been …

I found myself in great agreement with the advice in this crisp essay on why you should quit your job, particularly a good job, and encourage productive leisure. Quit Your Job

I figured out this pattern today for testing an HTML table dynamically added to a page by JavaScript, using Playwright Python: table_js = """ function tableToJson() { return Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("table")).map((table) => { return { headers: Array.from(table.querySelectorAll("th")).map((th) => th.textContent.trim(), ), rows: Array.from(table.querySelectorAll("tr")) .slice(1) .map((tr) => { return Array.from(tr.querySelectorAll("td")).map((cell) => cell.textContent.trim(), ); }), }; }); } """ def test_search(ds_server, page): page.goto(ds_server + "/-/search?q=cleo") # Should show search results, after fetching them page.wait_for_selector("table") tables …

August was the final month of summer break, so I managed to sneak a couple books in before school started up. North! Or Be Eaten - Andrew Peterson Book two in the Wingfeather Saga, I read this aloud over several weeks to the middle girls before bed. The Wingfeather family is on the run from the Fangs and have to make their way through Dugtown, which is full of more …

I have a new piece out on Gandhi for Aeon. It’s free to read here:https://aeon.co/essays/on-the-varna-system-gandhis-plan-to-empower-the-workers

This is a big quote from the book A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. I thought it was interesting so I’m saving it here. Context: A long time before, robots gained consciousness and wanted to live on their own. So humans and robots parted ways, and humans promised to leave the robots alone. Robots also chose to let themselves die (break down) instead of repairing themselves. Dex is …

I screened this documentary out of a misplaced sense of duty. After all, the filmmaking team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory made a number of exceptional films over many years’ time, and Ivory is still going strong at age 95. Attention must be paid, and good work celebrated. Stephen Soucy has done just that, but he’s given us a good deal more. Only an insider would be able to …

Exciting news on the Dirtbag journey! Mr. Dirtbag Daoist and I bought 5 acres of vacant land on the Western Slope of Colorado!If the regular American dream is a house with a white picket fence, the American vehicle nomad dream is to buy a plot of empty land to park your rig on. This is easier said than done, as the US has many regulations that govern what you can …

My family loves jam—Dave's homemade sourdough toasted in our old-school two-slice toaster is most of the reason—so this time of year I make a lot of it. And I'm talking about gallons of the stuff, enough to last us until the fruit ripens again next summer. So far this summer alone I've made raspberry, marionberry, strawberry, blackberry and two kinds of plum jam, with Dave's special citrus marmalade rounding out …

Wow. I guess this “covid” thing is real. I’m “recovered” now but really– so much B.S. has been spilt over this it just boggles the mind. Almost as much as the evil Chinese bio-weapon itself. Having gone through a bout of Corona Virus I now know what it means to peer into the abyss. You don’t want to catch this, but I’m inclined to think that there are few real …

On and off for the last several years I’ve been manually curating my roughly 40,000 lifetime tweets. I recently finished, and in the process embarked on an unexpected journey of self-discovery. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sonntag concludes with an observation that remembrance is an act with ethical weight and, as a corollary, that in the prevention of future suffering it is also sometimes necessary to choose to …

Lisa says there’s been something different about the clouds this summer, something more dramatic. Or maybe we’re just paying more attention? But last night, over Charlottetown Harbour, there was drama in the sky.

I hope Municipal Dreams, the blog, has provided a useful political and design history of council housing (amongst other things) but the aspect I value most is the social history it tells. People read about the town or the estate in which they or their parents grew up or, less directly, they see a story that echoes their own. Given that one in two of the early post-war generation lived …

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provides a helpful framework for identifying technical accessibility issues, but what happens when the same issues crop up time and again? How can you find the causes and change the culture of the team behind the system?