Recently updated blogs

For those of you who don’t follow American politics, the immigrant scourge is back. This time it is Haitian immigrants eating your pets which has gone from a crazy internet meme to the Republican candidate for Vice-President pushing it in his speeches. That actually is, I think, sort of new, in that this used to be more of a whispering campaign type of thing. Well, it was is the U.S. …

Does he know what his sentence is?” “No,” the officer said, wanting to continue with his explanations, but the traveler interrupted him: “He does not know his own sentence?” “No,” the officer repeated, pausing briefly as if to insist that the traveler should give a more specific reason for his question, and then said: “There would be no point in announcing it to him … He will come to

This is my user manual. If we are working together (or planning to), please read it carefully. You will learn how to deal with me productively and avoid misunderstandings. I initially wrote this for my current colleagues, but I thought it could be a good idea to make it public for everyone else I daily interact with. My style I need to understand why I’m doing something I love working …

Everything changes. Some things feel certain until they’re ripped out from under you, and you realise you’ve been building towards something you don’t even want any more. The only constant in life is change. I find a lot of comfort in this phrase, especially when everything feels like it’s up in the air. Right now, it feels like all there is is air. Everything is different, this side of things. …

Posted on September 11, 2024 Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear I’ve been influenced again into feeling the need for a garment. It was again a case of multiple sources conspiring in the same direction for unrelated reasons, but I decided I absolutely needed a linen hood, made from the heavy white linen I knew I had in my stash. Why? I don’t know. I do like the feeling of wearing a …

Back in August 2022, I read the novelette, "Fire Watch," by Connie Willis. It was published in a collection with the same title, and was part of the same universe as Willis's Oxford Time Travel series: Doomsday Book (1992), To Say Nothing of the Dog (1995), Blackout (2010), and All Clear (2010). I liked "Fire Watch" a lot but I did think that it might not be too clear if …

In his 2015 shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos talks about two types of decisions - those that are best represented as one-way doors, and those that are more like two-way doors.This thought process about how reversible a decision is applies anywhere in business, and it's no different when it comes to software development.Bezos describes the difference himself quite succinctly in that shareholder letter: Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly …

"So that story sounds like bullshit." I remember saying that to Akilah Hughes early in our first production meeting about the podcast that would become Rebel Spirit, which launched last week and released its second episode today. Akilah had just relayed the story she'd been told of how her high school got its name "the Rebels": the students of the founding class in the mid-1950s were so enamored with the …

Sony has officially unveiled the PlayStation 5 Pro, a beefier version of their four-year-old console that boasts the ability to play games at both a higher graphical fidelity and a higher frame rate. It costs £699. Fuck me. I don’t love my PlayStation 5. It is the most boring game console I have ever owned by a wide margin, offering little in the way of notable features or exciting quirks. …

Matt dropped me a line to show me this video that he had made, digging through every documentary source the he could find to clip footage of Charles Schulz drawing, including Schulz’s own commentary. It does get a bit mesmerizing. I kinda prefer that there was more strip work than stand-alone images, as so much more goes into that, but it’s still fascinating to see how he can clearly already …

Fewer than 300 US federal websites in late 1994 I’ve just added a mention a mention of the Federal Internet Source to my Magforum page about the history of digital magazines. It struck me what a ridiculous idea this would seem today – a spiral-bound directory of US federal websites. The copy of the directory I have from autumn 1994 proudly lists ‘nearly 300 sources of government information on the …

I've watched Saturday Night Live from a frighteningly early age—I bet I've seen almost every episode live from about 1979 onwards, when I was barely 7 years old staying up late on Saturday nights to see some comedy.Before NBC launches into their 50th season of SNL in a couple weeks, I wanted to highlight my favorite sketches from the past season that I still think about months later. #3 DetectivesMy …

I was born in 1980, which technically makes me a part of Generation X; there is at least one data point, though, that makes me a millennial. In 2021 Fast Company conducted a survey about what constituted middle age; millennials defined it as 35 to 50, while Generation X said 45 to 55 (Baby Boomers said 45 to 60). For my part, I wrote that Apple was in its middle …

An Airbus 380 and Boeing 747, from Tom Hagen’s Lockdown Series, later a book called simply Airports:During the lockdown time in March, April and May, I took photographs of the largest German Airports and their resting runways. It was a historic moment and a unique opportunity to get these images.

Joan Myers, as she prepared to embark on writing her own revisionist history of the Arbuckle trials, saw that the primary sources, as of 2013, would be newspaper accounts.* At the time, searchable databases provided by the Library of Congress, Newspapers.com, the California Digital Newspaper Collection, and so on were game-changers for researchers. Nevertheless, Ms. Myers warned against relying on the reportage of the early 1920s, meaning, of course, that …