Recently updated blogs

For a long time, I've been trying to learn more about my husband's 3d great-grandparents, William Tyler Bentley (1795-1873) and Olivia Morgan Bentley (1799?-1838). The earliest official document I have for this family is the 1830 US Census, where they're enumerated in the town of Sandy Creek, Oswego County, New York. Other documents confirm Oswego as the birthplace of William and Olivia's children in the 1820s and 1830s.Browsing the 1830 …

This week for my Patreon subscribers, I'm highlighting insights from the owner of Dutchie, a leading brand in furniture/home decor (with a sexy twist), and KiwiCo, the new brand of legendary Blueberry creator Gizem Mishi Akin. (Don't miss my interview with Gizem here.) Subscribe and read it all here!

Conditions as of Wednesday (10/9). Red line shows striping location County initially installed but then rolled back. The community is still processing how Multnomah County engineers and planners could have ever approved a design for the Hawthorne Bridge viaduct that put bike riders in even more risk than usual. Over the course of a week or so, we learned that the County changed the existing bike lane design at the …

The Kiss, Francesco Hayez, oil on canvas, roughly 43 x 35 inches ( 110 x 88 cm); link is to image file page on Wikimdeia Commons, original is in the Pinacoteca di Brera (Brera Art Gallery) in Milan. In this beautiful painting by mid-19th century Italian painter Francesco Hayez, the woman’s stunning gown is the first thing to attract our attention. The shimmering blue material (satin?) is offset by the …

CSS gradients have been so long that there’s no need to rehash what they are and how to use them. You have surely encountered them at some point in your front-end journey, and if you follow me, you also know that I use them all the time. I use them for CSS patterns, nice CSS decorations, and even CSS loaders. But even so, gradients have a tough syntax that can …

Welcome to the weekly Perfume Chat Room, perfumistas! I envision this chat room as a weekly drop-in spot online, where readers may ask questions, suggest fragrances, tell others their SOTD, comment on new releases or old favorites, and respond to each other. The perennial theme is fragrance, but we can interpret that broadly. This is meant […]

The Voyage of Magellan, Chapter 16: The Happy Thieves

Few who end up in the hospital are likely to be thinking about whether there’s a sufficient, readily accessible, and safe supply of blood on hand if needed. Someone who has is Sarah Young, former manager of the blood bank at San Francisco’s Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center. Until she retired in 2017, it was her ... The post Art and science vied for Sarah Young’s heart: Both found a place …

On the 3rd October I turned 62 years old. Born in 1962. Kind of incredible and mundane in equal measure. Instead of pondering too much on the (limited) joys of getting older, because there is no acceptable alternative, let's just go for a run instead.Mary asked where I would like to go for a birthday run. And instantly regretted it! She is not a huge fan of the NB circuit. …

The cybersecurity expert SwiftOnSecurity, a decade ago, wrote a parable called "A Story About Jessica" and posted it to their (now-deleted) Tumblr blog. I found it moving and insightful. The consultancy Superbloom pointed to it …

Turned on my chromebook this morning to post the hexjeff below, between last night and this morning chrome installed Gemini, its motherfucking AI tool, and chrome pinned the icon to my task bar and is badgering me on screen and in email, here is my response to Every.Fucking.Thing:Serendipitously if unfortunately, three weeks ago the person I'm related to by marriage accidentally and unknowingly knocked my chromebook off the piano bench …

1 million people visit Vesuvius each year. It is a big number which involves a lot of people struggling up the steep and dusty path to the rim. Rather more people visit the more accessible archaeological monument to Vesuvius that is Pompeii: counting those as well brings the total to 2.5 million. It makes it…

The Philadelphia Pipe Bending Company, founded in 1880, is still in operation today. Here we see two workers standing inside some large coils with advertising signage. 6½ x 8½ inch glass negative. View full size.

The distance between us and eternity is growing and it demands more and more effort in our life in order to return to eternity. So we go out of eternity and fall. Time is a kind of radical sin and not a kind of progress; it’s something completely opposite. We should make time something other than it is, and that is precisely why when Christ was baptised the river Jordan …

1. How do you create an internet archive of all human knowledge? (NPR). Transcript of a 12 minute interview with Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. The average life of a webpage before it’s either changed or deleted is a hundred days. Kahle realised, back in 1996, that our collective digital memory was going to be a problem. He did something about it. The Internet Archive currently holds 866 …