Recently updated blogs

After 82 episodes, the Fun Fact podcast has reached Final Fact – at least, for now. Good things don’t always get a satisfying ending, but this one turned out. Fans of the show may enjoy It Shipped That Way, where I’ve been interviewing leaders from companies like Slack, Superhuman, and Shopify about how they’ve built great products and teams. More recently I’ve also been interviewing more founders, like this episode …

What’s up, Internet? This conversation came up randomly in the 32-Bit Cafe’s team chat earlier this month and I had fun with my contribution to the conversation. I then saw the WeblogPoMo AMA challenge pop up on Mastodon with the same theme and figured I could get in on the challenge with this cheeky response. As per usual, here it is weeks later 🤣 This is a reply to Tyler …

When Emily Calandrelli launches on her upcoming suborbital space mission, she'll be carrying a pocketful of plants.

I started running a game with my neighborhood gang for Horror on the Hill, a classic module from the 1980's. Meanwhile, my high school group voted to do Curse of Strahd. The high school gang was formerly "The Pillories", the party that played Lamentations of the Flame Princess over the past year and recently wrapped their campaign. Originally we were going to do a Call of Cthulhu next, but I …

There is value in reasoning by first principles and there are different approaches you can take to discover the first principles at play in a given situation. I will leave that for future posts. Here, I want to briefly cover a foundational truth about this. What does it mean when you determine those first principles? What is the nature of that? The first principles you find are, themselves, a mental …

In the past few years, I’ve put together a series on the first three published short fictions by female authors who are completely new to me or whose most famous SF novels fall mostly outside the post-WWII to mid-1980s focus of my reading adventures. Today I’ve selected the first four stories by an author I’ve only recently started to read–Leigh Kennedy (1951-). I’d previously reviewed “Helen, Whose Face Launched Twenty-Eight …

Hope you had a blessed Sunday! Time for another Catholic Meme Monday. Did you watch the big fight? On a scale of one to ten how over-hyped do you think it was? Let’s get down to business! I was today year’s old when I discovered there was a specific feast for Carmel saints. And all my theology books when I bring home new theology books. Gotta sneak in real quick… …

We sat in the belly or the shadows of our Atlantean gods. Their stories had been lost to time, yet we knew we could still uncover them. Using surrational methods we channeled their myths, we collected and synthesized them. What follows is the result of our search. PEACHTREE CENTER STATION Before the gods was a time of blackest void. And all was of the primal heart rock then, and all …

Civil War films are, to say the least, thin on the ground. So, forgive me for scraping the bottom of the barrel.My Kingdom For A Horse was a BBC made for TV play written by John Godber. The protagonist, 31 year old, still living with his parents, history teacher Steve is played by Sean Bean. Steve and his best friend Pud, are pikemen in the Sealed Knot. Unfortunately for Steve, …

I have raised this point in the past, but I feel it is worth saying again. The biggest complaint I have about reissue programmes of most bands is the way the record labels and in some cases, the artists themselves have treated their fans so badly down the years. A case in point is the deluxe edition of ‘Then Play On’ by Fleetwood Mac that I produced back in June …

In October I attended the Fantastic Futures conference in Canberra. Fantastic Futures is organised by AI4LAM, and brings together people from archives, libraries and museums to talk about how they are, or could be, using machine learning and other "AI" tools in their work. When I arrived – indeed even when I booked to attend – I was feeling pretty jaded with AI. It has, of course, been the unavoidable …

I’ve written the second in a series of six posts that will be coming out with the Streit Council, on the problem of economic integration without political union. There’s no paywall. You can read it here: https://www.streitcouncil.org/post/why-federalism-creating-the-cataracts

Starring Felicity Kyle Napuli, Angeli Bayani, Jasmine Curtis-Smith, James Mavie Estrella, Beauty Gonzalez and Shion Hayakawa. Written and directed by Kenneth Dagatan. Produced by Bianca Balbuena, Stefano Centini and Junxiang Huang Epicmedia. Do not trust this ‘fairy’! During the Second World War in the Japanese-occupied Philippines, a well-off merchant, who is accused of hiding a stash of gold, decides to seek help, leaving his wife, daughter and son to fend …

At work I've been putting together a plan for running an accessibility champions network to share with senior leaders. There's a fair amount of activity across all the teams I'm working with currently, that's becoming somewhat difficult to keep track of for various reasons, inconsistent communication approaches being one. On Thursday I attended Techshare Pro conference hosted by HSBC in Canary Wharf. Rather more corporate than what I'm used to …

Hello everyone! I apologize again for my lack of recent posts. I am still devoting most of my available writing time to working on my novel, which is slowly, but surely, progressing. I am no longer confident that I will have a complete draft by the end of 2024 due to the amount of revising I have been doing, but I am still expecting to have a complete draft by …