Recently updated blogs

Version numbering is hard, and there are lots of popular schemes out there for how to do it. Today I want to talk about a system I’ve settled on for my own Django-related packages, and which I’m calling “DjangoVer”, because it ties the version number of a Django-related package to the latest Django version that package supports. But one quick note to start with: this is not really “introducing” the …

If anything looks wrong, read on the site! One of the greatest weapons modern social platforms have against us is something called FOMO - the Fear of Missing Out. We are inherently social creatures and we want to belong to a group, and to do so we feel like we need to be aware of everything that is going on. We fear we’ll miss out on something important and will …

“Dark Wave,” hosted by Slicing Up Eyeballs' Matt Sebastian, explores the darker side of classic '80s alternative, including vintage goth, post-punk and industrial.

Suppose you want to migrate to another star, taking your entire civilization with you. Not an easy task given our technology today, but let’s remember that in the 13 billion year-plus history of the Milky Way, countless stars and their planets have emerged that are far older than our 4.6-billion year old Sun. If we imagine an intelligence that survives for a billion years or more, we can hardly put …

(1999) Written and directed by James Marsh; Based on the book, Wisconsin Death Trip, by Michael Lesy; Starring: Ian Holm, Jeffrey Golden and Jo Vukelich; Available on DVD Rating: **** “…I was looking for stories that cut across 100 years and resonated with contemporary anxieties about guns, or religion, or drug-taking. I thought that was an important way of making the film more contemporary in its concerns.” – James Marsh …

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 …

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 …