Sometimes I wonder if Bill ever regrets the whole "self-representation" thing. Not that a lawyer would have been much help today, I think, but at least he'd have someone else to blame. Another short but sweet post today. Bill was in Cobourg for a bail hearing - and things did not go as planned (for him; I believe they went precisely as planned for the Crown). He was denied bail, and will therefore almost certainly spend the rest of the time between now and sentencing at the Central East…

If you see the trailer for Wild Horse Nine, the new movie teaming John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, you may think that you’re in for another comedy about a couple of wise-ass characters. But if you notice that the movie has been directed by Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin, In Bruges, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), you’ll put yourself in the right frame of mind for an unlikely but engaging mixture of dark comedy, political cynicism, and sentiment focused on a couple of…

We lose our understanding of our software when we don't review the AI output. This goes for code, tasks, emails, Slack messages and bug reports. AI replaces our mental model of the software systems we are paid to understand.

Diese Suppe löst in mir ein echtes Trauma aus! Als ich so 12/13 war, sahen meine Mutter und ich einen Fernsehkoch, wie er so eine Suppe zubereitete und wir notierten uns das Rezept. Da wir in den tiefsten 80ern keinen Elektrostandmixer besaßen, liehen wir uns den der Nachbarin, füllten die frisch geköchelte knatschheiße! Suppe bis obenhin ein, deckelten den Glasbehälter zu und gaben Gas...

The drama that we watch in the mornings is based on Uno Chiyo's lifeWe found out that our ward's folk museum was having an exhibit on her life, so we went to check it out.When we first moved here, we actually went to this museum, but I guess I never wrote up about it.Parts of our area was a popular place for writers to work and live and was called Magome Bunshimura All the exhibits are in

A recent invitation to visit Pamplona brought back memories of a meeting fourteen years earlier. In the summer of 2012, a three-person delegation travelled to ’s-Hertogenbosch to present me with an award on behalf of the AMTS from Pamplona (I …

AI Promised Less Work. I Have Never Worked More Orestis Ioannou points out that he doesn’t have less work in the age of AI. Neither do I. The work is different, but I’m not sitting around drinking coffee. I never took the promise of less work seriously anyway. If anything, what I can do by myself has expanded. Living in the Weimar era of Ruby The title is clickbait, and the article is not what you imagine. I’m linking to it because it points to this exchange, which I found insightful. Nate…

While the temperatures today are cooler than yesterday, the rain has stopped and the sun has come out, so I was very happy to finally get outside! While there is a lot to do all over, I am wanting to prioritize getting things winterized for the cats as much as possible. Today, that meant working … Continue reading Doing so much better today!

Welcome to my October 2026 Brutally Honest Earnings Report, where the long-term goal remains unchanged: trying to cover all my gear and travel costs entirely through stock income. Sounds crazy, right? Yeah, probably but it still doesn't stop me from traveling as much as I can. Let's get started!

Pin-up of the thickly thatched Jimmy Pursey, at a female reader's request, duly answered by the equal-opportunity musical newspaper Sounds... September 2nd, 1978

why is this 1971 advertisement from the era before deejays were cool?it's not the fashion - the sideburns, the superwide tie. that look was with-it thenno, it's the fact that being a deejay involved using a microphonethis is the era when deejays weren't silent figures intently focused on mixing one record into the otheras important as picking tunes and reading rooms was the smarmy patter they had to maintain between songsSmashy and Nicey wasn't just a wunnerful Radio One archetypeit was a…

Louie.

I'm working on a project at work for entity mapping; using semantic triples to describe a knowledge graph of a client's content ecosystem. It's mostly a boring spreadsheet so I was wanting to visualise it as Nodes and Edges so it's easier to understand for less technical people. In my quest to find some off-the-shelf software that can turn an Excel file into a picture deterministically, I discovered Turtle, a Python library for drawing diagrams using path descriptions in (mostly) human-readable…

William Blake, Notes on a Public Address: I am really sorry to see my Countrymen trouble themselves about Politics. If Men were Wise, the Most arbitrary Princes could not hurt them. If they are not Wise, the Freest Government is compell'd to be a Tyranny. Princes appear to me to be Fools. Houses of Commons & Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something Else besides Human Life. Henry David Thoreau, Journals (April 24, 1852): Society, man, has no prize to offer me…

Today is officially MAX Day at SPS!

Feedback submitted to the City of Kirkland for their 2027-2028 budget process. I’m all in on Human Services and Affordable Housing! Kirkland’s “budget game” in their twice-annual printed newspaper I notice a vast imbalance between the Human Services and Affordable Housing budget and the Police and Court budget. Is it possible that shifting some funds away from policing and into prevention and support might yield better outcomes? I have heard that Baltimore is a success story in changing their…

As someone who, last time I checked, doesn’t have any glimmer of hope of using Siri AI on iOS in the EU, I found this announcement vaguely insulting and highly disingenuous, but that’s Apple for you when it comes to addressing developers these days…

There's the old saying that the best thing to do in a gold rush is to sell picks and shovels. It's probably true to some extent. If you can sell the tool everyone needs then there's a fairly stable way to make some money.What I've been thinking about lately is whether there's another angle on this line of thinking. Selling picks and shovels is good business but you're still out of work when the gold runs out. This is where the analogy starts to wear a bit thin but if you can find a way to…

Sorry for getting this out to you later than I’d like. I never factor in the possibility of illness, nor the subsequent dread when something unwritten becomes overdue. Sorry, too, for being so far away. I miss having the space to think hard and long when editorializing my week. The new bob has been helping at least. A haircut can do so much for you (or to you!) psychologically. My best idea in months, really. Before October was over, there was book club. It was my turn to pick and I went for…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Kathleen Furin’s collection The Loneliness of Glass is filled with captivating stories of women on the edge. Christine Sneed wrote of the book: “Arrestingly vivid. . . . Furin’s stories…

It’s amazing what sticks in your brain so many years later. I say that as a guy who has made a whole website about the stuff that sticks in my brain, but today, I finally had the occasion to look something up that I remember seeing years ago and had just never investigated.I speak of the most obscure monster in Chrono Trigger: Yodu De. I think it’s entirely possible to make it through the game without ever seeing this monster’s name on screen, to say nothing of seeing it at all, and unless I’m…

Shamek Farrah

My prior post on Sequioa PGP didn't mention setting up a Web Key Directory (WKD) because I briefly read through the details and thought it might be a pain to set up. Turns out, it's quite easy. Not only that, it's probably the preferred option for custom domains. Let's talk about it. What is WKD? A Web Key Directory is a directory on your web server that points to the various public keys associated with your PGP email addresses. Why is this useful? Let's recap how asymmetric cryptography works.…

My favorite thing about the open web, and so-called "open web advocates", is that they get very grumpy when people show up with new ideas. 😅🙃

Back in March I posted about the Tamizdat Project; today I learn from Lev Oborin’s Facebook post that the (bilingual) first issue of The Tamizdat Review is out, and it includes his own Sixteen New Notable Books (Russian version), “including novels by Leonid Bershidsky, Dmitry Bykov, and Anya Makeeva, poetry by Aleksandr Del’finov, a collection of historical studies devoted to the future, and an anthology that conceptualizes the loss of home.” A number of them sound intriguing, e.g. Pesni i sny…

As the elections are underway, I have taken down CongressCorral.com with the idea of relaunching it with the new class of legislators in early 2025. I will probably do some other upgrades as well. I will probably also take down NosyRaleigh.com and do some work on it as it was one of my first sites and it’s looking really crusty. No hibernating in this house!

Halloween leftovers. Another uninspired entry as I wasn't able to get anything during the day nor was I in the mood. Tomorrow can only get better.

tag(s): #yell-at-cloud #smallweb #blogging I wrote recently about how open sourcing your code isn't only an altruistic act, and there's a component of ego about it. In the same post I recall (from memory, because I don't have a link) a blog post that talked about this in relation to blogging. I could be writing these thoughts in a text file, or in a private journal, and still get a lot of value out of the activity. I make a choice when I publish these lines. As I said in the closing of that…

Adaptive dark mode looks neat! TL;DR: For websites that signal support of dark mode with <meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark"> in HTML or color-scheme: light dark in CSS, Adaptive Dark Mode does not change a thing. I love these posts by the @webkit.org team. In many cases they don't just explain how new features will work, they also share some good best practices. For example: All the web technology needed to fully support dark mode is widely available today, including: <meta…