Being a sheriff has always been a dangerous job and several were killed in my hometown’s history. Once I began “Love of My Days” with the killing of Sheriff Flower, there was so much to explain. I had to write about working an entire life with nothing to show for it, about the way a man loves the horses he has trained, and tracks in the snow. Around the middle of the story, when Karlet says she knows how the wayfarer in her kitchen likes his eggs cooked, I saw it all – the murderer’s marked…

Google is ending support for the functionality that allowed users to "Send As" some other, non-Gmail account using the Gmail web interface. Word of this has been circulating on Reddit and elsewhere, and Google has published a support page and FAQ with details. Starting in January 2027, Gmail will no longer support "Send as" for third-party accounts. That's the feature that let you send email from an address like @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com through your primary Gmail account, using the Gmail web…

In many disasters sheltering in place can make a lot of sense, but what about fire? As someone who lives in one of the densest municipalities in the country, with 3-story wooden buildings packed close together, is fire likely enough to rule out any kind of "stay put" approach? After having Claude do some rough calculations I think probably not. Very few houses are lost to fire anymore, but this is mostly downstream from putting a lot of effort into suppression. From when a fire is reported…

In my reading group, I’ve been reading about religion and spirituality. So far, we’ve read Albert Einstein’s ‘Science and Religion’, Haroon Moghul’s ‘The Wrong Imam’, and Thich Nhat Hanh’s ‘The Miracle of Mindfulness’. While watching ‘Walk With Me’, a film about Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastery in France, I saw visitors to the monastery moved to tears while listening to the monks singing in harmony. I immediately thought of how worshippers in Christian churches cry while singing and praising God…

The fine folks at WP Product Talk invited me on to chat about applying AI inside of businesses (something I’m going to be writing a lot more about soon), building MCPs, the NerdPress Guided Agent Connector, and more. My thanks to Matt Cromwell, Zack Katz, and Katie Keith. You can watch on YouTube and listen on their website. Give them a subscribe.

The world is going through a memory shortage. Not the kind in our brains (though that may be true too), but the memory inside our computers and phones. Blame the AI companies. “Them again!” you might be thinking. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and co. are buying up as much of the world’s memory output as they can get their hands on to feed their data centers. Very little is left, and that little — as is typical of the savagery of unregulated capitalism — is sold for its weight in gold. Memory limits…

Pupdate The month started out unusually warm and dry, so we got in some good long walks before the paths turn muddy. Miniature Dachshunds Max and Milo running along a woodland path By the end of the month their coats were back in use, as it had got cold and wet :( Rachel Parris We’ve been fans of Rachel Parris since first seeing her in one of our early trips to Edinburgh Fringe. We loved her on The Mash Report, and Tuesday Night Club with husband Marcus Brigstocke is one of the things that…

There were several religious councils held at Braga, the 11th of which took place as late as 1566. The illustration is Braga at the time of the last Council.) We talked about the First yesterday. The Second Council, held in 572 only 11 years after the first, wanted not only to formalize some of the practices of the clergy, it addressed behaviors of the clergy and bishops.There were ten decrees from the Second Council, and they laid out some things that seem so appropriate that one wonders that…

David Rothenberg lists whales among his contributions to Bass Lines / Border Lines, an arresting credit for a record made in the Dance Hall in Arivaca, Arizona, near the U.S.–Mexico border. The opening piece, “Jaguar through the Wall,” puts that border in the path of an animal with its own reasons for crossing. By the 17-minute finale, “Lives of the Desert Whales,” a humpback has joined Rothenberg and bassist Glen Moore. Rothenberg was 18 when he spent a summer studying with Oregon, the group…

I was in a series of discussions recently where the hardest part was that too many variables were changing at once. All fluid, all moving, seemingly at once. It’s remarkably easy to get stuck in circular conversation when you’re facing that kind of complexity. Until someone writes it down. Once we took the time to put it on paper, the decision paths and the bottlenecks became clear. The bottleneck in these situations is almost always clarity. Writing doesn’t just help you express the clarity…

Hobbies on the go: Today I dropped off my work car for service. They told me it would take two hours, and there wasn’t much I could do but sit and wait. When I told a colleague, he said: “Oh, what a drag! It’s always like that. I hate waiting!” Me, I thought: “Yay, two hours to tinker with my blog.”

A month ago, I got a proper workbench. And then I took a li’l Gary Panter painting that I have and had it printed as a vinyl stick-on thing to put at the end of the workbench (because it was looking too institutional). But — as you can see — they (I used Myposter) totally got the colours wrong. Well, actually — the blue is on point, but the green has turned into a sort of teal. Phooey! And that particular shade of teal is the exact colour that things that have been sun-bleached get, so it feels…

The most interesting thing about these headphones isn't the headphones; it's their case. The good folks at Tozo have sent me a pair of their new ear-blasters. They're a fairly standard pair of in-ear headphones. Sound quality is good, noise cancelling is excellent, battery life is fine. You know, all pretty standard. But what's actually a little bit special is the charging case. As well providing charging to the cans, it has this cute little full-colour display! Which is also a touchscreen!…

Check out As in guillotine... for more. NOTE: I went to sleep early on Tuesday night knowing several results were leaning in positive directions, but I did not expect to wake up to what ultimately happened all across the country. It’s only the first major national victory in a decades-long, grueling campaign, and there is still so much work to do, but it’s okay to spend a couple of days enjoying a rare glimmer of light in the darkness before getting back to work. Resistance is never futile, and…

Felix Rieseberg argues that AI is changing what makes junior engineers valuable. He makes the case that fresh perspective, ambition, and quick prototypes can beat tenure when execution is cheap. Read more

** Here's the larger picture.This is what a blue tsunami looks like, apparently @finviz_com [image or embed]— Mike Zaccardi, CFA, CMT (@mikezaccardi.bsky.social) November 4, 2026 at 1:00 PMI haven't had many chances to say this in the over a decade we've been running this blog, but this strikes me as the market behaving perfectly rationally. As mentioned frequently before, Trump was combining Hoover's tariff policy with Nixon's approach to Fed independence, both cranked up to eleven, while…

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Ring-necked duck, male (photo by Polinova, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons) 5 November 2026 This fall I’ve noticed that birds are migrating later than they used to. This is especially true for waterfowl because they wait until the northern lakes start freezing before they migrate. In 2008 with help from my friend Chuck Tague, author of The Nature Observer News, I posted a monthly phenology. Each post listed “What to Look for” but the timeframes are wrong now because of climate change. For…

During a monstrously dull meeting earlier, colleagues were discussing films shown at school during those periods towards the end of term, when things were slowly winding down. Someone mentioned their memory of watching a film called Kes, which they described as “a random pigeon story”. Please send help.

Fun fact: I never played the original. I didn’t have a N64. Tough times back then.

This is a Conflict and there are Sides The tech, in itself, will always be more adept at generating spam than useful output, will always be more useful to spammers and grifters than to well-meaning actors. It is a semiotic pollutant that attacks the foundations of social and epistemological trust. These systems should not exist. They should not be deployed, they should not be used, by anyone, for any purpose. The people who promote this technology, the people who deploy this technology, are…

hmm.......I let this cook overnight and I was ready to take the clamps off. I was a little concerned with the shelf twisting the bottom stretcher. It didn't happen as all the legs were laying flat. No rocking and no high or low legs. The bottom shelf was tight to stretcher end to end.walnut Miller dowelsUsed 3, one into each end apron and the 3rd one centered between them. This will allow the shelf to expand or contract as it needs to.2 on, a few more to goIt has been usually warm lately for…

I spent three days in San Marino, a landlocked microstate completely surrounded by Italy. The people of San Marino are called the “Sammarinese.” Travelling in Afghanistan is hard, but writing about Afghanistan is easy. If you are a white person in a place like Afghanistan, interesting things will happen to you. You don’t even have to do anything. Just stand on a street corner and strangers will stare at you and walk up to you and introduce themselves and shake your hand and offer you tea and…

From Asia and the Americas to Europe and Africa, I've worked with many talented people who do great technical work: highly skilled, strong leaders, and people who get things done. The more I work with these people, the more I realize how small and immature I am. However, seemingly not many people can question fundamental assumptions behind their work. What are we trying to change through this project? For whom are we working? Why do we need this particular tool given our specific situation? Why…

What am I doing? Not a Masters (NaM) Unit 2: Literary Tools & Techniques The Assignment Playing with POV – Take the same short story and rewrite it with three different POVs. Who is telling this story and where are they standing? 5 Principle Points of View (POV) In Chapter 7 of her book Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, Ursula Le Guin writes about the different points of view and how authors can use them. Authors can influence readers, but authors are…

Daily Drawing 1040

In response to parents exhausted by gentle music circles that fail to deplete high-energy children, early development franchise Tiny Thrashers unveiled a new weekend curriculum today: supervised, full-contact toddler moshing.The 45-minute class eliminates acoustic sing-alongs and sensory scarves in favor of Swedish heavy metal, foam-padded walls, and a double-bass drum track that rattles the windows of the adjacent pilates studio.“Traditional toddler enrichment makes a fatal error,” explained…

From 1914 or so, a postcard of “Bird’s eye view of lower New York” I’m going to sound like a stereotypical philistine looking at modern art, but a kid could do better than that. Maybe. The line-work is really crude and the perspective is off everywhere. But a number of tall buildings are immediately recognizable, along with the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, and the elevated trains snaking across the edges of Battery Park. Shadows are drawn really inconsistently. Perhaps the…

Legal Eagle put out this video today, November 4: “it’s good politics to punish the people who have engage in illegality” –he says there, among other things, with his whole chest. ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ In the wake of one of the most decisive rebukes of the worst of the right (Trump and all his allies and minions), more than a few people immediately took to their platforms to call for ‘unity’ and ‘bispartisanship’–supposedly ‘in service of the people’. Never mind that what the people very vocally want…

I am reading On Gaslighting by Abramson (2025) and The Rhetoric of Reaction by Hirschman (1991)