MLB Fan · I was in New York last week, and got to make a call on MLBAM, a re­al­ly good cus­tomer of AWS, where I work. The first three let­ters in MLBAM mean base­bal­l, of which I’m a devo­tee; and al­so a hap­py five-year sub­scrib­ing cus­tomer of MLB.tv. So I was feel­ing sort of multi-level fan­nish. It was super-fun, and I got a cute pic­ture ...
 
Six-page Typography · What hap­pened was, Lau­ren brought home Bringhurst’s The Ele­ments of Ty­po­graph­ic Style and I was in­stant­ly cap­ti­vat­ed, by the book’s beau­ty and al­so the pow­er of its mes­sage. So I’ve got ty­pog­ra­phy on my mind. Stand by for more on the sub­jec­t, but it struck me im­me­di­ate­ly that I’m liv­ing a ty­pog­ra­phy les­son at work, in the form of the fa­mous Ama­zon six-pager ...
[5 comments]  
2017 Camera News · Here­with some re­portage on the most in­ter­est­ing cam­eras in the world, with opin­ions to pro­voke er en­ter­tain peo­ple who are up on this stuff, and a ba­sic sur­vey of the land­scape for peo­ple who like pic­tures and won­der about cam­eras ...
[6 comments]  
JSONPath · Or should be that be JsonPath? What­ev­er, it’s a tool I’ve been us­ing late­ly and gen­er­al­ly like. But it could use a lit­tle work ...
[6 comments]  
IsItOnAWS Lessons · I did some recre­ation­al pro­gram­ming over Christ­mas and the blog I wrote about it is now guest­ing in Jeff Barr’s space for your amuse­men­t; try the soft­ware at IsItOnAWS.­com. What I didn’t do there was re­lay the lessons I picked up along the way; one or two are around AWS, but most fol­low from this be­ing my first non­triv­ial ex­pe­di­tion in­to the land of NodeJS. So (ac­knowl­edg­ing that on­ly 0.8% of my pro­fes­sion aren’t al­ready Nodester­s), here they are. Spoil­er: I don’t like Node very much ...
[5 comments]  
Contradictions · Back when I was an ac­tu­al Marx­ist, we used to talk about the “contradictions of capitalism”. It’s ac­tu­al­ly a handy phrase (al­lit­er­a­tive too!) and re­cent­ly I feel like the In­ter­net is try­ing to stuff those con­tra­dic­tions down my throat ...
[5 comments]  
Garage Color Fix · I was out the oth­er day shoot­ing signs of spring; there was this garage, and it was pret­ty too ...
[3 comments]  
Prairie Spring · Most places know four sea­son­s, but for the most in­tense ex­pe­ri­ence of spring you re­al­ly come Up North. I’m in Saskatchewan vis­it­ing my Mom, went for a short walk in the park be­hind her house, and came back with pic­tures of the ex­pe­ri­ence ...
[1 comment]  
Whiteboard Interviews · The oth­er day, I joined a semi-viral tweet chain with I’ve been cod­ing since 1979 and I still have to look up java.lang.String meth­ods all the time. There were a bunch of pro­gram­mers do­ing this and I thought it con­sti­tut­ed amus­ing hu­mil­i­ty while al­so mak­ing a use­ful point: Re­mem­ber­ing the de­tails of any par­tic­u­lar API or al­go­rithm is ir­rel­e­van­t. Turns out I was part of a trend, see TheOut­line: Pro­gram­mers Are Con­fess­ing Their Cod­ing Sins to Protest a Bro­ken Job In­ter­view Pro­cess. Ex­cept for, that’s bull­shit; I still do white­boards at in­ter­views, and I don’t think the idea is bro­ken. (Al­so, they’re not sin­s.) ...
[8 comments]  
Spaced Paragraphs in Word · The In­ter­net is fierce with polemics about one-space-or-two-after-the-period. Bah, lightweight stuff. What about all those poor peo­ple you see mak­ing MS Word docs look a lit­tle more spa­cious by in­sert­ing an ex­tra emp­ty line be­tween para­graph­s? There is a bet­ter way! But the Of­fice UI (on Mac at least) is heinous, so here’s a step-by-step ...
[12 comments]  
Geek Career Paths · Sup­pose you’re do­ing tech­nol­o­gy, and like do­ing tech­nol­o­gy, and your career’s go­ing well, and you find your­self won­der­ing what you’re go­ing to be do­ing in twen­ty years. I’ve been down sev­er­al of the roads you might de­cide to take, and it oc­curs to me that talk­ing them over might amuse and in­for­m ...
[19 comments]  
Looking Up · Seems like ev­ery­one I know is blue and grouchy and an­gry; can’t say as I blame them. But it’s time to turn a cor­ner, be­cause the future’s just as long as ev­er, and we need joy to face it. Let me see if I can help ...
[3 comments]  
Two AWS Years · Wow, it was De­cem­ber 2014 when I climbed on board this train. I’m sit­ting in a pret­ty in­ter­est­ing place and feel I owe the world some re­portage ...
[5 comments]  
Super Stifado · My Su­per Bowl Stew has be­come a tra­di­tion, so I should share it. With some tech mag­ic too. [Up­dat­ed again for 2017.] ...
[1 comment]  
Time Machine Completed the Backup · Re­cent­ly, I ac­quired a Synol­o­gy DiskS­ta­tion and wired up a nice com­fort­ing Time Ma­chine-to-Synol­o­gy-to-S3-to-Glacier back­up da­ta flow. But then I start­ed to see “Time Ma­chine couldn’t com­plete the backup” with some­thing about “could not be ac­cessed (er­ror 21)”. Here’s how it got fixed ...
[5 comments]  
Shooter as Tabula Rasa · Last night I ac­ci­den­tal­ly came face to face with Twit­ter hor­ror, a very pale re­flec­tion of larg­er real-life hor­ror, but still jar­ring. What hap­pened was, some­one shot up a Québec Ci­ty mosque. For a few hours no­body knew who’d done the shoot­ing, and that ab­sence of iden­ti­ty be­came a blank can­vas which the Net’s trolls paint­ed with their shit-colored dream­s ...
[2 comments]  
The Women’s March · Just like ev­ery­one else I have a the­o­ry about What It Mean­s, but I al­so have a sto­ry and a cool pic­ture to il­lus­trate ...
[3 comments]  
China Story · I re­cent­ly read Do Not Say We Have Noth­ing by Madeleine Thien. It was short­list­ed for, but didn’t win, the Man Book­er. It’s won­der­ful but it’s not her best; Dogs at the Perime­ter from 2011 is I think the best nov­el I’ve read this cen­tu­ry. Here­with notes on both ...
 
トリコ and Me · I’ve been send­ing few­er words out on­to the Net so far this year, and one of the rea­sons was The Last Guardian, which I fin­ished last night. Now I’m miss­ing it and maybe writ­ing about it will help ...
[1 comment]  
Florida Gothick Fun · I re­fer to Ra­zor Girl by Carl Hi­aasen, which I en­joyed more than any oth­er sin­gle book I read this year. Not say­ing it’s the best book of the year; but in late 2016, read­ing some­thing that makes you re­peat­ed­ly laugh out loud over a span of hours is not to be sneezed at ...
 
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