Statuses

Cereal box wisdom this morning:

Change your opinions, keep to your principles. — Victor Hugo

It reminded me of the common value seen at many tech companies to have “strong opinions loosely held”.

Considering how difficult of an ideal this is to uphold in a field where opinions are a dime a dozen and people are often inexperienced, I prefer Victor Hugo’s version. Because what’s important is not having opinions, but having principles that guide your practices.

40 goals for Crosby.

I can’t decide whether it speaks to his greatness that he’s still Pittsburgh’s best player at 36, or it shows how ordinary the rest of the team is.

Probably a bit of both.

I wish pedestrians didn’t make such a production out of it when I ring the bell on my bike. I just want to avoid surprising them, but most hurriedly turn around, grab their kids, and move waaaay out. Take it easy people, it’s not like my bike was 6 foot wide and I was going to plough right through you.

Ah, I bet things would be different if I lived in the Netherlands.

I disagree with Dan Moren and his piece about Apple TV. The problem with tvOS is that it’s often impossible to tell what the hell is currently focused or selected on any given screen. I use this thing every day and I still have to move focus around to figure out where it is.

That’s job number 1, Apple: highlight clearly what I’m interacting with. That’s it.

I always thought that ads were one of the worse things to plague modern life. But I’ve changed my mind. In the year 2024, no one can seemingly conduct business of any kind without requesting reviews.

Ad blocker? Checked.

Review request blocker?

My dad was at different times coach, recruiter, and referee for women’s hockey. He would have been excited to see the PWHL games. Sadly he passed away in November so he didn’t get that chance.

But in a satisfying twist, the PWHL Montreal team plays half their games blocks away from where he was born. That makes me happy.

Imagining how surgeons introduced themselves if they talked like software engineers…

“Are you backend or frontend?”

“I’m top-end.”

“Oh wow cool.”

The ArriveCAN app scandal is ridiculous. As someone who makes apps for a living, of course it doesn’t cost $60M+ to turn a paper form into an app with a database backend.

Of course. That is way, way, waaaayyyyy too much. No, the true cost is a lot less than that.

Tell you what, I’ll do it for $30M. Half price, what do you say?! Total deal!

Money has lost all meaning.

Christopher Nolan movies should come with not one but two sound level controls: voice and music.

I’ll let you guess which one should go up and which one should go down.

I’m not one to get anywhere close to Google Analytics, so for some time I’ve been trying out WP Statistics. I like that it runs and stores everything locally on my site. No sending data anywhere. And it presents the collected data very nicely. I’m far from an expert on web stuff, but this seems like a pretty good option.

It’s still only the first week but it’s pretty darn cool to be able to tune in and catch a women’s pro hockey game on TV several nights a week. It’s so normal!

The PWHL is up and running and it’s a treat to watch! I’m happy to finally see a pro league for women’s hockey. I’m especially glad to see the games being broadcast on TV and online so everyone can see how good it is.

My daughter played when she was little, and we watched Cassie Campbell lead Team Canada at the Olympics and went to see Hailey Wickenheiser play once, but women’s hockey never had the visibility it does now.

It’s going to help their game and their skill so much to play professionally, train every day, building rivalries, and competing against the best in the world. 👏🏻

I finally stopped my Quickbooks subscription. I wasn’t happy about the price continuing to rise, and it didn’t make sense any more considering the little amount of side-gig work that I bill.

A good thing to know is that Quickbooks remains read-only for a whole year after canceling.

So now I’ve switched everything over to Wave, which is free for the bits that I use.

The impact of ChatGPT in education is a very complex question. There are a lot of aspects to consider, ranging from ethics to social responsibility to personal development. And it’s not all black or white. Joss Fong from Vox touches on many of the top questions in her latest video. It really resonated with me regarding the concerns that I had when I worked in education.

We went to see a movie in theater yesterday. Being Saturday night I was expecting the usual crowds but I was amazed how empty it was. Combined with the 20 minutes of ads we had to endure as the so-called “pre-show”, it really does feel like theaters are dying. It’s sad.

$700M to play baseball? It’s just another data point, but I’m starting to think that money has lost all meaning. Where I live, any dinky old house sells for $1M. And don’t get anyone started about groceries. There used to be decency, a certain logic, a fear to lose customers. Now it’s all gone. Raise the price! Put whatever number you want on it! People will be on the street or get into deeper debt! No problem!

Kids menus are a weird idea. Is it just a North American thing?

There is a menu, use it. Kids could get anything they want from it, albeit as smaller portions for say half the price. Wouldn’t that be easier than making a separate menu and restricting choices to junk food?

</soapbox>

A little gem from Helen Czerski today:

The key point that I think a lot of engineers still don’t get is that their job is not about making widgets that get plonked on top of the world. This is about changing the shape of things inside a working system (Planet Earth) to shift how it operates. Those widgets become part of that system – it’s like operating on a living human. The engineers of the future mustn’t see their job as creating things external to the world.

Which perfectly matches another post I highlighted earlier this year:

However thoughtful or well intentioned, a developer lives, works and is accustomed to a space where having fun “tinkering” is habit, using the “parts”/patterns already lying around the norm, and making tools/features that are seemingly magical to use in their ease or laziness the aim, but, deep consideration of the system wide design uncommon.

A developer sees themselves more like a young person hacking away at something for fun. This is still held as an ideal. They don’t tend to see themselves as a professional contributor/operator of an important social system with serious responsibilities.

So much nodding here, I’m going to need physical therapy.

Daring Fireball had this quote today:

Our expectations for software are different from other products we use in our daily lives.

I forget where I wrote about this before but I remember comparing software with a toaster. Everything in our lives is a toaster: always the same, immutable. Software is the exception. Nerds were fine with its ever changing nature, but computer culture has now been pushed to the population at large. And I would argue that there is a whole class of users—not just your grandmother—who wishes software was like a toaster.

Runaway Jury is one of my favourite movies because it’s about standing up to the corruption and the nonsense that keeps guns in people’s hands. And doing it by fighting corruption with smarts, and just plain old sticking it to them. I so wish it was true.

I’m looking forward to see the PWHL, the new women’s hockey pro league, get started in January. So much work it must be to start a league from scratch. Can’t wait to see the schedules and what arenas the teams will play. Finally some good hockey without undue violence at a good ticket price. Will definitely go see some games.

The last time I saw a live hockey game was women’s Canada vs US at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto in 2019! 😱

Independently and a week apart, both my daughter and wife asked what country I’d like to visit and I said the Netherlands. Both responded the exact same thing, and I quote: “You might never come back!”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how much they know I’d love to bike everywhere.

Kottke is opening up comments as an experiment:

Some days, my inbox is the best thing on the internet and I want to bring that vibe to the site.

I’m thrilled to see how this turns out. The web sometimes (too often) feels less and less like the people-centric place it used to be. It’s great to see Jason pushing back because his site is one of the very best things about the Internet.

The Magic Editor feature on the Pixel 8 exemplifies perfectly the kind of tech that we create not because it’s particularly desired or useful, but because we can and it’s cool. There is no interest here in capturing and celebrating the beauty of the human experience as it really is. Forgotten also is the social responsibility of creating a record of our reality for future generations. No. We can and it’s cool so let’s do it is the extent of the thinking being presented. It’s a sad lack of values.

I don’t know why anyone would want to read the work of Walter Isaacson after the shit job he did for Steve Jobs’ biography. He hadn’t done his homework. And I’m hearing now the same comments about Elon Musk’s bio.

Fool me once, fool me twice, and all that.

My wife was commenting that our dog would have turned 32 yesterday. She knew because her iPhone notified her, thanks to having set the birthday in her contacts and enabling the birthday calendar. That happens to me too, for pets and people. It’s been a problem for years.

And I’m surprised it’s not something that has come up yet on Apple’s radar. Surely higher-ups at Apple get birthday notifications for deceased loved ones too. I’m curious why it hasn’t been addressed. Especially considering that the solution seems pretty straightforward: add a death field to the contacts database.