Once upon a time, before the death of irony (what do you think, did irony really die in 2001? I feel like it’s sort of still around) there was a link soup column called, “Suck.” The format was a short essay written in a glib, cynical voice (I just typoed that as, “void,” and that’sContinue reading “Daily News”
Category Archives: Grumpy Old Man
Put a Bird on It
I have been nerdsniped by the dratted Russian hackers. Those darned “hackers”, causing trouble and getting people all excited about security. So now I’ve got to deal with thoughts and suggestions in my peripheral awareness, and remind myself that I’ve already done the work of threat modeling and risk analysis for my data and forContinue reading “Put a Bird on It”
Programmer’s Notebook – Ruby
I’ve been using MacOS as my desktop and development environment for the past 19 years. Whenever I got a new laptop, I’d use the migration assistant to copy my user settings over. So, I’ve got a lot of cruft in my home directory. Over that time I mostly did Java programming. But, there’s also beenContinue reading “Programmer’s Notebook – Ruby”
It’s A Mess
Last night, apparently, there was an entertainment broadcast to the world – the first Trump – Biden debate of 2020. Surprising precisely no-one, the president said awful things and behaved badly. But that’s not what I’m thinking about, right now. On my Twitter feed this morning, I saw lots of gasping and horror tweets fromContinue reading “It’s A Mess”
Specify Your Dream
I keep wanting to be able to write native apps for my devices, and it keeps being true that I can’t wrap my brain around The Way You’re Supposed To Do It. I’ve taken Coursera and Udemy courses on iOS and macOS programming, and I’ve even shipped a couple of toy apps to the AppContinue reading “Specify Your Dream”
Age of Corporations
In 2017, Charlie Stross talked about corporations as slow AI, and he identified some ways in which they have supplanted humans as first-class citizens. I remember reading, as a teenager in the early 1980s, a story about a world where humans were not citizens of nations but employees of companies and the whole thing wasContinue reading “Age of Corporations”
Well, duh
So, Iran has reconnected to the Internet, and there’s this quote way down in the Washington Post article about it: “Why did (the Americans) get angry after we cut off the internet? Because the internet is the channel through which Americans wanted to perform their evil and vicious acts,” Fadavi said. I’d say that this,Continue reading “Well, duh”
Regression
I’ve been ignoring Facebook for a few months, now, and my engagement with Twitter has mostly been retweets and likes. Yesterday, a friend who takes what other people say more seriously than I do decided he needed to back way off and go back to writing blog posts instead of tweets. Frankly, I would way ratherContinue reading “Regression”
Missed Opportunities
I have had the same email address since 1995. I have been buying things online since that was available. These facts mean that my email address is on every spam list in the world, and that every merchant I’ve ever bought anything from as well as all the spammers and scammers send me at leastContinue reading “Missed Opportunities”