Posts for Currently

• Wednesday, 16 May 2018 6:00 pm

  16 May

  Not even totally clear here whether people can be subdivided into developers and users. Seems reductive. But I'm just thinking on paper here.

  (Does the common person have the responsibility (to whom? To society?) to accumulate enough experience to navigate the Internet the way that a developer does? Like as if the Internet is itself a separate society unto itself, and much like many people know how to e.g. get a good deal on a house, cross the street even when the light is red, find the best butchers in town, anyway, much like that, are people responsible for developing a passing fluency in Internet society???)

  But assuming that it's not the responsibility of the common person to develop supra, do developers have a responsibility to build an Internet society that will be kind/forgiving/navigable to those who don't have supra?

  I guess the question really is: who comes first in this industry?

  I was listening to the How I Built This about Stripe, and one of the great features of early Stripe (and which probably continues today) is its developer-friendliness. It used to only take seven lines of code (or something) to integrate with your online store. Nowadays it only takes a couple of clicks in the Woocommerce backend. But I suppose if you had your own hand-coded store, which if you're serious about this you probably will. But so at any rate the developers were a priority. And the API or whatever you want to call it was simple and clean and easy to interface with.

  But much of the Internet is not that. Simple or clean or easy to interface with. Much of the Internet is about pulling off a series of pseudo-psychological gymnastics to get people to do what you want them to do. Is it the responsibility of developers to build an Internet that is as easy for regular old users to interface with as the Stripe API was/is for developers?

  Or should we assume that much like in society, every like third person is some sort of grifter? In society, someone will have anything that's not bolted down, basically. Any liquid capital is basically free game, and if you don't have your wits about you it will shortly belong to someone a little wittier.

  Is the Internet a place like that?

  Currently

• ---

  Tuesday, 1 May 2018 6:00 pm

  1 May

  Testing out being lefthanded today. The wrist isn't getting any better from the work party two weekends ago, now. I mean it *is* getting better, but it still feels bad. The pain has mostly been replaced by a creaking in my tendons. Sam sent me to the Wikipedia page for crepitus, which is what it's called. "Crepitus of tenysynovitis."

  It's May now and I still haven't put enough of Mountains of Hokkaido together to actually get it online. I keep wondering if there's some way that I can just grab the data wholesale from the PDFs and move it into the database. I can't think of any way to do that. Especially since I went through several distinct stylistic phases with the PDFs. The parser, whatever it would be, wouldn't be able to parse them correctly.

  Learning computer has taught me the value of standardisation.

  Back at the gym this morning, though, for the first time in like a week. It was alright on the wrist but I had to re-wrap it afterwards, in the locker room, sweaty.

  Sam pointed out the other day Americans tend to take every change in subject as an opportunity to talk about themselves. I think I have this problem. At the work party at Lingy Hut I did a lot of this. And at work, too, I tend to do this. I tend to start sentences with, "Yeah, I..." or "When I..." or something similar. Gotta work on not doing that anymore.

  Currently

• ---

  Tuesday, 24 Apr 2018 6:00 pm

  24 April

  Having some trouble staying committed to writing what's going on in my life. Maybe it's because I feel like there isn't much. Maybe it has to do with how little I do actually go back to the journals I wrote years and years ago. Or with the chagrin I experience when I do.

  I mean, it doesn't, but I felt it was worth mentioning here anyway.

  Over the weekend, we climbed up to Lingy Hut and did some work up there. Mortaring some stone foundations, mostly to prevent people from jamming garbage under there. Clogging up little drafts. Met JB and JM: old men with remarkably clear outlooks on the world. There's so much I could say about them that I feel sort of hamstrung right now. I couldn't possibly say everything I wanted to say before I lost my train of thought.

  Here's a funny little story. John told us about how he discovered the "Cabin Porn" website and neither JB nor DM, who appears to be the managing organizer for the Lakes part of the Mountain Bothy Association, could understand that it didn't actually have to do with pornography, and that '~ porn' is just shorthand for 'pictures of ~ that are really beautiful'. I thought this was very charming.

  But do you see what I mean? How long that sentence had to be to wrap itself around everything that needed to be said there:

  • JM discovered Cabin Porn
  • JB & DM couldn't understand
  • DM is managing organizer for Mountain Bothy Association - What is MBA? Don't go into it, this sentence is getting long enough
  • What is '~ porn'

  And the whole of our weekend was full of little instances like that.

  I need to come back to this. There's so much more to write.

  Currently

• ---

  Wednesday, 18 Apr 2018 12:00 pm

  18 April

  Been reading a lot of Hacker News lately. Getting very tired of people starting comments with ‘Except...’ or ‘Thing that you’ve commented is orthogonal to thing that the link is about.’

  This word, orthogonal, is shorthand for ‘I let my choice of words do the heavy lifting of making myself look smart on the internet,’ which is just the worst. Just say ‘unrelated.’

  ---

  Dunno what it is about certain perspectives. Sometimes I just get a vantage on something in a way I never do—either by weather or by location or by mood or whatever—and something gets transformed into something else.

  It happens with distant clouds pretty often actually. Where the air is clear and the sun shines on the sides of clouds rather than on the tops. And suddenly I can see how big they are. Could just look at that for a good long time.

  Currently

• ---

  Tuesday, 17 Apr 2018 12:00 pm

  17 April

  You know what I miss? That old chlorine smell from swimming pools. The public swimming pool in Lasalle, specifically, where I did swimming on Wednesday nights after school when I was young.

  The drive out along the autoroute with the sodium lights that strobed orange through the car.

  And the locker rooms, before and after the renovation, with toilets just off the like main body of locker room. I once saw a swimmer walk by with a bruise on her leg the size of my head and for some reason I’ve never forgotten that. In the locker rooms, I mean.

  I think there’s something comforting for me about the locker room at a public pool. Everything’s sort of wet and your bare feet on the wet floor feel terrible.

  And the huge echoes of a covered pool Olympic. Lengths so long you’re basically stranded if you start getting tired in the middle of a lap.

  Miss swimming.

  ---

  I know this is going to come across in future as that smug sort of shallow navel-gazing I like to do but I’m pretty sure that wealth makes people physically ugly. Just unapproachable.

  Maybe it’s like exercise. A little struggle is healthy for people. Then again, crippling poverty also makes people look a little spooky. Haunted. (Bit of a meme with me lately.)

  ---

  Been seeing a lot more ads for diet sodas lately. I wonder if it’s a summer thing, like people are drinking more diet because they’re going to be wearing swimsuits sometime in the next few months.

  ---

  Man outside is walking exactly in tune to the music on my headphones: “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers. Sucker for nostalgia, me.

  Currently

aaaand the Rest of It

Posts Stream Books Walks • Clear filters