Unpopular opinion in the micro.blog (and maybe the broader indieweb community), but I agree Glass, and other social systems, should have likes. They can be private, and they don’t have to feed an algorithm. But I would love a low friction indication of being seen and appreciated.

Elsa: look at that interesting building we’re walking past here in Denver. Me: it looks like the back of a building where we ate really great pasta about 7 years ago together.

I was right.

I have so many unread books, all physical, so I will once again be buying an ebook, because I read too much on vacation and none of my library holds are ready.

Sometimes it’s a real sacrifice to travel for work.

An incredible amount of my debugging involves opening a CSV in Excel, saving it as a UTF-8 csv, and then just literally doing read_csv() |> write_csv() in R.

This cleans up all kinds of junk that seems hard to catch from various CSV exports that come from … out there.

Chris Hayes has a great piece on what I’d call the “modern social condition” created by the internet.

Thinking about the purpose of blogging/posting, and for me, I have a tiny audience in my mind of people I’m already acquainted with who I hope notice. And I like having a slow trickle of new folks that I add to that list or observing how that list changes as I change.

I’m intrigued by the new photo styles Apple introduced, but don’t trust myself to choose a universal adjustment to my photos. I wish they’d do an A/B survey to onboard me and automatically choose my taste.

So, the vast majority of unvaccinated folks believe the boosters mean the vaccines don’t work. I’m now officially way past the, “you can’t cure stupid” phase of my emotions about this.

I know this has been true since 1999, but dammit American Football is a great band.

Feature request: block any SMS or iMessage with more than 4 recipients being sent to me. No group above that size is a thing I want to be a part of, family included.

Alternative: maybe just make all group iMessage/SMS require that I place it on an allowlist.

I am such a sucker for songs that have crackled spoken word over killer instrumentals. Love this post-rock trope.

Not every TV show needs a musical episode.

I thought there was no way I’d notice the higher refresh rate on the iPhone 13 Pro. I don’t notice it at all on my iPad Pro, so I really didn’t think it’s a big deal. But it’s quite noticeable on the smaller screen. I think I like it, but I absolutely can understand why some people will turn this off. There’s a bit of an uncanny valley effect, not unlike high frame rate video.

Do I think this is worth buying a phone for? No. Do I think I’d notice it after a couple of days? Probably not. I bet I could switch back to a phone without the higher refresh rate and not notice it. But the difference is real, noticeable, and nice.

I truly enjoy management, but fuck it feels good to SQL the shit out of something from time to time.

I absolutely spent the last hour thinking, “Ah, at least tomorrow is Friday.” 🙃

I’m feeling pretty disillusioned about having an impact and now feel like I’m just aiming for “not making things worse”, “my family is comfortable and happy”, and “sometimes I get to feel like I was good at something challenging.”

Of course I do think the work I do can have a huge impact. I truly hope it does. I’m not sure I’d ever be able to feel that impact. I’m just too distant from it. And I don’t think I have the energy or talent to do more direct impact on top of the day job.

The Democrats need to win elections. That’s the actual problem.

Because I’m a product manager, I try really hard to understand how people use software and devices. It’s important that I practice empathy and understanding, even outside of the products I work on.

But boy, I do not understand Apple-geek obsession with time tracking.

One thing I’d like to see companies do that they never will– sync/import/export of chat history and data between apps and services. I want the ability to import Signal into iMessage history or vice versa, for example.

I don’t think I’ll ever perform it, but I’ve been slowly building my acoustic set list for years. I’m up to 14 tracks I’m pretty confident won’t be going anywhere.

New Jamaican spot in Baltimore— we will return.

1Password Safari extension on iOS15 is amazing.