Palain VII

AI gets talked about a lot these days. Like everyone else, I have Opinions™. I don’t want this to turn into a blog about AI, so I’m going to do my best to roll my thoughts up here. Continue reading The A.I. Post

Last week I talked about technical writing as a role, and I figured I’d run with that theme for a minute. One of the things I mentioned was that we tend to write in other formats, and I wanted to expand on that – if you’re used to a “What You See is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) system like Microsoft Word or a Rich Text Format (RTF), or online editors, you might not think about writing formats much –…

I don’t talk about my day job all that often. What I’m doing currently is software development – specifically, I write tools and create infrastructure for a documentation team. This ranges from writing deployment pipelines and build scripts to writing extensions for the writing software we use, to building out sites and wrangling server configurations. I enjoy it, and I like that the role is…

I have never heard as many people avoiding upgrading to the new macOS, this late into the release cycle (we’re up to 26.2), as I have with this release. Between the new UI being an accessibility nightmare and just actively weird, plus it all seeming to be buggier than normal, it just feels like a bit of a mess. I’m not saying there weren’t some good improvements as well, but let’s just say it…

Sorry for the radio silence the past little bit. Even though I recognized I was going into a fallow period, I was still trying to get something out at least once a month, and I totally missed November. It’s not just the writing – I’m behind on my RSS feeds and other regular media diet, too! Continue reading Wrapping up 2025

Adam Savage on enduring today’s uncertain, hostile times (found via Chris Koerner): It’s some good thoughts, and I agree: the experiences that I think about most fondly, and the work that I’m most proud of, were all approached with a sense of kindness, empathy, and respect. (And as he mentions, the regrets that I do have largely center around occasions where I failed apply or communicate with…

Jay Springett has a nice piece over on his site called “Just Like Stuff“, and I appreciated the comment about not arguing with people about anything on the internet: I’ve had a hard rule for almost twenty years, related to, but separate from, not posting negative things on the internet: I don’t argue with people about anything on the internet. I grew up in the late 90’s and early 00’s on phpBB…

Based on some conversations after my last post, there was some curiosity about how I personally end up using RSS and what seems to work for me. Start with an RSS reader that feels good to you. It’s not one size fits all, you may want a different experience than me. A lot of them are free (and most of the rest at least have a free trial) so there’s no harm in trying a few out. I’ve been using…

Over at Citation Needed, Molly White has a nice piece on how you can Curate your own newspaper with RSS. If you’re not reading Molly’s work already, you really should, especially if you care about what’s happening in the tech sector (mostly a mix of web3/crypto, and tech’s impacts on human rights and freedoms). The basic gist is that RSS is a tried and true protocol that tons of services already…

Just got back from a week in Bristol (UK) for work. Nice time, good folks. I sincerely like my coworkers, and I love to travel, so it feels more like an opportunity than a task when these work trips come up. That said, one of these days I need to allocate some time off around the trip, so I can go see more of the country and say hi to various folks I know. I was back at work for a week (three…

I’ve got a lot of RSS feeds in my feed reader. Some are dead feeds, some are prolific. If I don’t keep up, after about a week, I’ll come back to around 700 articles waiting. The thing is, a lot of those articles are bad. Here’s why: RSS getting treated like a notification system. If all your RSS feed does is post a one-liner saying you’ve got an article up, you’re wasting my time and missing…

Partly for my own edification, and because I’ve found similar posts interesting, I thought I’d share what tools and tech stack I’m using. Continue reading Tools, 2025 Edition

It’s been a chilly spring – a few warm spells here and there, but the back half of May basically didn’t break 50 and was raining more often than not. Even Memorial Day weekend was pretty wet and cool. So yesterday, when it finally climbed into the 70s and got sunny? A delight. The ice cream stand down the street is now open for the season, so what better way to inaugurate the summer with a…

Wil Wheaton had a nice post talking about music and discovering the full length album version of In A Gadda Da Vida (all 17 minutes of it) for the first time recently. I can’t share in that particular revelation, as I was already familiar with those epic organ and drum solos – Dad has/had the album and we definitely spent some time enjoying the “back catalog” over the years. Worth a listen if you…

I have a whole rant-y post that I’m not posting because I’m pretty sure y’all are already aware of how fucked things are right now and me venting my feelings on it won’t really help. So instead, a few quick site updates: Updated the About page a little to catch it up on the fact I’ve moved back to Vermont and am now doing software development rather than technical writing. Added another…

A quick read from Matthew Lyon, “Forget This Device“, where they dug out the reasons why so often the simple little affordance some log in prompts have of “Remember me” or “Remember this device” end up being utter BS. A lot of the reasons basically come down to poor implementations, and outdated approaches to cookies (most browsers don’t store cookies from other domains at this point, as a…