/reader

I’m not particularly interested in actually doing it. You have to record a video with a bunch of rules and crap. But I heard about it years ago and the general challenge idea stuck in my head.

My gym recently did a “Supermax” event where we, over the course of two hours, found our max on six different lifts. The first three happen to be bench, squat, and deadlift. I got:

Bench    = 265 lbs
Squat    = 375 lbs
Deadlift = 365 lbs

So: 1,005 lbs! Made it!

With this example:

The inner layers moving slowly, the outer layers moving quickly/inconsistently. About that:

Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

Which can be mapped onto technology rather cleanly. Ryan Barrett did this recently. And drew this:

I find this a helpful framework to think in sometimes. For instance, if you feel frustration at how quickly or slowly a particular technology moves, are you considering its place within the layers? Perhaps that speed is because it is part of a system that pressures it to be that way or it being that way is beneficial to the system as a whole. Even zoomed into browser technology, HTML not moving as fast as JavaScript feels like it could be mapped onto Pace Layers.

Ryan says he’s not the first to do this technology mapping.

I’m far from the first to think along these lines. Erik Samsoe on Twitter (with Brand himself), Dmitri Glazkov’s Forces of the pace layering confusion, and Gartner’s Pace-layered Application Strategy. Taking a wider view, the classic 7-layer ISO network model and 4-layer IETF model are a form of pace layering applied to networking protocols.

I think of Jeremy Keith who once connected it all to front-end technology then a fella named Tom mapped it out:

Jeremy again lists people who’ve aligned with the thinking:

I gathered together examples of people who have been infected with the pace-layer mindworm who were applying the same layered thinking to other areas:

• Rich applied pace layers to career paths,
• Mark applied pace layers to the design process, and
• Jorge Arango applied pace layers to reading.

Certainly an infectious thought!

It was also clear that he recorded 32 songs. I’d love to know that complete list someday. Modern streaming services have these 15 on a compilation, but clearly I’ll have to dig a lot harder than that.

 

Over the holiday’s our family did the Exploring Hogwarts puzzle. It was just 500 pieces but took us like… a month?

Of course, in the end, there was a missing piece that we absolutely could not find, confirming our conspiracy theories the entire time. It don’t know if that looks hard to you, but my gosh, it was a beast in difficulty the entire time.

• There were always very different places in a puzzle a piece felt like any piece could go.
• There was no true reference image to use. I guess that was kind of the point with the shifting nature of hogwarts.
• Many pieces fit perfectly into places that were not where they went, both visually and fit-wize.

I realize all this is of zero consequence, I just appreciated that I found a Reddit thread of people talking about how difficult it was.

 

I just got a big ol’ stack of USPS Priority Mail®️ marked as RETURN TO SENDER.

It’s… malicious spam. Physical spam, I suppose.

I didn’t send these, of course. But the return address is CodePen Headquarters, so it seems it was just a free way to get spam into our door. The evil schmucks drop these in the mail to fake addresses, they get returned to sender, and it’s marked that CodePen Headquarters is the sender. Tricky tricky. I guess that’s a way to cheat the system and not buy a stamp. Either that or some of these are real people and they just use our business address to lend legitimacy somehow.

Inside, there is a letter, and a check for $3,850.00 (!).

I’m not obfuscating any information there as I’m very sure it’s just all bullshit and it’s more useful to share all the details here. It’s some confusing deal where installers come to your house and put Canada Dry decals on your car and you become driving advertising or whatever.

Nothing can be done with these checks as they are made out to fake people. Even if we found someone named JASON SHOCKLEY to cash this thing, there is no way it would actually go through.

The scam part comes in where they want you to send a copy of your “deposit slip” to them in which you’ll inadvertently send sensitive information. I guess? Or the fact that if they get contacted at all from one of these marks that you’re signaling gullibility and they’ll try and get their hooks in you some way or another.

There is plenty of chatter on the internet talking about these “car wrap” scams, so apparently ain’t nothing new here.