/reader

This is part of the discussion’s we’re having right now in our household around college.

Growing up, I was a voracious reader. I especially loved non-fiction. I loved learning. It didn’t matter the subject. Give me a set of encyclopedias for one birthday and I’d have read through everything that caught my eye by the next. Luckily, my Mother and Grandmother — the two women who raised me — gave me plenty of access to books both at home and at libraries (both public and college). One was a full time college student, the other a university professor with a doctorate.

My educational journey was chaotic. I went to seven different elementary schools and three different high schools. I therefore encountered an equal number of different pedagogies, educational methods, and systems. Montessori, Core, Open, etc. Public, private, and parochial.

By the time I got to the final years of high school, I really didn’t know how to be a student anymore — at least not one in any top down educational setting. I felt not only did I know way more than any of my class mates but most of my teachers as well. Most of what was in the text books I’d read and learned in my own childhood independent study. I was kind of… done. Done with the idea of school at least.

Yet, college was expected. Five generations of my family had advanced college degrees. I was expected to be part of the sixth. So, out of that obligation and expectation, I went to Dillard University — the school where those five generations had done their undergraduate work. Where my Grandmother even sat on the Board of Trusties at that time. I didn’t even have to apply… I just got an acceptance in the mail and orientation packet shortly before arrival.

I lasted a year. Did not attend many classes. New Orleans is a very easy place to get lost in. I got lost and I didn’t go back.

All of this is to say that, despite poor grades in High School (turns out, if you don’t attend classes or do homework that is the result) and only one abysmal year in college (same), none of it mattered for my long term success. Here’s why (and the thing I’ve told Beatrix and we should be discussing more with kids these days).

No one cares.

That’s right. The only people that care about your high school grades and activities are college admission departments. They are the only one’s that care about if you went to class or not and what clubs and teams you are on. Your GPA only really matters to them. Once you actually get into college, no one will care about where you went to high school, what you did there, or how well you did it. No one will ever ask again.

And, here’s another sad truth. Once you leave college and get your first job, no one will care where you went, what your grades were, or even if you graduated at all. Put a college down on your resumé. Pick any one you like. No one will question it or bother to check. No one will really care. It’s kind of mind-blowing but true.

On my resumé under Education, I simply put “Dillard University”. Not one person or employer has ever questioned if I graduated, what my major was, what my grades were, or if I was accepted and attended more than a handful of classes before I decided my best education was found off campus. They only care if I know how to do the job or can be easily and quickly trained in on how to do so.

Four years into my IT career I was managing the people getting hired who had Computer Science Degrees. I was their boss. They had spent four years learning about the work. I had spent four years doing it.

The world cares about what you know. Not where you know it from.

And, that’s a hard truth to swallow. All of the time and in many cases hundreds of thousands of dollars a person pours into these institutions only to have it ultimately be met with indifference. What’s the point?

Your experience — education, jobs, teams, activities, path — shows the world that you are a Knower of Things. Not just of any specific thing… but that too. A Knower of many things and someone who wants to know things by whatever means they can access. That the Knowing is a life long quest to you and that you want be a part of this school/college/job/position/membership/team to be a Knower of More Things. Having gone to school and then to college and then to work and all the things you did there and beyond show each person along the way that you’re one of the Knowers — regardless of where you know it from. You want to be with The Knowers, where The Knowers are, doing the Knowing.

And this is my main wish for Beatrix. That she is and continues to be a Knower of Things and chooses whatever path is best for her to be a Knower of More Things. Because there are OH SO MANY things to know and the barriers to knowing them become more porous by the day. Where she learns them and how she learns them matters less than Knowing.

Pick the classic example: traffic. Traffic is annoying, isn’t it? You’re sitting there, wasting time, dealing with people doing wacky shit. And yet traffic has no intrinsic quality. Traffic is just traffic, that’s all there is to it.

But what if I told you that tomorrow you’ll get paid 10000 bucks for every minute you spend in traffic? I bet you’d have a very different experience dealing with said traffic. You’d likely not be annoyed by it—why would you, you’re getting paid handsomely to be there—and you’d probably spend most of your time thinking about what you’d do with all the money that is about to come your way.

And yet the traffic is still the same. Your time spent with it is still the same and the people doing wacky shit are still doing that. The only thing that has changed is how you perceive that experience.

This is true not just for traffic but for the vast majority of the things that are annoying and frustrating out there. Things and people are not frustrating: we are frustrated by them. The feeling and the sensations are coming from us, not from them.

Now, I’m saying all this but I’m also someone who enjoys ranting about all kinds of things. But I find ranting enjoyable for two reasons.

The first one is that I’m doing it in good spirit. Sometimes I like to be a bit silly and go on a tirade against webfont licenses, browser companies, AI, or any other topic that comes to mind. But I’m doing it for fun, I’m honestly not bothered all that much by those things.

And the second reason is that I find venting in an overly dramatic way—and you should see me in person yelling at my screen—to be a fun therapeutic exercise. It’s almost like a piece of acting and it’s genuinely fun, at least for me. But it doesn’t consume me. It’s not something I carry with me.

But some people out there are consumed by their constant complaining. And it’s infectious. The more you complain the more you find and see things worth complaining about. And that’s not healthy. It’s not healthy for them, it’s not healthy for the people around them.

I can’t pay you for every minute you have to face something that annoys you—I’m really sorry—but that doesn’t mean you can still pretend I do and see what happens to your mind. You might be surprised.

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Win of the week: husband finally got the offer letter for the new job he’s been coordinating for months!!! they wrote the job description just for him 🥰 only one more week of the current hell job 🙌

Looking forward to: chilling out and reading this weekend

Stuff I did:

• 7.75 hours consulting — wrapping up the spring project, sent off next deliverable for the new project
• 6 hours writing — trying out ways to make worldbuilding suck less so I stop avoiding it — Annie had the brilliant suggestion to see how I could adapt my blogging practice towards worldbuilding… more to come 😉 and my offline writing friend reminded me about the book Novel Metamorphosis so I’m trying the exercises
• took the cat in for follow-up blood work — thyroid meds are working! liver number is still high but the vet wasn’t too concerned — cat is sad the vet is having us cut back his diet 😿
• I was telling my sister “I got enough new shirts this spring that I can wear a shirt I like almost every day!” (between laundry) and she was like… why don’t you buy enough shirts to wear one you like every day, and stop wearing clothes you don’t like anymore? (She is wise.) So I bought five more shirts… on sale! 😎
• got another, different kind of storage rack for the pantry to help me keep inventory of canned beans easier and reorganized the pantry — but when it’s tidy less stuff fits 😭
• an hour of weeding — cleared around the plants I put in last fall (Rudbeckia and bee balm) and the path to the backyard
• stopped in to Ace Hardware to buy some acoustic caulk after my husband was like “why not just get it online?” — and they didn’t carry it 🤦‍♀️ so I bought a bag of dirt as an errand consolation prize
• bonus walk with my friend + regular walk joined by another friend I haven’t seen in several months
• one virtual appointment + mouth guard fitting at the dentist’s
• I’ve been getting mild headaches a couple times a month that last ~36-48 hours so I’ve started keeping a log — I suspect they may be related to yard work (sticking my face into pollen) — but if they are related to grinding my teeth then the mouth guard should help!

Dinners:

• Seattle dogs (with cream cheese and sauteed onions)
• cherry tomato sauce with leftover rigatoni (loosely based on)
• fake chicken burgers with leftover sauteed onions and pineapple + curly fries
• Mexican takeout — salmon tacos + chips and salsa
• frozen waffles with syrup and berries + fried eggs + frozen veggie breakfast sausage
• Thai restaurant to celebrate the new job! panang curry with tofu + white rice
• smoked salmon and leek quiche (good one today!) + roasted purple fingerling potatoes from the local food delivery box (fun!) + arugula salad + orange juice

Reading:

• Read We Need To Talk About Fifty-Five by qntm
• Finished reading This Will Be Fun by E.B. Asher, We Will Not Cancel Us by adrienne maree brown, and The Arts and Crafts Movement by Gillian Naylor (technically called it quits 50 pages early because the library wanted it back)
• Re-read Beautiful Secret by Christina Lauren
• Continued reading Dangerous Fictions by Lyta Gold
• Started reading The Class Matrix by Vivek Chibber
• DNF’d Reborn by Seth Haddon and The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis
• Received Antimemetics by Nadia Asparouhova
• Backed Scott Listfield’s Astronauts II — I thought his first art book was excellent so I have high hopes

Words I looked up:

• forthwith
• scrim
• ineluctable
• vavasour
• ersatz
• fugazi

Someone in our neighborhood puts up a whiteboard next to the road with exclusively bullshit Scrabble-ass words*, but I am incapable of not reading text that is in front of me, and today’s word was so obnoxious that I will subject you to it as well: semordnilap (yes that is palindromes backwards)

Pretty stuff I saw:

• love the swirly colors on this art tile by Jaime Cazares — when I was little I went on an open studio tour and one place taught us how to use spraypaint to make marbled paper and I was alllll about it
• fun “scribble” metal bird sculptures by Nakisha
• cute wooden painted bird carvings
• pink and neon yellow plaid trench coat 😍
• a lot of neat stuff in this month’s Book Covers of Note by The Casual Optimist

New music I listened to:

(via)

(via)

(via)

• yaya bey feat. Father Philis – Merlot and Grigio (via)

Nature notes:

• glimpsed a black butterfly with yellow on it in my yard — probably a Mourning Cloak — also saw a white one but not close enough to ID
• bumblebee got inside the house! cats alerted me (trying to eat her) and we got her back outside posthaste — there are a bunch of bumbles who seem to be nesting in the dirt next to our front walkway 🥰
• spotted a ladybug larvae in the backyard while I was pulling weeds! (reminds me I noticed a surprising number of adult ladybugs in the shore pine when I was pruning it recently)

The latest David Frum podcast is about crazy tech billionaires. Once again he talks about who he's willing to listen to. He's really smart, thinks about things, and speaks brilliantly, but cultivates his ignorance and seems somewhat proud of it. In contrast, I listened to Jon Stewart's weekly podcast yesterday and it was as usual outstanding. Like Frum he thinks and speaks brilliantly, with the addition of being hilarious at times. In this episode he talks to an Iranian friend, a new perspective we don't hear often, but fits in with what I had understood about Iran. It's a highly educated country, a good standard of living and are mired with a repressive government and no options for regime change. When you hear that talked about on other podcasts and cable news shows, remember -- it's impossible to change regimes unless the country has prepared for that. There is no regime-in-waiting in Iran, hasn't been one since the 1979 revolution. This is the next danger in the US. Will there be anything remaining of our political system? It's almost all gone now. Funny to listen to the people on TV about surviving the next 3.5 years -- what do they think will happen then? Nothing will happen, that's the most likely thing. Back to Frum, what a shame there's such a smart guy, so cloistered, and boastful about it. That's not a good way to proceed now imho. #

Net-net: I would pay money to hear a podcast with Frum and Stewart interviewing each other. That would be very powerful stuff imho, and probably very funny, and respectful.#

I'm working on the next part of linkblogging in WordLand. I want to really switch over to the new routine. There was a question of whether I wanted to push the links to the social sites, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. I've decided I do, but for the moment only to push to Bluesky. It's the only one with a simple enough-enough API or feels worth the effort to me. I'm basically focusing my politics on Bluesky these days. Also seems there are people there who are interested in the development I do. I have far more "followers" on Twitter, but at this point I think most of them are gone. And Threads dropped off my radar a while back. I'm just not interested. For me now it's mostly Bluesky and Facebook. #

I've been looking for hard-hitting stories about yesterday's Supreme Court decision that gives Trump far more power than any American president has ever had. And unlike military power, which they are clearly not very good at using, the people running the show in the White House are very much prepared for how they will use the new power, which appears to be unlimited. #

Fixed the images that broke on morningcoffeenotes.com, a site that dates back to 2003, when it transitioned to https in 2024. #

With any luck this will be the final test. Hahaha.#

Fast & easy Open Social Web#

• You hear the term Open Social Web used in places where things that are social are neither open or web. They aren't that far, and here today I'm going to give you a fast and easy recipe for linking the collection of social twitter-like sites into a real honest to goodness open social web#
• Add inbound RSS feeds. The social site allows a user to specify an RSS feed that represents their posts. When a new one shows up, it appears in the timelines of people who are following the user. They can add items to that feed however they like. It can come from anywhere. That's 1/2 of "open."#
• Add outbound RSS feeds. This gives you the other half. When a new item shows up in a users feed, however it got there, it appears in their outbound feed, which can be tied into the input feed of one or more other sites. #
• Support links in users' posts. You really can't claim to be part of the web if you don't implement this core feature of the web. #
• That's all there is, except this: The feeds have to be good. Don't be cheap with the information they contain. Work with other developers to make sure all the information they need that you have is present in the outbound feeds you generate. Same with the inbound feeds, be reasonable, if you can accept certain information and match it up with your service, then you should do it. Think of the users first. #
• You could try to use ActivityPub or AT Proto to play the role of RSS. I think you'll find that's more work, and not that many people have mastered these formats. RSS is simple and lightweight and has had 20+ years of burn in. Lots of familiarity, lots of working code. #
• It's time to stop claiming you are the open social web when it's so easy to be the open and on the web. #

Hallucinating myths into fact#

• I have a Google Alerts query for my own name, just to see if any journalism outlets mention me. When it happens, it's often to give me credit for co-creating an app called iPodder, which they say was where podcasting started. None of that is true. But that's what journalism says about me.#
• On the other hand if you ask ChatGPT what role I played in developing podcasting it gives a more accurate answer. #
• So tell me what the role of journalism is. Hallucinating myths into fact? That would be my estimate.#
• Here's the ChatGPT result. I actually did a bit more than that, but what they say is closer to the truth and gives an idea of how things like podcasting come into existence. A lot of work and struggle against people's disbelief, and most of the time it doesn't work -- podcasting is one of the successes.#
• BTW, the second item in ChatGPT's list is not true. Adam's Daily Source Code came after my own podcast Morning Coffee Notes. I was urging him to do a podast but he didn't get one going until after I went first, proving the old adage "People don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors." So somewhere along the line it got confused and it hallucinated just like the journalists. The actual first podcast was a Grateful Dead song in 2001 which I used to test Radio UserLand which was the first software to implement podcasting. There's a documentary coming out soon and I believe they have a bit about that, so maybe that'll get on the record. #
• If this is how history is written btw, I wouldn't trust anything in the history books. ;-) #