Another beautiful day in north Wales. Today's plan is to get on the 60 year old rotavator that I recently repaired, and chop up some grass ready for planting wild flowers in one of the fields. 🌷🌹🌻🪻
I love this time of year.
Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is great, and you're great for using it. ❤️
Act II, Scene 1: Ophelia tells her father about how a half-naked, deranged-looking Hamlet barged into her room, physically assaulted her, and ran off into the night. Since we never hear anything about Polonius’ wife, we must assume that the strain of raising two children on his own has rendered him non compos mentis, as this leads him to believe that Hamlet is in love and not a booze-shattered date rapist. He decides to tell the King and Queen about it, because Ophelia’s personal life is apparently the business of everyone in the Danish royal family.
Afgelopen donderdag mocht ik bij de Metal Business Club meetup zijn in de Ziggodome, tijdens het concert van Ghost. Mooi om met verschillende (zelfstandige) ondernemers te spreken die allemaal een passie voor stevige muziek hebben. Het concert en de show van Ghost was geweldig, een mooie combinatie van werk en plezier zo! En erg bijzonder dat precies op het moment dat vlak nadat een nieuwe paus bekend is, de kersverse Papa V Perpetua van Ghost ook op het podium verschijnt…
Someday I'll be able to point ChatGPT at the home page for writing about WordLand, and tell it to read every page that's linked to it, and from that put together a well-organized book about WordLand. Maybe sometime next year perhaps?? I used that as a prompt, to see what ChatGPT would say.#
When a friend discovers a new product of mine and says the world owes Dave for being such a great guy, I wish they'd skip that part, and follow what we're doing. Get in the loop. #
Software isn't a thing, it isn't finished, it's a process as it gets invented by the users. It's a performing art. WordLand today is like a musician performing in a small club, working out the playlist, and hoping to be playing at theaters then arenas, and finally someday, if we're very good, stadiums. But we need help. #
If you love WordLand, subscribe. Use the software. Learn what it can do, hit its limits, make requests. #
I remember very well being handed a list of feature requests by Apple's lead evangelist from a new exec they just hired at Apple. I looked at the list, and handed it back and said I'd like to meet him. On the paper was the top ten list of every MORE user at the time. We knew what they wanted because we listened, studied, and learned. I knew his new boss was a real user, and thus I knew we could do stuff together. It worked out exactly that way. #
We lived for the first years of my life in Jackson Heights, which is probably, today, the most culturally diverse place in the world. In the 1960s it was a white neighborhood that was adjacent to a black neighborhood, Corona. They paired our elementary schools when I was in third or fourth grade. My little brother went to the school in Corona, and I stayed in the school in Jackson Heights. #
There's a famous picture, in our family at least, of my mother walking my brother to school. It was on the front page of the NYT one day. That was a big deal then. #
When I was in fifth grade we moved to Flushing. It was a sleepy little place (for NYC), nice houses, mostly Irish and Italian families with a few Jews. Now it's a Far East culture, from China and Korea, and still just as nice as it ever was. #
We have a system in this country, it takes people from everywhere and gives them a platform to create whatever they want. In Flushing it's the best Chinese food in the city, which is saying a lot.#
You thought you could ride a bicycle
but, turns out, those weren’t bikes
they were extremely bony horses. And that wasn’t
a meal you cooked, that was a microwaved
hockey puck. And that wasn’t a book that was
a taco stuffed with daisies. What if
you thought you could tie your laces?
But all this time you were just wrapping
a whole roll of sellotape round your shoe and
hoping for the best? And that piece of paper
you thought was your tax return?
A crayon drawing of a cat. And your best friend
is actually a scarecrow you stole from a field
and carted away in a wheelbarrow.
Your mobile phone is a strip of bark
with numbers scratched into it.
Thousands of people have had to replace
their doors, at much expense, after you
battered theirs to bits with a hammer
believing that was the correct way
to enter a room. You’ve been pouring pints
over your head. Playing card games with a pack
of stones. Everyone’s been so confused
by you: opening a bottle of wine with a cutlass,
lying on the floor of buses, talking to
babies in a terrifyingly loud voice.
All the while nodding to yourself like
‘Yeah, this is how it’s done.’
Planting daffodils in a bucket of milk.
Little North Beach at Deception Pass — we saw pigeon guillemots nesting in the cliff!
Highlight of the week: we had a great day out on Whidbey Island with some internet friends (where I repeatedly failed to guess what mountain we were looking at then finally landed on Kulshan which I did not realize was an indigenous name for Mt. Baker)
Looking forward to: resting this weekend, busy week!
finally hooked up my 20-year old monitor as a secondary (I know monitors are cheap nowadays but $200 is $200 and hey, it still works 🤷♀️) — it flickered a bit at first but resetting to factory settings fixed it, back-compat is de-lovely
grabbed takeout and went to eat at the park one nice night
met with the window treatment people again to finalize color picks and get measurements for the exterior shade
had a moment of political despair so rerouted my feelings into advocacy — emailed State Parks about some inaccessible bathroom features I noticed and submitted a comment to the governor about Right to Repair bills
breakfast burrito + ginger beer (not a great combo)
Taco del Mar fish burrito — in college someone told me they got Irish food on Cinco de Mayo and Mexican on St. Patrick’s Day to avoid crowds, and since then I’ve generally followed that flip but this year we were going to get fish and chips from the Irish pub then were like burritos would cost half this
Moroccan-spiced chickpea soup from Let’s Do Lunch
black bean burgers + (overdone) curly fries — I recently hung a new smoke alarm that was meant to have fewer false positives but it’s gone off like five times in the past two weeks (these weren’t burned, just a little dark at the tips! 😤)
vegetable salad at a fancier than expected restaurant (conveniently had eaten a bunch of snacks right before)
pasta with premade sauce and chickpeas
Reading:
Read Compromised into a Scandalous Marriage by Lydia San Andres
Re-read Chasing Cassandra by Lisa Kleypas
Started reading More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner, The Plenitude of Distraction by Marina van Zuylen, and Cooking As Though You Might Cook Again by Daniel Licht
DNF’d The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond and Witch Hat Atelier 1 by Kamome Shirahama
Ordered and received The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan: Kurdistan, Woman’s Revolution and Democratic Confederalism by Abdullah Öcalan
I recently followed George Penney on Mastodon and have been charmed by their joyous slice of life observations from Aotearoa NZ
Pretty stuff I saw:
charmingly aesthetic barn at our friend’s Airbnb where we watched swallows hunting and a hummingbird zoom low across the lawn like something out of a kid’s cartoonsunset ferry ride home
New music I listened to:
Purity Ring – Obedear 👍
Nature notes:
camas in the ground are starting to bloom! (the camas in raised beds opened a week or two ago)
pink rhodie is starting to open
spotted a garter snake warming up on our front walk
saw a kildeer fly by at the park! 😍
saw a bunch of neat bird stuff out on Whidbey! Pigeon guillemots nesting in the cliff below Deception Pass bridge, a bald eagle landing on the road in front of us to grab something, a hummingbird drinking from madrone flowers, a kingfisher calling as it zipped by, an owl hooting at our friend’s Airbnb in the late afternoon
found a detached chiton (with creature still inside 😳) at Ebey’s Landing in the wrack line
Apple, as embodied by its leadership’s decisions over the past decade or more, no longer seems primarily motivated by the creation of great products. Time and time again, its policies have made its products worse for customers in exchange for more power, control, and, yes, money for Apple.
