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Category: General

Notes: 2022-10-28

October 29, 2022
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Back in 1905, before the city was annexed by Seattle, Ballard had different street names. Different and better.

This is OK as creepypasta but it’s great as a parody of forum culture. “Please keep all pet-related talk confined to the appropriate subforum! Thanks!”

For my own reference, this is where you express interest in Letterboxd features and this is where you express interested in TMDB features. Letterboxd has a tricky tightrope to walk: more social features are good but would require more moderation and I think it’s a little bit undermoderated as it is. There’s a very slight spam problem.

Elon Musk, bless his heart, has chosen to lie to Twitter employees about his plans to cut 75% of the workforce. Dude, the Washington Post has the presentations. You just took a ten million dollar hit by firing the CEO instead of sidelining him for a year and paying him to sit at home. Be brave, tell the truth.

Notes: 2022-10-25

October 26, 2022
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The format of these is likely to change, but I do need someplace besides Twitter to dump random thoughts. We’ll see how this works. Thanks are owed to my pal Ginger for demonstrating the value of this sort of thing.

If you like music, Elizabeth Nelson’s piece on Marquee Moon is a must read. It’s such a perfect album made in such weird, imperfect circumstances. I learned not too long ago that those two “pantheonic instrumentalists of the 20th century” she mentions finally united on Matthew Sweet’s great three albums of the 1990s, starting with Girlfriend. Assuming that she meant Richard Lloyd as the first. It’s also worth checking out her band, Paranoid Style, which is as one might expect from the name.

My adolescent schooling trauma, such as it is (it’s not all that), was reawakened when I learned that a Sacramento teacher was just arrested for concealing a 15 year old kid for 2 years. Apparently she teaches at some kind of Waldorf-inspired public school? The lesson here is that you just can’t trust a Waldorf teacher’s judgement. I do wonder a bit if there’s not more to the story — real problems at home? But man, just letting a kid hide out is never going to be a wise solution.

I liked this interview with Scott Adkins. It serves as an introduction to the world of direct to video action movies, which is a pretty cool world if you ask me. I don’t care so much about whether or not John Hyams is an auteur; I just dig the never-ending stream of competent action movies with good fight scenes. It’s a bit like the hey day of Hong Kong action cinema.

Canlis Scavenger Hunt 2020

November 23, 2020
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The fine folks at Canlis, the only restaurant in Seattle where you have to wear a tie, ran a scavenger hunt last week as part of their Canlis Community College project. Prize was a $5,000 gift certificate. This attracted the attention of some of my Ingress pals, since driving around the city trying to figure out someone else’s plan is basically our core competency. The first four challenges, we did relatively horribly. But the final challenge, the one for all the marbles, that went differently.

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Solosocks

March 30, 2018
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It’s a personal blog, so it must be time for some minutiae of my personal life! Gonna get all 2005 around here. I’m gonna tell you about my socks.

Last year I picked up a bunch of Solosocks by way of Kickstarter. The gimmick is that they come in packs of 7 socks, and each sock has a slightly different pattern in the same general theme and color scheme. When you lose a sock in the dryer, it doesn’t matter.

My review is this: they’re a bit lightweight. Three months in I’ve already ripped a hole in the heel of one sock out of the 14 I bought. Other than that I like them a lot. They’re warm enough for Seattle winters, and if I’m going someplace colder, well, I have other socks available.

The larger sizes are sized large enough for big 11″ wide feet like mine. This beats the hell out of most interesting socks you can buy. Go Denmark.

Bag-Bound

May 10, 2014
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For nearly 20 years I didn’t have to do much business travel. These days life is different. When my trip frequency rose above once per month I evolved a bag strategy which is both imperfect and functional. It is also very heavy on the Tom Bihn gear, because I like his bags and I tend to stick with things that work well enough. Other companies also make great stuff; my former boss swears by WaterField bags, for example. Choice is awesome.

My general theme is simplicity. Painless packing is the single most important aspect of this whole thing so keeping it simple is important. Particularly when it comes to cables, I’ve often just bought an extra cable so I don’t worry about remembering to pick one up and carry it with me. This is useful to me because I’m really forgetful. I am, obviously, fortunate to be able to make that tradeoff.

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CopyrightX, Part 2

March 16, 2014
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Awesome first six weeks! At which point we had a major reorg at work and I went from doing architectural work and consulting to managing an awesome team of 20 people. No regrets, but it does mean I can’t work from home as effectively, particularly for the first couple of months as I get familiar with the team and vice versa. Thus, no more Friday AM sessions and I’ve had to drop out of the course.

On the other hand, I’m definitely finishing up the lectures, cause they’re awesome.

In general I think the course and the teaching methodology is good. The sessions are law school style as I understand it: lots of case studies and discussion on the finer points of philosophy and the law. The lectures are all on YouTube. This seems smart. Discussion could be a little fragmented since we had both voice and textual chat running in parallel. In my experience, text chat can drown out the voice in those cases: you’ve got 20 people typing and one person talking.

I’m also way interested in the idea of using the MOOC as an adjunct to a traditional course. Our section leader was I believe a student in the professor’s traditional course, running concurrently? That’s gotta be a great learning boost.

Anyway, bummed to be one of the percentage who dropped, but glad to have had the experience.

CopyrightX: Bryant’s First MOOC

January 30, 2014
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I got into CopyrightX! I’m very excited about this; it’s a subject near and dear to my heart and admission is competitive. The course begins this week with readings, a video lecture, and a discussion group on Friday. The syllabus is online, for the curious.

My discussion group looks fairly amazing. We have a couple of techies, at least one lawyer, an academic — really varied group in terms of age, careers, and especially location. Unsurprisingly, it’s a bunch of people who are good at expressing themselves with the written word. I’m finding myself excited about interacting with this bunch, which I didn’t really think about or expect.

I am going to try and blog along and talk about the material itself plus my thoughts on the online education methodologies. No promises but it seems like a good study aid. I’ll tag the posts as copyx and add a category if I can figure out the right one.