Observation

If you want to the see the absolute worst in terms of entitlement, impatience, and outright stupidity that humanity has to offer, head to any Trader Joe’s grocery store on any weekend evening, 10 minutes before closing time.

And if you are looking for an employee who can work under intense pressure, has infinite patience, the ability to not cause himself a severe macular injury due to the eye rolling, and can untangle a Gordian knot of entitled people, hire the guy who directs the traffic in the parking lot.

Footnote for those that don’t get it: Trader Joe’s is an exceptionally popular independent grocery chain in some US states that has universally bad parking. Think of the parking lot as designed by a hungover frat boy turning in his assignment two hours past deadline, and just occasionally he gets to pair up in a group assignment with the smart kid in class who is able to draw a straight line and knows that automobiles are wider than 36 inches.

We were talking about version control systems and how far back we went and our different tricks to do version control with files that don’t like version control or projects that don’t use version control.

• Git
• Mercurial
• Perforce
• AlienBrain
• Visual SourceSafe
• SVN
• CVS
• RCS

Then you get in to numbered files. But this numbered file names still exists today. Even when you use version control. It gets especially bad in audio studios and creative agencies.

“Character-Map_test_final_for_goff_v2.psd”

“goff” no longer works at the company. We cannot remove “goff” from the filename because another programmer hard-coded a regex in a microservices Docker container of some back-end server code and the person who can fix it has too many OKR’s to meet already and responds with “it would take me longer to explain where to find it than to fix it myself.”

Side note: Every time an artist changes the filename of an asset in a project, somewhere a young, child-like programmer quits the games industry for good.

Then you get into 5+1/4″ floppy disks stored in colour coded boxes for the day of the week. This acts both as version control and backup system.

Interesting anecdote: When I was doing ZX Spectrum and C64 development, those machines were hooked up to a separate computer (either a RML 380Z or a BBC Micro) via a custom interface card. Write code on the Beeb or RML, download to Speccy or C64. I used to use two Atari ST computers or two CBM Amigas hooked up to each other for dev work on those platforms as well. Made backups, versioning and “oops, the game crashed and reset the machine” a lot easier to deal with. You didn’t care if your code crashed the machine or went into an infinite loop, you could simply reset the target machine, adjust your code, and download it again. And this is how we do modern console development too.

And then, for the 8-bit era, I get to the C15 audio cassettes with hand-written labels. stored in manila envelopes. Some of those tapes I still have as part of my “historical artifacts” collection from my early game development career.

I am sure there are people out there with tales of punched cards and paper tape, but I’m interested more in how version control was done in systems that didn’t have tooling to support it, rather than a “who is the oldest today” competition.

“Can you offer some insights in how other people might apply your approach? Are you a contractor? How can you tell if someone is offering a job of the sort you want, and how do you convince the gatekeepers you can do the work well?” asked the person on HackerNews

And I replied…

Sometimes I am a contractor.

Sometimes I am on W2.

I am a contractor right now.

Because the company is new.

But I will probably be W2 one day, very, very, very soon

Possibly tomorrow. Or by the next cheesey moon.

As to how?

I build “stuff.” Then I show “stuff” to them.

Them being people, them who run companies overly small and underly big.

It takes me to new jobs. Or brings in a gig.

I message everyone on LinkedIn. And at hackathons too.

And meetups, and greetups, and gatherings old and new.

Anywhere I can think of, I reach out to the them in the Bay,

and those NFT’d out weirdos down in L.A.

Sometimes directly in Frisco, and that one guy at Cisco.

And then them say “can you come here and work for us to build ‘stuff?'”

And we talk about fun things as I walk through the code.

And sometimes I find out, in the course of the day,

they are really building “it” which I’ve already before built,

and I say “no, not interested” and we go on our way.

Other times it turns out they want to build “it+that”

but they don’t know how to build “it”

but do know a world about that “that”

And somewhiles it is the other way round

They’ve got the shape of the problem

But not the geometrical bound

Sometimes the glue that bonds “it” and “that” doesn’t work

and I come up with some new formula for the glue that will stick

And somewhiles it don’t pay well, but it’s the problem I pick,

My career might seem strange to them that build “it”

But I’m happy for me, because I don’t I give a shit

I’ve talked with entrepreneurs, this that they’ll say:

“We’re planning on sending a Musk to the Moon”

But that Musk asks always impatiently ‘will it be soon?'”

Turns out they’re just building yet another crap app

And so I wave them away, it don’t sound like no fun,

“We need you”, they say, “we can’t get our math right”

“We’ve put Musk in the Sun!”

I’m always happiest when stacking “that” on to “it”

Sometimes I’ll add one, five or eleven to see what will fit

There’s an upper, upper limit of the stacked up that “that”

Sometimes it’s nine, more likely sometimes its four,

But if we just keep stacking, eventually I’ll look for the door

I once had a project where they’d divided “it” by zero

And I got to fix “it”, and look like the hero

And I’ll go to my grave, working each day

And my last words will be “I had fucking fun all the way!”

In the past 14 days I have received 90 recruiter messages.

Only three mentioned a salary, two of which were below market rate and equivalent to a 30% to 50% pay cut.

Only one, Madelyn Rainey whom I totally owe a follow-up email too, actually read my profile. Somebody who is totally worth knowing.

Of the 90 messages received, 67 were for junior to mid-level roles (1 to 4 years of experience), or front-end web development roles.

Of the 87 messages that did not have a slary range, after I enquired about compensation with succinct: “What’s the compensation range for this role?”

74 didn’t respond at all when I asked about compensation range. I was “ghosted” as they like to say.

10 asked me what I was looking for. Evaded and answered with a question. And then still didn’t respond when I asked again.

3 responded with a compensation range that was… a 20% to 50% pay cut.

In that same time frame we’ve interviewed five candidates for open vacancies and don’t have enough hours in the day right now to interview more.

I love the twisted, vitriolic narrative, and I especially like the hot-under-the-collar headlines of these articles.

All the headlines are taken from “respected” thought leader magazines or business websites such as Forbes, Inc, FastCompany, ChiefExecutive, HRExectuive, and there are thousands of these headlines, and the increase in them the past year has been like watching the hockey-stick on a unicorn.

All the words keyed up to make you (the reader) feel like “our” (the company) “employees” are the problem, the competing companies are stealing “our” valuable resources, we are in a war for “our” talent. We must “win” at all costs. We’re gonna try everything!!1!

It’s not us (the company).

Oh no.

We treat our valuable people fairly!

Lookit at how fair we’re being by generously trying to figure out how to get them to stay.

We’re like a family here!

But how dare “our” resources consider going with the money, or a less toxic environment, or realising there is more to life than being chained to a desk for 40+ years to only end up with a broken mind, or chained to a physical job for 40+ years only to end up with a broken body.

Our employees love us!

Newsflash: Employees, not people, not individuals, not a person, “employees”, humans who work for money to be able to live, are like cats, they “love” whoever feeds them the most and don’t treat them bad.

I think the pendulum swung a little too far the wrong way in the past four decades. And it is interesting to now watch those that got promoted and worked for a decade or two in such a system to now realise that the pendulum has swung a little further the other way. But you didn’t notice, because you were too happy with the status quo.

It’s like watching an abuser wake up one day only to find that the victim has an ex-Marine big brother with impulse control issues.

“Is the East coast (NYC primarily) becoming the new Silicon Valley?”

Always wanted to write a newspaper headline where the answer is a default “no.”

Okay, let’s lay some groundwork.

NYC has always had a healthy start-up ecosystem. And a lot of the fintech start-ups get their start in NYC natch. Because… well, because Wall St! Gravitational centers.

You want to be in technology? Silicon Valley!

You want to be in advertising? Madison Avenue!

You want to be in films? Hollywood!

You want to be in musicals? Broadway!

You want to marry your cousin where it’s socially acceptable? A… nyway, I digress.

Gravitational centers. NYC has always called to the FinTechs.

They call it the “The Great Resignation”, if you listen to narrative spun by those with an agenda. They call it also “The Great Migration”, if you listen to those with an axe to grind about California.

But here is a data point that doesn’t have an agenda driven by anything other than the need to hire software developers at funded start-ups and unicorns alike, US companies, basing themselves in NYC, and not just FinTech companies, that are hiring either in the US or the UK. With some hiring in Canada. There appears to be some bias against Canucks.

This is a subtle trend appearing on some job openings. You wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t paying attention.

English is the primary language of communication in the company. Lower wages in the UK. An untapped pool of educated software developers craving to get their paws on some of that sweet, sweet American lucre. No H1B visa applications. Only five hours time zone difference, which is not much worse than between NYC and SF.

And it is happening because of remote first tech companies. Outsourcing rarely saves costs, and for the most part, just makes for a worse product, especially in innovative tech areas. And it doesn’t matter where you outsource too.

Putting aside cultural and language differences, outsourcing brings a different incentive to the playing field that centers around things like “don’t piss off the client, just give them exactly what they want!” Outsourced companies (the vendor) become “people pleasers” in an abusive relationship with a sociopathic entity (the client). Every time. You’re lying to yourself if you deny that.

But if you just pull in employees, from regions that are culturally and liguinstically similar to yours, where, just because they speak English, you don’t have to explain what a snowman is, you can recruit from both regions.

The interesting thing I actually notice is that the compensation on offer is egalitarian. Same base money remuneration on both sides of the Atlantic. And the US company offering secondary benefits to US employees as the UK employees get by a matter of law.

I am not sure how long this trend line will continue, or whether the benefits and remuneration will skew inappropriately once less enlightened companies get in the mix. But it is an interesting data point.

There’s really four tiers of companies that hire software engineers:
1. Tech companies with global reach where engineers generate revenue
2. Tech start-ups that have limited funds
3. Non-tech companies (local & global) where engineers are considered a cost center
4. Local tech companies that are regionally limited

And we rarely, if ever, have a conversation about the differences between these types of companies, and how they structure compensation and the types of engineers they try to hire.

There is stratification in tech hiring, just like there was stratification in game development companies in the ’80s and ’90s. Similar but different.

I think this is a brewing crisis for many companies, and I think will start leading to a lot of dissatisfaction amongst employees. We’re already witnessing it here at the start of 2022, but what we’re seeing is just the tip, of the tip, of the iceberg.

I don’t know what the solution is, or how this is all going to play out, but I can make some pretty good guesses, and I am going to say, it isn’t going to be pretty for some companies, tech and non-tech that rely on tech, and immigration patterns both domestic and international.

The next few years in hiring are going to be extremely interesting.

“Oh, inflation isn’t that bad!”

I’ve got 19 years of records, of every item I’ve ever spent on groceries, every gallon of gas I’ve ever pumped in to what car, every killowatt consumed by appliances, insurance coverage, how much takeout food we’ve consumed, and a variety of other data points, and whilst my lifestyle has no doubt grown in the intervening two decades since I started tracking, and whilst I am also only a single household, our monthly household budget has gone from $5,700-ish in November 2019 to almost $8,000/month in February of 2022.

I can tell you how much I spent on milk in any given month in any given year for the past two decades, in what store the milk was purchased, how much was purchased, what day it was purchased on, and in what city it was purchased. And I can pull that data for every grocery item, every clothing item, every light bulb, and every set of guitar strings.

That’s a span of merely two years, yet our monthly expenditure has risen 38% in that time. We’re travelling less, we’re buying less non-edible household items, we’re driving less, we’re eating out less, and yet still our expenditure increases unabashedly at an unprecedented rate.

I cannot imagine what effect this is having on those families in a less privileged position, but when someone tells me that only just these past few months has inflation begun to rise rapidly my only comment is “Pull the other one mate, it’s got bells on.”

My take on negotiating, and yes, you should always negotiate.

You’ve probably heard this one before: “First one to state a number loses.”

No, the first one to accept the number loses. Let’s put aside the psychology of anchoring for the time being and just focus on numbers.

When someone reaches out to me with a “golden opportunity” my default response is “What’s the compensation range for this position?”

If the compensation is too low, or they try to sell me on the intangible benefits, or back load the compensation with deferred stock/bonuses, or the compensation range is spread too wide, that’s the start of the negotiation. I haven’t even interviewed yet.

If they respond with “what are you looking for?” I respond with “My base compensation is currently $X.”

Occasionally they’ll follow up with “Yeah, we could match that.” Or even worse “We could get close to that.”

*bzzzt*

Wrong!

I’m not looking to make a move just for you to match my current compensation. You have to get above it. I’ve already got a number in mind that can open the conversation.

It’s your job now to say the right combination of words that’ll pique my interest. “Get close to that” is not the magic combination of words.

My default position is “No” and I realise that is a privilege that many don’t have. But the negotiation before I even interview has already started, the negotiation is for you to come up with enough reasons for me to say “Yes.”

Companies employ people who are very strong negotiators who do that sort of thing a dozen times a day, and they have more information than I do about compensation, and they often subscribe to the “sunk cost fallacy” that a candidate, having passed the interviews will more readily say “Yes.”

Sorry, but no, I’ve bought too much shit at fleamarkets over the years that filled me with instant regret that I’ve gotten awful immune to sunk cost thinking.

Again, I realise this is a huge privilege that many don’t enjoy. But if you are willing to say “No” at any point in the negotiation process, for the tiniest detail, you have the strongest negotiating position in the room, then you can just hash out the details until you are willing to say “Yes.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t work for me, I’m going to take a rain check.” And then stonewall. People hate silence. And they hate being rejected. Those are your strongest and simplest to execute negotiation tools you have if you are bad at negotiating.
1. Rejection
2. Silence
3. “No”

Headline: “Meta might consider leaving Europe due to restrictive practices”

Actual truthful headline after reading article: “Meta/Facebook may leave Europe due to inability to exfiltrate European citizen’s personal data.”

Or said another way…

Cynical headline after stripping away the PR: “Large American company with major privacy issues that runs counter to European privacy laws and has studiously avoided paying its fair share of taxes for the past decade in Europe, threatens to leave Europe if Europe won’t change privacy laws specifically for company.”

There’s the door.

That’s your arse.

Probably best if one doesn’t hit the other on the way out.

Classic abuse situation if you think about it. I think I dated someone like that once.

This is a minor humblebrag, but also a bit of an egoboost for me: When your CEO lets you know that the highly regarded recruitment company made a recommendation to “poach this guy and get him in your company” and it turns out “this guy” is actually you.

Waiting to see if a random recruiter sends us any of our own C.V.s.

On another note, we’re hiring for senior positions!

Looking for a Linux firmware/device driver/embedded systems programmer, a ML/AI computer vision developer, a 3D engine game programmer, and an Unreal game programmer.

Bonus point! We don’t leetcode!

If you are trying to hire senior and lead software developers in a hot market, and find unique skillsets, and your interview loop lasts a month, and the candidate is still being given “exploratory chats” and still has no idea what their compensation is, of course you’re going to find it hard to hire.

Most developers aren’t looking, and those that are, if they’re any good, will have multiple offers and the windows of opportunity to execute on those active offers are rapidly closing for them. Candidates aren’t going to wait around on the off chance that you come through.

I still don’t understand this with companies complaining they cannot hire good developers. You’re squandering opportunities.

Dealing with recruiters and “talent managers” right now who are trying to insert unnecessary delays and hurdles in an already broken process.

When you accidentally cut from one camera track to another when editing multi camera footage in Premiere and insert a cut you didn’t want and it is too late to use the undo feature because you have made several more cuts since then, rather than setting the new clip after the cut back to the camera you want, e.g. “camera 1, camera 3, camera 2, camera 1, oops, that was supposed to be camera 1, camera 1, camera 2, camera 1”, you can instead easily delete the incorrect cut by clicking on the cut in the timeline, and hitting the delete key.

So long as you haven’t done a delete/ripple delete of the intervening video the removal of the accidental camera switch/hard cut is completely taken out.

Editing on eight synced cameras my Premiere timeline looks like the forearms of a goth chick at a Bright Eyes concert.

Have been doing a lot of optimization work for a couple of clients lately and a large majority of my billable hours break down in to “staring at a progress bar”, “figuring out why a progress bar isn’t moving fast enough” and “figuring out why the progress bar no longer moves.”

An interesting claim “We developed this helicopter in just six months.”

Designed? Or developed?

I suspect that certain aspects of the helicopter were designed and developed 10 times faster.

Or even faster than that.

But then many other aspects of the development took just as long.

The video claims, and we can assume based on other statements made by companies over the years that a modern helicopter takes five years of development work

Are we to presume that the entire endeavour was truly done in just six months?

This is their claim.

I don’t think it holds water.

Yes, I suspect the cockpit layout and some of the outer skin was designed in just six months.

VR speeds up the process of that because you don’t have to “cut metal” and then assemble everything.

You can figure out “does this part of the fuselage block the pilot’s view? Should we move it back a little?”

An IDE (Interactive Development Environment), an electronics circuit simulator, a 3D printer, Maya, Mudbox, ZBrush, Photoshop, and all of APIs and frameworks and extensions, along with many other tools that we have today enable us to perform magic that 40 years ago when I started my career would have been considered next to impossible.

To quote myself, “We could not build a modern computer or even the software to run on that modern computer fifty years ago because we did not have the tools to design the tools that would build the tools that would make the computer that would let us write the software.”

VR is an enabling technology.

I think VR and AR are going to change the landscape of how we design products.

It will enable engineers and designers to create products we cannot even yet dream of. VR, like all our other tools of wonder, will allow us to do ten times more things in the same amount of time it would take to do just one thing, and yes, somethings will be done ten times faster, but our pace of development, procurement, approval, and processes, no matter how fantastic the tool, will still have certain inherent limitations until we change those processes as well.

Shout out to Unity3D at 1:13 in the above video.

I believe there is a strong correlation between people who don’t pay attention in school and negative Amazon reviews.

Reading the reviews of magnets on Amazon is enlightening because what goes through my mind is “Magnets! How do they fucking work?!?”

I weep the for human race when someone applies a magnet to a “magnetic surface” like the thin metal wall of a refrigerator with a slick surface and then complain that the magnet cannot hold the rated weight. Or any weight.

I understand that not everyone is mechanically minded and the world is a complex and fascinating place of seeming juxtapositions but if you do not understand that magnets are stronger in one direction, and require something to adhere to that has substance, but weak in the sliding/shearing direction, or weak when sat on a thin ferrous metal surface, or don’t work at all with non-ferrous metals, then I can only conclude that you were not paying attention in science class in school because it is “boring.”

Also, if you had told me 30 years ago that hundreds of people would…

1. Leave detailed reviews, with explanatory pictures, of refrigerator magnets
2. Have people refute or support those reviews with further details and pictures and diagrams
3. Argue over the subtleties of the different types of magnets
4. And have a customer service representative answer questions about how to properly use the magnets

…I would have told you to put down the hash pipe and come back to the real world.

And yet, here we are.

Not only with glowing or damning reviews about a pack of magnets costing a few dollars, but me, thinking long and hard about the human condition of people who write reviews about magnets.

Long-ish personal anecdote.

Went to help my brother collect his new RV yesterday.

The drive wasn’t any longer than an SF to LA or SF to Portland run, which I’ve done quite literally hundreds of times, but oh boy, do I hurt today.

I feel like I have been hauling sheet goods back and forth in the workshop all day.

I don’t get that at all.

On the way home I stopped at Woodcraft and picked up some Freud router bits for some custom cabinetry I am building.

Which got me to thinking about intellectual property.

The packaging is obviously covered by copyright laws.

The user manual is covered by copyright laws.

How the packaging works is covered by patent law.

The Freud logo is covered by trademark law.

The router bits themselves are covered by no less…

than patent law for how they cut

than trademark law for their distinctive Freud red colour

than copyright law for the shape of the router profile.

And then all the trade secrets about how the cutter is forged, sharpened, the non-stick coating is bonded to the metal, and the tungsten-carbide is bonded to the edges of the cutting surface.

Which is crazy!

Once you throw away the accoutrement of the product, i.e. the manual, the storage carton, the sticky warning labels, what you are left with is a chunk of metal that were I to recklessly melt it down in the workshop would be worth just a few cents.

At what point does a lump of metal start to be protected by law once it has been shaped?

It is interesting to observe that throughout human history society has tried to engender gender into everyday things.

Girls and boys clothing

Girls and boys colours (pink and blue in the latter half of the 20th century in the west)

Girls and boys toys (cars and dolls)

Girls and boys words and speech patterns

Girls and boys cars (automobiles)

Girls and boys careers

Girls and boys sports

Girls and boys hobbies

Girls and boys room décor

Girls and boys technology (to a degree)

The only thing we have not yet separated, but have taken a darn few good stabs at, is food.

Probably because girls and boys, to a man, have universally said “Fuck your salad, stay the fuck away from my rare steak.”

Leave those kids alone!

Read that lengthy Atlantic article. I’ll wait. Read it? Good. Let’s proceed.

“That is insane.” was a common complaint.

Watch the documentary of “The Land” by Erin Davis and read the article.

At the end, my wife and I turned to each other and chorused.

“No! That is fucking awesome!”

I strongly believe we are heading to a crisis within American (and UK) industry, science and technology due to the over-protective parenting style.

We want better for our kids, and “better” equates as safer in a lot of our culture when it comes to our future.

But “safer” isn’t “better” when the outcome 40 years later is worse because we no longer have children who are now adults who are willing to take risks and “figure it out on their own.”

And then we lose.

We lose because future industry leaders in other cultures won’t have that risk averse nature.

We lose because future industry leaders in other cultures will be willing to figure it out on their own.

We lose because future industry leaders in other cultures are willing to experiment.

We lose because future industry leaders in other cultures are willing to set fire to things.

And we lose because future industry leaders understand that there isn’t anybody ready to swoop in and save them from themselves.

Getting good grades shows proficiency.

Getting a good grade doesn’t demonstrate to the world that you can effectively deploy what you have learned.

We would hope it does, but study after study has demonstrated that academic achievements bear little relation to later success in life.

I think education should concern itself more with teaching people how to apply an area of knowledge to solve a problem rather than just making sure the person has the knowledge.

The problem is, its very easy to teach a subject through rote learning and then test and measure a student’s recall of the lessons than it is to teach a student how to use knowledge and information to make the world better.

The easy option measures your ability to teach someone how to recall simple facts.

The hard option measures how effective the student can be after you have taught them to think.

 

If you want to purchase any appliance online, the search results from Google unfortunately look like a bunch of spam emails trying to sell you shit you don’t want by people who have never tried out the product.

I see two dramatic forces operating in the world.

On the one hand people are very interested in what their interests are and the global internet has facilitated that.

And on the other hand people are very interested in what their neighbours are getting up to and the global internet has facilitated that too.

We’ve always had these two forces going on.

Which way the needle is pointing is indicative of the level of fear within a culture that dictates what we’re using the global internet for.

I attribute my voracious book reading, movie watching and music listening habit to my first girlfriend.

Not because she was an inspiration to me.

But because she was an absolute fucking bitch who repeatedly belittled me for not being well-read nor culturally aware, and chastised me about how slow (of thought) and uneducated I was at the time.

*sigh* The crap we are willing to tolerate when we are young, stupid and in love.

I have to warn you now, eating fried onions and baked beans as a chaser to a raw fruit smoothie of berries and bananas is not an ideal combination.

Now I know what people mean when they say “I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.”

The chaser wasn’t intentional. I was cooking onions for tonight’s dinner of French Onion soup and having baked beans (on toast) for lunch.

After many years of studying a variety of subjects I have come to the conclusion that education itself isn’t inherently boring, it is the people that teach that make education boring.

I begin almost every blog post I write with “So which fucking retard decided…” and then riff on how something came to be, my observations about the situation, or what the perceived problem is.

Then I go back and remove the opening words.

Making sausages is not a pretty sight to behold, but the outcome of the process is often something tantalising and savoury.

The reason that I am good with kids is because by the end of the day I always make sure to give them back to their parents.

I’m the cool uncle/friend of family that just does the fun (and sometimes dangerous) stuff.

And we don’t have to clean up afterwards.

Now I understand why grandparents are loved so much.

It is amazing to me what you can purchase through Amazon.

I just ordered:

• A bag of cat litter
• Two op-amps
• A half-dozen titanium rods
• Two Cadbury’s chocolate bars from the UK
• A roll of 3D printer filament
• And an 8oz block of copper for machining.

Expected delivery is tomorrow morning.

Mind.

Blown.

Think about this…

There are children living in one of the most advanced societies in the world eating nothing but takeout or food that didn’t solely come from a box.

There are children who do not know what it is like to eat a meal where a large proportion of the food did not come from a can or a box.

There are children who do not know what it is like to eat a meal where everything was prepared from the basic ingredients.

When will the kitchen, the physical room, be considered an obsolete concept and just disappear from modern dwellings?

A bureaucracy may appear to be unassailable, but it is persistence that beats it every time.

The internet is filled with the cacophony of a billion people all screaming at the top of their lungs with lessons on how to do the simplest of things.

This street bazaar of the trivial and banal overlays a single lone whisper telling you how to do the complex and complicated.

Only poor people wear brands.

And only the vacuous care about them.

Amazon reviews are always enlightening.

I am always bemused by people expecting to get a professional $4,000 drill press for $140 that can drill titanium.

A professional kitchen/commercial food processor for $200 that can grade 4lb of cheese at once.

A top-of-the-line gaming laptop that will run Call of Duty on ultra settings for $600.

But then, just as absurd, are the reviewers unable to comprehend how to use a pack of pie weights for baking a pie dish correctly without a 30 page instruction manual.

The review of a standard 6ft HDMI cable with the author complaining that the instructions were not clear which end should go in the TV and which end goes in the DVD player leave me questioning their sanity and their veracity.

P.S. “It’s green, with shades of brown, and most of the shit you find there wants to kill you.”

The naivety on both ends of the age spectrum when it comes to digital privacy and digital security is one of those areas where we need better education.

Why aren’t we seeing PSA ads on TV and the internet about how to stay safe online?

About how not to download malware?

Where is our iconic tearful native cultural icon?

Where is our Schoolhouse Rock song for digital security?

Where is Sesame Street announcing that today’s episode was brought to you by the letters N, S and A?

Where the hell is LeVar Burton reading me a book on elliptic curve cryptography?

So many crappy memes and linkbait images on LinkedIn today I swore I had type in 9gag to the address bar.

I really do think LinkedIn is starting to turn the corner on its useful as a business network.

When you interrupt a programmer and they respond with “WHAT?!?” or don’t even pay attention to you, they’re not being rude to you.

Point 1: They probably haven’t even heard you.

But most importantly;

Point 2: That “WHAT?!?” any programmer who is focused on their task just responded with as though you are the last person on Earth they want to see, is actually the programmer restarting their speech centers.

Programmers, and all creators who get in the zone, and it even happens to people who deep read, cycle down the “polite discourse and capable speech for a functioning society” part of their brain when it is not being used. It’s a speech app that got unloaded from memory because it wasn’t needed. The first few seconds of responsiveness you get from someone in the zone are the primal speech patterns responding because they boot up faster and come on-line sooner. The “polite society” module takes longer to load (it’s really bloated because it was designed by committee) so the first responses can be an affront to what you consider “professional behaviour.”

You should no more expect a civil response, that part of a programmer’s brain just doesn’t exist at that moment, than you should expect a cat to show you affection – again, that part of the cat’s brain just doesn’t exist.

I honestly believe that most modern homes are designed by young architects who focus on sex more than utility.

I know this to be true because the master bedroom is large and impressive and convenient to having lots of sex (or at least, imagined sex if the architect had someone to have sex with) but is impractical for all other purposes.

It is the only explanation for wasting 20% to 25% of a home’s space to a place that you merely sleep in.

How to spot a fake service dog?

Is the dog leading or is the person leading?

If the dog is leading, especially when the person isn’t walking forward, i.e. the dog wants to move forward and lead the person, but the person doesn’t need to be lead, that is, they are capable of self-navigation, then it probably isn’t a service dog.

I judge people by their supposed service animals.

If you have a service animal in a jacket, with lots of patches, you are declaring to the world, service animal.

But I notice that the louder people declare something, the less true it usually is.

How to spot a “fake service dog?”

Watch the handler.

If the person handling the service dog isn’t treating the dog like a part of them, it is a sure bet that its not a service dog, though not always guaranteed.

It is so very easy these days to have an opinion on something.

I note that it is still quite difficult, though, to form one (an opinion) for yourself.

I have a love-hate relationship with service animals in the US.

On the one hand, love because I am able to have a trained anxiety service dog for PTSD which I never would have had access to in the UK.

Hate because everyone you meet has a service animal (most of them untrained), festooned in badges and patches and a garish little jacket declaring they are a service dog when the dog’s training is evidently deficient.

Do you vote for the vah-jay-jay?
Do you vote for the Jew?
Do you always end up voting,
For people like you?

Do you vote for the black?
Or the homo on crack?
Whether you live in a mansion
Or a rustic old shack
Who are you voting for?

Is it someone like you?
Someone like those?
Or someone like them?
Is it someone who walks funny
But can turn out their toes?
Who are you voting for?
You’re voting for you, that’s who!

The pollsters step out,
And the votes roll on in,
It doesn’t matter who else is voting,
For the radical, the incumbent, or a drinker named Drew
There’s only one way to vote and you’re voting for you

Who can shout loudest?
Who can talk longest?
Who can stand widest?
Whilst tapping their shoe?
Who are they voting for?
Are they voting for you?

Which way will the vote go, nobody knows,
Whether you elect you, me or them or those.
Or only elect these that can turn out their toes,
and maybe, just maybe, turn up their nose.

It doesn’t matter if you vote for a fox,
Or you cast your one vote for his little red box.
It doesn’t matter if you vote for a cat,
Or you tick your one vote because of his hat

It doesn’t matter which way you vote,
The only thing that you should really note,
Is that you just get out there, and vote!

P.S. If you’re offended, you’re the one with the problem.

…timing.

A really bad joke that was 20 years in making.

In today’s modern age, to put oneself out there publicly or creatively is to subject yourself to an unwelcome entourage of Fedora bearing internet denizens with both an opinion and a correction pen.

But I repeat myself.

Social media.

The place where everyone gets to have an opinion (valid or not) about your opinion (valid or not).

The gatekeepers of education have for a long time put a rubber stamp on the knowledge they have imparted to you.

Credentials show the world what you know. Even if you already knew it, that little piece of approval gives legitimacy to that knowledge.

But that little piece of paper doesn’t really show that you know it either. It merely indicates that you had the opportunity to be exposed to the knowledge at some point in time at some appointed location.

Slowly we have moved from “we will teach you more because we have greater knowledge (look at all of our books) than you can acquire on your own” to “your greater knowledge is irrelevant without our approval.”

When we wake up and stop paying homage to credentialism, the end for traditional verification of knowledge will come swiftly, and those institutions that are not willing to keep up, will also end swiftly.

When someone screams for equality, you only have to ask them one question to know if it is equality for just themselves or is it equality for everyone that they are seeking.

“Are you willing to step aside for a less-privileged minority than yourself?”

People used to keep diaries.

They would secretly hide their diary away.

And become positively murderous should anyone have the temerity to read the entries.

Now people put their entire lives online.

And get irate and depressed when people ignore them.