David Edgar's website

Kate Wagner, author of McMansion Hell, is sent by Road and Track, to do a piece on F1. Wagner has positive impressions of a driver, Lewis Hamilton, neutral impressions of the sport, and negative views of the rich, high-status people in the same audience areas as herself. Road and Track actually took the article off their website an hour after publishing it and at time of bookmarking there is very little context as for why. The explanations given by the editor in chief don't make much sense even to me, a non-media person.

• capitalism
• criticism
• culture
• formula1
• sport

Every time I encounter a seppo payment system that refuses to accept my four digit postcode I stop to wonder if banks just accept 90210 as a wildcard.

• figs
• preserve
• recipe

Nothing highlights the pure theatre of ISO 27001 quite like correctly answering all of the questions in the mandatory security training but being chased personally eight months later for not watching each second of the videos from which one was supposed to discover the answers to the questions.

I somehow seem to each year pick a side I kinda want to see win in the Super Bowl despite normally believing it is a very silly, boring sport.

NGL this year it’s the team whose victory will piss off the most Americans.

• Sport
• superbowl

I had a similar theory, about not caring about things more than the people who are intrinsically motivated to care. Mandy's make so much more sense.

• advice
• essay
• selfcare
• work

Clay Shirky (inorite) yammers on about finding ways to divert surplus brain cycles into something he considers productive. Feels like there is some morsels in it despite...you know...Shirky.

• productivity
• society

• fiction
• Omelas

• engineering
• leadership
• teams

• diy
• howto
• solar

I’m looking forward to receiving Atlassian’s study a dozen times today from people mad about the mandatory two days in the office.

They know, right...barbers? They can tell while cutting your hair whether you spend much time on it? It was when the guy pulled out the third different brush while frying my scalp underneath the blow dryer that I felt like saying to him "You know this is the only time for the next three months my hair is going to see any instrument other than my fingers, right?"

• diy
• howto
• solar

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/oct/31/michelangelo-secret-sketches-under-church-in-florence-open-to-public

Michelangelo hid from the Medicis.

In a tiny room beneath...... the Medici Chapels.

I was kind of disappointed to find it wasn't already noted in the Real Life examples of the Right Under Their Noses trope, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RightUnderTheirNoses

Part 2 of a response to the McKinsey developer productivity idea

• business
• management
• metrics
• software

I predict this article being very useful to me by the end of the year in order to fend off the McKinsey thing being applied to me

• business
• management
• metrics
• software

This fairly closely aligns with why I am having so much trouble using micro.blog, a service I have been paying for since the Kickstarter. Using it just doesn't align with my read of the idea of owning my own words (I mean, I guess content is the right term but it has such a gross meaning in our degraded, hustle-ised culture). When I think about ownership, I think of having control of it. But obviously when I put those words on someone else's service, I have ceded control. Sure, Manton seems like a nice guy. So does @shlee@aus.social. Nevertheless, I am giving them a bit of me every time I post to their databases.

• culture
• indieweb
• web

Looks at list of last books read. Hmmm

• The Martian
• The Library on Mount Char
• the entire fucking run of Murderbot Diaries

All of which are at least on their fourth go around. So comfort reading and competence porn.

Well, at least it got me out of my rut or not reading at all.

An understated call to action to reject the lure of "the global town square"; not the same stridency as Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" themed articles, but the same basic point.

• indieweb

A self-history on building S3 from a person who was there. The only thing I knew going into this was knowing the used Scrum as a project management tool. Not sure if it was the same person, but someone joined a Twitter Space run by Bryan Cantrill and defended the methodology on that basis. Which is not really here nor there.

• architecture
• software
• system
• web