That number is “one”

Part of the impetus for this was a general retreat from engaging in the increasingly unpleasant social media sphere — but like the existence of this site in the first place, it’s honestly more an exercise in personal vanity than anything else.

Though it was mildly entertaining to dust off the old web scraping skills to semi-automate the retrieval of my words from various social media sites and older web forums back to this one. Facebook and Instagram made it easy, they have a reasonably good (though well-hidden) export feature.

What I did not do, and probably should have, is record the original source of each post. Not so I could include a link back to the original — they can probably survive without my trackback traffic — but so I could keep track of the different customs and mores from different sites in different eras.

(A “meme”, for example, on 2000s-era LiveJournal used to basically be one of a collection of writing prompts passed around between bloggers so they’d have something to blog about. Later on it became an image-based joke with text in Impact font. These days, of course, it counts as a nuanced political opinion. How things change.)

Some of this stuff was originally written for a private audience, so if you see me complaining about a freelance client know that I wasn’t publicly ranting in real time. I was privately ranting in real time. Very different. The passage of time has sufficiently anonymized the guilty parties — except in cases where that was myself — so I feel ok about hosting those in public here now.

Not that this really feels all that “public”: I know for a fact this site is read more frequently by bots than by humans. Hello, bots. These are some of the words that helped train you. Enjoy.

Anyway, that’s the update. I mention it mostly so that if something seems weirdly out of context, that’s because it is.

Other than doomscrolling, I mean.

Yep here it is, 2:21 and I’m just waiting around until 2:30.

NINE MINUTES TO CHECK THE MAILBOX HERE GOES FUN

Note to self: move mailbox three minutes farther from house

LLMs have no concept of truth or facts, but will just tell you what it “thinks” you want to hear. In this they are perhaps a perfect match for this modern age

Which is fair because I’m the one who broke it in the first place.

But then again that happened while I was fixing something else.

The same thing that broke this time around.

Anyway it all works now.

(How's that for a hook? Are you interested now?)

So I was a freelance developer for a very long time, mostly in distance learning. In 2003 and 2004, I did a gig for a major publisher, pretty much single-handedly building the front end for a tool that could generate customized websites for each of their titles -- it was a very early precursor to today's learning management systems.

Having taken a long round trip out of that industry and back again, I now work full-time for that same publisher, and just for fun thought I'd try to ask around and see if anyone remembered that old tool I built back in the day.

Friends: they're still using it. Prominently. Almost unaltered. The design is unbelievably dated, significant parts of the UI are broken, and there's still a "this feature is temporarily disabled" apology popup that I remember adding to one of the widgets a couple decades ago -- but it's still in use across a majority of their titles; subsidiary to their new products, but still in there as a top level link.

It predates git (we were using Concurrent Versioning System for code management; the "commit messages" are a string of comments at the top of each file). It predates browser support for PNGs. It predates jQuery. It predates HTML5. It *definitely* predates all current frameworks. Worst of all, it had the misfortune to be built during the years of The Great XML Delusion, when the entire industry suddenly became convinced that XML was the Way Things Should Be Done, so the entire front end was built as a gigantic wad of XSLT templates, a complicated and obsolete language that nobody in the present day wants to relearn (myself included!) Which probably goes some way towards explaining why the broken bits are still broken. Here's the best part: some years after I built it and moved on, I went to a UX conference with Kate Krolicki where one of the presentations was devoted to tearing that exact product apart from a usability point of view (I had introduced what I thought was a clever navigation mechanism, which turns out to not have been clear to a lot of users). So that was fun too.

I have found the person responsible for maintaining it and apologized. I should probably track down a generation of educators and students and apologize to them too.

All this is to say, to my tech-oriented friends: if you ever feel like your work is too ephemeral, that it'll all be replaced when the next framework fad sweeps in, if it ever seems like you're just building sandcastles that'll get washed away by the next tide.... remember that that's a good thing.

(On the other other hand, it now feels absolutely luxurious to be able to, y’know, turn on a light switch when it’s dark. Appreciating that. Also: hot baths. Those are nice. Thanks, universe)

The result was a little surprising; in hindsight I should have expected this, but the trick I’m using to put the circle off center didn’t carry over into the circle itself. When I do this on the hoops, irregular spacing of the anchor points can place the “eye” of the circle anywhere I choose — here that spacing controlled the position of the circle’s boundaries, but the tension from the colored thread pulls the anchor points into centered equilibrium inside the circle.