A friend of mine invited me to a bird walk at the botanical garden in San Francisco. The walk was organized by the Golden Gate Audubon Society so it was my first “formal” bird walk. We learned about birds, witnessed people being very excited about seeing a baby hawk, and…

Ben Werdmuller, writing about Priorities: Up to a point, acquiring more money is a necessary evil. We all need a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. But past that, money is an empty goal that can only be at the center of a meaningless life. I’m no…

Baldur Bjarnason on the crisis at Basecamp: A blanket ban on political discussions where there hadn’t been one previously only makes sense if you don’t trust the judgement of your employees. They demonstrated that they didn’t trust the employees’ ability to productively discuss the topic at work even when relevant to the task. A blanket ban on political discussions, especially these days, reminds me of abstinence education. It’s too rigid to work and will erode any trust built up at the company.

I’ve been reading a lot of takes about the January 6th insurrection. My favorite one is from the EFF: The decisions by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and others to suspend and/or block President Trump’s communications via their platforms is a simple exercise of their rights, under the First Amendment and…

Someone, or more likely something, out there in the surveillance world thinks I’m a senior. For years now I’ve been receiving mail from AARP and its adjacent services. If there’s a new clinic for seniors, they’ll make sure to mail me a card. They even followed me after I moved apartments! Most recently, the surveillance machinery figured out I speak Russian so I got this nice card offering help in renewing my Medicare. (Which I don’t have because I’m in my thirties.) They’re so close, and yet so far.

On the second day of the shelter in place order in Oakland, I went for a walk around Lake Merritt. Turned out I wasn’t the only one.

Or How to Improve Your Sleep by Dropping the Cascade — What happens when you drop the “C” from CSS? At Medium, we’ve been experimenting with a new way of using CSS to style our user interface components: a few months ago we started using small, atomic, and non-cascading classes instead of the usual BEM modifiers. …

Beautiful JavaScript is now available in Chinese! Thanks O'Reilly for sending me a copy.

Heaven and hell Suzuki told an old Chinese folk tale about the difference between heaven and hell. In hell everyone has very short arms. They sit around tables full of sumptuous food, trying to eat with very long chopsticks, but they can’t get the food in their mouths because chopsticks are too long and their arms too short. They try in agony to feed themselves, to no avail. In heaven everyone also has short arms, but everyone is feeding each other across the table and having a lovely time.