I’ve decided that only things I don’t care about can be automated by AI. Everything else needs to be careful crafted by artisans.
The manual for some dishwasher? Sure, have a robot whip it up. The manual for my dishwasher? That had better be hand-written by the engineers who built it.
The Web platform includes a CSS feature called prefers-reduced-motion to detect if a person’s device is set to reduce motion on screen. Seeing a window smoothly zoom out of an icon can help us understand where it came from. For some people, though, this motion is can trigger discomfort.
Whenever I sign into the RBC Web banking system, I wish there was a prefers-tasteful-motion.
On clear days at our family’s cottage on the eastern end of PEI’s North Shore, we have a view of the Hermanville / Clearspring wind farm. I take a small bit of comfort against climate nihilism when I see any of the large wind turbine installations and the spread of residential solar panels on PEI.
We’d been noticing that most of the windmills at the Hermanville installation haven’t been spinning this year. I was dismayed to read that, according to the CBC, “6 of 10 turbines out of commission” at the site.
I give the civil servants that are responsible for the operation of the site the benefit of the doubt that they’re doing what they can to get the turbines working again. In the meantime, though, it’s frustrating and sad to see such an important piece of public infrastructure sitting idle.
Maritime Electric (“a Fortis company”, as they like to remind us) needed to replace an aging power pole near our family cottage (the one with all of the woods). We weren’t around when they came to replace it, and we didn’t realize our clothesline was affixed to the old utility pole.
Instead of leaving our clothesline down on the lawn, which would have been understandable, the thoughtful crew left just enough of the old pole to hold up our clothesline.
I’ll be even more grateful tomorrow when we return from the beach with sandy wet towels and bathing suits in need of hanging.
Back in 2021 I wrote up a summary of the prospects for an electric minivan in Canada (and the US, as the market is similar). I added an update back in 2022 about how not much has changed.
Here’s your July 2023 update: no change.
There is still Toyota’s hybrid with their Sienna, but not a plug-in hybrid or full EV, and Chrysler’s plug-in hybrid version of the Pacifica, though availability is extremely limited.
For me today in Canada, there is still no feasible all-electric minivan.
Instead of waiting for a mythical EV minivan, we’re starting to relax our requirements and consider other (smaller) EV types.
This year at silverorange, the Web design and development company where I work, we welcomed Clare Raspopow as CEO of silverorange. Clare is the third person to take on the CEO role in our 24-year history, and the first who was not among the original founding partners in 1999.
Clare has been in the role since January. The nice benefit of making our public announcement after six months is that I already know (though I was always confident) that we found the right person.
Welcome Clare, and thanks to Isa, who did the job so well for the past 8 years.
While running a company for over two decades and successfully transitioning the leadership is a significant accomplishment, I’m also proud of the term we coined for this transition: The Clareification. Naming things is hard.
This explanation of the Monty Hall Problem by Lukas Mathis is the first that I’ve ever been able to understand intuitively.
People say it’s healthy to seek out change and new experiences in life. I’ve found that if you just stay in place long enough, you might just find that your favourite podcast changes their theme music. Voila, growth!
If the 1987 song Moonlight Desires by Gowan (YouTube) had been a track on Peter Gabriel’s 1986 album So, it would be held in as high regard as anything else on that album.
When you move a meeting “forward” (or “ahead”), or “back”, you realize that some of us see time as something that washes over us, and others see time as something one moves through.
So, the reason I missed your Zoom call is because we have a fundamentally different understanding of how we relate to the universe.