Around 20 years ago, I used ThinkPad laptops. Back then, they were still IBM ThinkPads, not Lenovo. My primary workstation was always a laptop with an external mouse, keyboard, and display at my desk.

The ThinkPad laptops supported a docking Station you could physically ‘click’ your laptop into, and then everything on your desk was plugged into that docking station.

I remember thinking, back then, that someday we’d have a single cable you could plug in to your laptop and it would do everything. Display, power, audio, mouse/keyboard, would all run through one super cable.

Imagine the seconds I would save each morning when I plugged in my laptop! What a world it would be!

The future is now – and has been for a couple of years. I can plug a single USB-C cable into my laptop, and it gets power and connects to a display and an array of other peripherals.

Now that I live in this dream world, I look back on my past self and think: Dream bigger, nerd.

A staple of CBC Radio on PEI, Matt Rainnie, is retiring today. I’ve had the opportunity to speak to Matt on the radio a few times over the years (once about Firefox in 2004 and about music in 2019).

Matt was made for that radio hosting job. He was somehow genuinely curious about every person he spoke with. It didn’t seem to matter if they were talking about their music project, history, technology, or farming.

That curiosity kept his many thousands of conversations on the radio from ever feeling routine. It also made him easy to talk to for those of us being interviewed, who were often nervous and not gifted at speaking naturally in an unusual circumstance.

I can’t imagine a career where you were live on the radio every day for years. You can’t be late for that job. You can’t ‘phone it in’. That takes a special kind of person.

Thanks Matt!

My colleague (actually, let’s upgrade that right now to friend-and-colleague), Nikki, has written a delightful post on how and why she came to work at silverorange.

It was a near-miss, with her husband happening to catch a talk at a meet-up by one of our co-founders. I’m so glad Nikki found us.

Brad Sucks has a new album out! Congrats Brad. It’s great.

I’d start with Learning to Lie, which is a great song and has a robot-pickleball-themed video.

I managed to get my Canadian passport renewed before it expired, and not at the last minute in a panic before a trip.

I feel this is an achievement of “having it together” at a level that warrants a congratulatory note from the Prime Minister, like when you turn 120 years old.

It was fun to be featured on Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs series this month. Manuel asks bloggers a series of regular questions about they writing and process. He’s interviewed lots of great writers. I saw that my friend Peter Rukavina had done it, so I was in.

It’s a clever setup he’s got going: ask people who like to write (often about themselves) to write about themselves. I was happy to oblige.

You can read my full interview here: P&B: Steven Garrity

Conway’s law states that:

[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

I propose a new law, in accordance with Garrity’s Law of Eponymous Laws:

Garrity’s Law of Spreadsheets:

We are bound to create spreadsheets that reflect the structure of our own brain.

The only way to truly grok a spreadsheet is to make your own.

See Garrity’s Law of Eponymous Laws

🎵 I’ve looked at [young people having bad hair cuts] from both sides now… 🎵

My grandmother Mary Nantes (“Nanny”) died in 2018 at the age of 98. Her last name is now my middle name (Nantes). Yesterday, CBC Radio on PEI aired some archived interviews with her about life in the 1930s and 1940s.

It’s nice to hear her voice again, and interesting to hear how she and her nine siblings would write letters to Santa Clause, and burn them in the wood stove (so they’d go up the chimney – makes perfect sense).