I asked my coworkers today: We have terms for the children of your siblings, or the children of your children. What do you call the children of your work -friends?
I was satisfied with one colleague’s suggestion of “Coworker once removed.”
Then, many hours later, it dawned on me: Businiece (or the slightly less perfect, Businephew).
All in a day’s work.
If you start a timer on the macOS Clock application and close it, it keeps counting. Like, forever.
I’m up to 284 days. Apparently I started a new “lap” after a few months. Onward.
This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.
When I was a child, our family bought a coconut from the grocery store. It was a rare and exotic novelty.
We all gathered to try and access the strange and nourishing coconut milk trapped inside the huge hairy stone.
In a time before YouTube, we had to resort to our own ingenuity to open the coconut. We moved the operation out into our garage where we tried a hammer and nails. We tried a drill and screwdriver.
Eventually, we smashed the coconut open and watched as a tiny splash of coconut milk trickled out onto the dirty garage floor.
AI features keep popping up in all of the digital products I use. Figma, Photoshop, Notion, Zoom. These products tend to prompt acceptance of vague privacy terms that may or may not feed your private/company data into the AI slurry.
Figma added some AI generation tools into their FigJam product under a “Beta” caveat. I’m both impressed at how candid they are and troubled at how they are comfortable shipping a feature that requires such a warning:
“AI outputs can be misleading or wrong”
— FigJam product, which uses AI…
Also, if you ask the Photoshop’s AI-powered “Generative Fill” feature to draw something “with a transparent background”, it renders a messy checker-board background that is sometimes used to illustrate transparency.
Lots of power, lots of potential, lots of problems.
Nice cover of Nothing Compares 2 U by Choir! Choir! Choir! with Feist. Found via Kottke.
My distaste for band names with punctuation notwithstanding.
If you enjoy Canadian rock music from the past three decades, you may enjoy the Trans-Canada Highwaymen.
If you saw me laughing while walking home from one of my kids’ schools this week, it was because a podcast host said that the two subjects of his story:
“They go together like Jack & Meg White, or Ant-Man & The Wasp”.
Jonathan Goldstein in episode #54 of Heavyweight
I listened to the first episode of the season of the Dissection podcast dedicated to Radiohead’s In Rainbows album.
This first episode is a great recap of their career — appropriately over-simplified, but nicely presented as a coherent story (which it really isn’t). I’m optimistic about the rest of the season, but this opening episode is worth listening to regardless.
Thanks to Brad for the recommendation on Mastodon.
Naming things is hard, so I like to recognize clever and effective names for things. I’ve previously noted Ingrid the crossword app and WordTsar the WordStar clone.
Today, I acknowledge the punny genius of a vintage metronome/rhythm device for recording studios I learned of via a YouTube video. It was called the Russian Dragon. When you’re off-tempo in music, you’re either “rushing”, or you’re “dragging”. Get it?
See more examples of how naming things is hard.
While listening to this interview with comedian Maria Bamford, I laughed out loud when she shared her approach to charitable giving.
Maria Bamford gives 11% to charity, which is “one percent better than all Christians.”
Generous, sharp, and hilarious in one gesture.