The philosophy of the IT folks at my organization is “move fast and break things”

Move fast: add “implemented xyz technology” to my CV as fast as possible

Break things: the organizations tech stack.

I have been invited to a meeting at work titled “How to effectively schedule and hold meetings.”

By declining the meeting I feel I have mastered its core lessons.

When I was young I was not part of the monoculture. I didn't watch sports, or American Idol or Survivor or whathaveyou, so I never had any idea what was going on.

It's not that I wanted to be part of the monoculture, I didn't but sometimes it felt a little lonely not being able to talk about what everyone else was talking about.

Some people say the days of monoculture are over, but I don't think that is quite right. It is just the monoculture these days is participating in culture war bullshit. Something happens, usually on social media, and everyone takes a side. Everyone is still talking about the same thing, they are just yelling.

I am still not part of the monoculture, there is something happening about jeans and a model I think (I really don't care). But I feel less lonely these days.

My wife’s cat cannot tell time.
But he does know when it is 18:00

My wife’s cat cannot measure things
But he does know exactly how long her arms are.

I’ve noticed at work there are two types of retirement parties:

1) Parties for beloved coworkers that everyone will miss.
2) Parties for despised coworkers that everyone is glad are finally retiring.

It’s kind of interesting that type 2 parties are always happy events and type 1 parties are always a bit sad.

In a conversation about the social effects of some new or emerging technology I often here the bromide "technology is neutral." The idea being that some manifestation of tech has no intrinsic value.

Facebook is trying to bring a wearable AR product to market, it will record everything you look at and use facial recognition to track people around you. Facebook has a track record of being evil, so trying to defend the product by saying "well, Facebook might be bad, but technology is neither good nor bad" is not really making a point. Most of the time when people say "tech is neutral" you can justifiably add "but this current application will be bad" to the end of that sentence.

"Tech is neutral" is the least interesting thing you can say about the application of technology, and it is often used to avoid talking about the actual social problems tech can and does create.

I just lost a days worth of work because I had the audacity to include an equation in MS Word. Somehow that corrupted the docx file. I guess it happens when word tried to translate latex style markup to whatever jank it uses under the hood to format equations.

Unbelievably frustrating but also sort of fascinating. In my lifetime I’ve watched word descend from the obvious best choice for writing on a computer to a pile of laggy jank that just isn’t as useful as other options. Or maybe it just feels like that because I’ve learned better ways to use a pc since my high school days. In either case, office products seem to be the worst choice for most of the work I do. But I’m stuck using them because my colleagues don’t want to learn better tools. Bleg.