Blogfog
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Author! Author!
What is writing for? What matters, who wrote some text, or who reads it? One idea is that text — I’ll call it “literature” here — only matters, and only really exists as a significant entity at all when someone reads it. This is a key idea from “reader-response criticism,” a branch of literary theory.… Continue reading
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“Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it”
Does Elon Musk deserve a trillion dollars? Did he earn it in any way? My answer would be no, and I think I’m not alone. But let’s ratchet the scale down a bit. How about Tim Cook, CEO of Apple? According to the most recent SEC filing (required of publicly-traded companies), he was paid $74… Continue reading
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Unincorporating
My most recent employer recently decided the jobs I and many of my colleagues were doing no longer needed to be done. We had, of course, been doing exactly the work that same employer specified. We were doing it pretty well, too, judging by the performance reviews, bonus payments, and acclaim we were receiving. But… Continue reading
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The local and the flood
The local was washed away in the spew. You know the spew. It’s the relentless flood of information overwhelming us online. So much email the majority is automatically deleted. Same situation with text messages. Social media is even worse — there’s so much nobody can keep up with it, even though thanks to the automatic… Continue reading
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Design as divisive; design as inclusive
Among other pursuits, I’ve been a software interaction designer. That’s basically a user interface designer without doing the graphics. When I was doing interaction design, I always started from user research. In order to design something that works for users who are not like you, it’s critically important to learn about them. You start by… Continue reading
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Dark Tower indeed
The Dark Tower , Stephen King’s multivolume epic, takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting he describes with “the world had moved on.” Everything fell apart. Nobody knew why, but nearly everything people depended on simply stopped working and went into decline and decay. Full disclosure: I’ve read some of the series but not all of… Continue reading
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Writing and reading
I was reminded of the memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. I read it a few years ago, mostly because I found the title intriguing. What reminded me was this post from Herman Martinus, the developer and maintainer of Bear. He cited this passage from Murakami:“…I can’t grasp… Continue reading
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Why do we keep doing this?
I don’t know if it’s a uniquely American thing, or maybe a uniquely human thing, but damn, we fall for scams. All the time. Maybe it’s an off-the-charts ability that a few people have that make them able to come up with what they know is a lie, and get everybody within earshot to believe… Continue reading
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Contradictions
Terry Goodier’s essay The Boring Internet is all about the low level protocols that underpin Internet services. He points out that there’s nothing pretty or easy about protocols. And he points it out in a visual essay that’s lovely to see. The form of the essay and the form of its subject are a contradiction.… Continue reading
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The stepping stones and the flow
There are two kinds of digital places you can put your creations. In one of them, what you create remains and becomes a kind of stepping stone for crossing a stream. In the other, what you create disappears and becomes part of the stream, as if you’d poured a cup of water into a brook. … Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!