Sitting in the sun on a windy autumn day, the sun warming and the wind chilling. On the best days, when the textures of the season become leather and the colors creep into the real world from behind your eyelids, the warmth and the chill are in balance. It’s a comforting thing, balance. I don’t… Continue reading

It’s very difficult, recently, to escape the flood of news stories about artificial intelligence, many of them created by the latest version of artificial intelligence. “AI” is an initialism now recognized by far too many people. When I say “latest version” of AI, artificial intelligence has been around by that name since the mid-1950s, and… Continue reading

Autumn has just begun in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s the most interesting season, for me at least, and it has its own feeling. It’s hard to put words to that feeling. Hart Crane, about a century ago, wrote Fear: The host, he says that all is wellAnd the fire-wood glow is bright;The food has a… Continue reading

I’ve noticed something over the past few years about the software I use at work. I’m referring to commercial stuff like Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, and the lot, “collaboration tools” like SharePoint, as well as more niche things that are more unique to the company I work for (which is a large enterprise). What I’ve… Continue reading

The American dream scape. A strange topology beneath the moon that our oddly faceless icons walked on, then abandoned, an issue suddenly as dead as the dust under their nasa boots. We Americans inhabit stories and myths, not reality. We’re fictional characters who believe ourselves to be real, but disbelieve the real world. We’re wraiths… Continue reading

When I was about three years old we lived in a little ranch house on a cul-de-sac. We were right at the end, and our driveway opened onto the round paved end of the street. There was no through or cross traffic, and I was allowed to ride my tricycle there. But it was down… Continue reading