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A new form of hostile architecture: the chairless cafe / restaurant

Posted on May 15, 2024 | Leave a comment

According to wikipedia, “hostile architecture is an urban-design strategy that uses elements of the built environment to purposefully guide behavior. It often targets people who use or rely on public space more than others, such as youth, poor people, and homeless people, by restricting the physical behaviours they can engage in”.  Examples of this are ledges in cities with spikes or bumps on them so people cannot sit on them, or benches with extra dividers so people can’t sleep on them.

There’s a new form of hostile architecture that is subtler. I’ve noticed it has occurred after the pandemic. It comes in the form of fast food restaurants and cafes that make it impossible to sit and stay. As I noted in the photo taken above, Starbucks has returned to my area after closing up during the pandemic, but they have set up so it is next to impossible to sit and stay. They used to have similar places nearby that did have seating, but they’re all gone.

And it not just limited to Starbucks. A nearby McDonald’s had a place with seating and they stripped it all out and limited it to just a few stools. Likewise with the new Popeyes in the area.

What all these places want is take your money and move you along. While this may be good for them, the result is less places to get out and take a break in the neighborhood. Cities need more of these places, not less. Just like cities need benches to sit down on, cities need cafes and low cost restaurants that people can use to get out and see people and get a change in their environment.

I would advise you to patronize places that provide that experience and avoid places that do not. We need less hostile architecture in our cities, not more.

 

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Find your greatness

Posted on January 18, 2024 | Comments Off on Find your greatness

The ad on YouTube says: greatness is just something we made up. I’d refine that and say: the limitations on greatness is what we made up. In truth, there are endless ways to be great. Find your way to your greatness.

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Dead week, week 52, Janus week, the last week of the old before the first week of the new

Posted on December 27, 2023 | Comments Off on Dead week, week 52, Janus week, the last week of the old before the first week of the new

How to think about week 52, the last week of the old year before the first week of the new year? It’s a good question I’ve been considering since I read this post by Austin Kleon over on his substack: How I’m spending Dead Week. He states:

For years, I have dreaded the weird no man’s land between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Because I set my own hours around here, I never know what I should be doing. Should I be working? Should I rest? Should I do both? I was delighted when Meg sent me Helena Fitzgerald’s piece, “All Hail Dead Week, the Best Week of the Year.” Finally, a term I can use. “Dead Week!”  Fitzgerald says instead of dreading Dead Week, she looks forward to it all year long. She frames Dead Week as a “nothing time” in which nobody really expects that much of you and nothing you do matters that much.

Ha! That’s one way to look at it! I think it especially good if your year has had you burning the candle at both ends….use that week to let the candle burn out! Rest and recuperate, I say. Read some books. Take some baths! Grabs some naps. Let things slide.

I also think of the week as Janus week. As wikipedia explains:

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus  is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces. The month of January is named for Janus (Ianuarius).

That’s how I like to use the week. There’s lots to look back upon and consider during that time. Indeed, it’s hard not to, as media of all kinds publish their Bests of 2023 lists on every topic you can think of. And while it is fine to contemplate the year that past — and I recommend you do —  it’s also a good time to think about what you will do in the new year. So do that too. Like Janus, look backwards and forwards simulataneously.

So while it is a dead week for some, for others like myself it is a transition week where the old goes out and the new comes in and I prepare myself accordingly. Does this mean I am discouraging you from hot baths, trashy TV and Christmas leftovers? Not at all. I think there is room for both in this, the last week of the year.

Enjoy week 52, however you go about it. Your earned some rest, and then some.

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Forty things that have changed in IT and IBM in the last forty years (from 1983 to 2023)

Posted on October 3, 2023 | 2 comments

If you were to ask me, on this day, what has changed with regards to computers and IT and IBM in the last 40 years, I would say it’s this:

  1. Access: Very few people had access to computers 40 years ago. Those folks used mainframes, minicomputers and the occasional personal computer from Commodore or Radio Shack or this new start up called Apple. Now everyone has access to a computer they carry around in their pocket. (We call it a smart phone, but it’s really a powerful computer that makes calls.)
  2. Ubiquity: Back in the early 80s the vision of everyone having a computer / terminal on your desk was just that: a vision. The few that did have these big monster 3277 or 3298 metal terminals or if you were lucky, a 3279-color terminal. People worked on paper.
  3. email: One of the drivers of having a terminal on your desktop was to access email. Back then IBM’s email system was called PROFS (Professional Office System) and it meant you no longer had to send you three-part memos (yes people did that with carbon paper between the memo paper, so you could give the cc (carbon copy) to someone else). You sent electronic mail instead. Everyone thought it was great. Who knew?
  4. Viruses: Viruses were new. My first was called the CHRISMA exec. In those days every Christmas people would send around runnable scripts (ie. Execs) and they would be the equivalent of digital Christmas cards. Digital Christmas card came from outside IBM. It read your address book and send itself to all the people you knew. Sounds like fun. In fact it overwhelmed the IBM networks and IBMers around the world had to shut most things down to try to purge the network of this thing. It took days. Not fun.
  5. Networks: Companies sometimes had their own networks: IBM had one called VNET. VNET connected all of IBM’s computers worldwide, and it had connection points with outside networks like BITNET too, which is where the CHRISTMA exec was. There was no Internet per se.
  6. Network size: IBM’s VNET had over 1000 VM computers all connected to each other. All of them had an id called OP which was what system operators used to sometimes control the VM mainframe. Once on second shift another system operator and I wrote a program to messages all 1000+ ops in the world the equalivant of “hi hows it going”. To our surprised many of them wrote back! We manually started messaging them back and even became friends with some of them over time. It was like twitter before twitter or gchat before gcchat, etc.
  7. Documentation: Computer documentation was hard to come by, and if you had any, you might hide it in your desk so no one else could take it. The operators had a special rack of documentation next to where they worked. I was thrilled in the 90s when you could walk into a bookstore and actually buy books that explained how things worked rather than having to get permission from your manager to order a Redbook from IBM publishing in the US.
  8. Education: In the 80s you could get a job in IBM operations with a high school diploma. Universities in Canada were just ramping up degree programs in computer science. By the start of the 90s most new hires I knew had at least a university degree and more likely a comp sci or engineering degree.
  9. Software: We take Microsoft’s dominance in software for granted, but back then Lotus’s 123 was the spreadsheet program we used, and others used Wordstar or Wordperfect for word processing. Microsoft worked very hard to dominate in that space, but in 1984 when the ads for Macintosh came out, Gates was just one of three people in the ad touting that their software ran on a Mac.
  10. Minicomputers: In between the time of the mainframe and PC, there was the rise of minicomputers. DEC in particular had minicomputers like the VAX systems that gave IBM a run for the money. IBM countered with machines like the 4300 series and the AS/400. All that would be pushed to the site by….
  11. IBM’s PC: The first truly personal computer that had mass adoption was the IBM PC. A rather massive metal box with a small TV on top, it could run the killer apps like Lotus 123. Just as importantly, it could run a terminal emulator, which meant you could get rid of old terminals like the 3270 series and just give everyone a PC instead. Soon everyone I worked with had a PC on their desk.
  12. Modems: modems in the 1980s were as big as a suitcase. If a client wanted one, an IBM specialist would go their location and install one for you. In the 90s people got personal modems from companies that sent data at 9600 bps or 14000 bps or even 56 kbps! Today people have devices the size of a book sitting at home and providing them with speeds unthinkable back then.
  13. Answering machines: The other thing people used to have on their desks besides a PC was an answering machine. Before that every office had a secretary. If you weren’t at your desk the call would go to them and they would take the message. If you had been away for a time you would stop by their desk and get any slips of paper with the name and numbers of people to call back. Answering machines did away with all that.
  14. Paper planners: Once you did call someone back, you would get out your day runner / planner and try to arrange a meeting time with them. Once a year you would buy new paper for it so you could keep track of things for the new year. In its heyday your planner was a key bit of information technology: it was just in paper form.
  15. Ashtrays and offices: it may seem hard to believe but back then smoking in the office was common, and many people smoked at their desk. It was a long and hard process to eliminate this. First there was smokeless ashtrays, then smoking areas, then finally smokers had to smoke outside, then smoke in areas well away from the main door. Likewise people worked in cubicles. It was miles away from working at places like Google or WeWork, never mind working from home.
  16. The rise of Microsoft and the decline of IBM: The success of the IBM PC lead to the success of Microsoft. The adoption of MS-DOS as the operating system for the IBM PC was a stroke of luck for Microsoft and Bill Gates. It could have easily been CP/M or some other OS. With the rise of Microsoft and the personal computer, IBM started to lose its dominance. IBM’s proprietary technologies like OS/2 and TokenRing were no match for DOS / Windows or Ethernet. IBM did better than some computer companies like Wang, but it’s days of being number one were to be over.
  17. The role of the PC: for a time in the 80s you could be a company and not have computers. Paper and phones were all you needed. We used to say that companies that used computers would beat any competitors not using computers. And that became the case by the end of the decade.
  18. The rise and fall of AI: now AI is hot, but in the late 80s and early 90s it was also hot. Back then companies were building AI using languages like LISP and Prolog, or using specialized software like IBM’s Expert Systems Environment to build smart tech. It all seemed so promising until it wasn’t.
  19. LANs: all these PCs sitting on people’s desks needed a way to talk to each other. Companies like Microsoft released technology like Windows for Workgroups to interconnect PCs. Office had servers and server rooms with shared disks where people could store files.
  20. The rise of Ethernet: there were several ways to set up local networks back then. IBM had its token ring technology. So did others. It didn’t matter. Eventually Ethernet became dominant and everywhere.
  21. Email for everyone: just as everyone got PCs and network access, in the 90s eventually everyone got mail. Companies ditched physical mail and FAXes for the speed and ease of electronic mail, be it from AOL or Compuserve or someone else.
  22. Network computers: one thing that made personal computers more cost effective in the 90s for people was a specialized computer: the network computer. It was a small unit that was not unlike a terminal, and it was much cheaper for business than a PC. To compete, the prices of PCs soon dropped dramatically and the demand for the network computer died off.
  23. EDI: another thing that was big for a time in the 90s was EDI. IBM had a special network that ran special software that allowed companies to share information with each other using EDI. At one point IBM charged companies $10/hour to use it. Then the Internet rose up and ISPs charged companies $30/month and suddenly EDI could not compete with a PC using a dialup modem and FTP software provided by their ISP.
  24. Electronic banking: with personal computers and modems becoming common in homes, banks wanted to offer electronic banking to them. Some banks like the Bank of Montreal even established a specialized bank, mbanx, that was only online. Part of my job in the 90s was to help banks create the software they would give out to allow their customers to do banking via a private network. While most banks kept their branches, most day to day banking now happened online.
  25. The Internet and the web: if the PC changed everything in the 80s, the Internet changed everything in the 90s. Suddenly ISPs were springing up everywhere. Even IBM was an ISP for a time. People were scrambling to get software to allow them to connect their PC and US Robotics 14.4 kbps modems to access FTP sites and Usenet and more. No sooner did this happen than the World Wide Web and browsers bust on the scene. For many people, the Web was the Internet. So long Gopher; goodbye WAIS.
  26. Google: finding things on the Internet was no easy thing. It only got worse as web sites shot up everywhere. Google changed the Web and made it usable. They changed email too. Sites like Yahoo! Wanted to make you pay for more storage: Google gave people more storage than they could ever need.
  27. From desktops to laptops: with home networks in place, people wanted to be able to bring home their computers to work remotely. I used to have a luggable computer that weighed 40 pounds that I would bring back and forth daily. As more people did this, computer companies got smart and made the portable computers smaller and better. Apple was especially good at this, but so was IBM with their Thinkpad models. As time went by, the computer you used at work became a laptop you use to work everywhere.
  28. The Palm Pilot: the Palm Pilot succeeded where Apple and others had failed. They had come up with a device you could use to track your calendar, take notes, and more. All you had to do was put it in a cradle and press the sync button and everything would be loaded onto your PC. Bye bye paper planners. Hello Personal Digital Assistant.
  29. IBM Services: One time IBM gave away its services. By the 90s they had a full one line of business devoted to providing their people to clients to help them with their business. People like me moved from helping run IBM’s data centers to going around to our clients helping them run their data centers and more.
  30. Y2K: if Y2K was a non-event, it was only because of the countless hours put in by techies to make it one. Even me. I was shocked to discover that EDI software I wrote for a Quebec bank in 1992 was still running on PC/DOS computers in 1999. It was quickly rewritten before the deadline to keep running on January 1, 2000. Just like countless software worldwide.
  31. E-business: if PCs changed business in a big way in the 80s, e-business changed them in a big way in the 90s. Even with the dot com era crash, there was no going back. With e-banking your retail branch was open 24/7; with e-business, the same was true of your favorite local (or non-local) business.
  32. The resurrection of Apple and Steve Jobs: two things transformed IT and made it cool: one was the Web and two was the return of Jobs to Apple.  Boring beige boxes were out: cool colored Macs made for the Internet were in. People were designing beautiful web sites with red and yellow and blue iMacs.And the success of those iMac led the way to the success of the iPod, and the success of the iPod led to so much more.
  33. Blackberry and dominance of smartphones: if the Palm Pilot got mobile computing started, the Blackberry accelerated that. Email, texting, and more meant that just like online banking and e-business, you were reachable 24/7. And not just reachable the way you were with a pager/beeper. Now you could reply instantly. All the computer you needed fit in your hand.
  34. The decline of analog: with the rise of all this computing came the decline of anything analog. I used to buy a newspaper every day I would commute to work. People would bring magazines or books to read. If you wanted to watch a film or listen to a song, it depended on something physical. No longer.
  35. The rise of Unix/Linux: you use Unix/Linux every day, you just don’t know it. The web servers you use, the Android device you make calls on, the Mac you write emails on: they all depend on Unix/Linux. Once something only highly technical people would use on devices like Sun computers or IBM pSeries machines is now on every device and everywhere.
  36. Open Source: in the 90s if you wanted software to run a web server, you might pay Netscape $10,000 for the software licence you needed. Quickly most people switched to the free and open source Apache web server software to do the same job. This happened over and over in the software world. Want to make a document or a spreadsheet? You could get a free version of that somewhere. For any type of software, there is an open source version of it somewhere.
  37. Outsourcing/offshore: if people could work from anywhere now, then the work that was done locally could now be done anywhere. And it increasingly was. No one locally does the job I did when I first started in the computer industry: it’s all done offshore.
  38. The Cloud: if work could be done anywhere by anyone, then the computers needed to do it could be the same. Why run your own data center when Amazon or Microsoft or IBM or Google could do it better than most? Why buy a computer when you only need it for an hour or a day? Why indeed?
  39. The return of AI: finally, AI has returned after a long time being dormant, and this time it’s not going to be something used by a few. Now everyone can use it and be more productive, smarter. Like the PC or the Internet before it, AI could be the next big thing.
  40. Web 2.0/Social Media: One thing to insert in between the Internet and AI in terms of groundbreaking changes in IT is Social Media. Both public social media like this and private social media like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Without social media I couldn’t share this with you.

In 40 years the devices have gotten smaller, the networks have gotten bigger, and the software has gotten smarter. Plus it’s all so much cheaper. If I had to sum it up, I’d say that sums up all the changes that have happened in the last 40 years. And we are just getting started.

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Before there was “Stop Making Sense”, there was Talking Heads on Letterman

Posted on September 16, 2023 | Comments Off on Before there was “Stop Making Sense”, there was Talking Heads on Letterman

Somewhere in between June 1st, 1983 when the album Speaking in Tongues was released and December, 1983 when “Stop Making Sense” was filmed, Talking Heads and their extended band went on David Letterman to perform two of their songs: “Burning Down the House” and “I Zimbra”.

If you are a fan of the film, you’ll enjoy these two performances. Already you can see echoes of what will you will see in the show. Indeed, other than Dolette McDonald being replaced by Edna Holt, everyone on stage at Letterman appears in the film.

That was televised in the beginning of July, one month after the record was released. Already the band is pretty tight. They had months of shows to do before Jonathan Demme started filming. No wonder the performances in the film were superb.

As for “I Zimbra”, if you think you hadn’t seen it in the original concert film, you’d be correct. The band did perform it, and it was intended to be in the film, but it was taken out. Good news, it is included in the recent rerelease of the film (which I wrote about, here).

Here’s “I Zimbra”

and here’s “Burning Down the House”

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Stop Making Sense! (Some thoughts on the newly released classic)

Posted on September 15, 2023 | 1 comment

“Stop Making Sense” is making a comeback this September, 40 years after it’s initial release. There’s an expanded audio album out today, and a new version of the film premiered at TIFF this Monday.

To some it may seem like a comeback, but for many like me, it never left. This film has meant so much to me in my life: it’s like a good friend I met in college who stayed close to me four decades later. I can watch it any time, anywhere, and I often have since it first came out. Unlike me, it’s timeless, even four decades later.

But don’t just take my word on it. Read this great piece by Jon Pareles in The New York Times, Talking Heads on the Return of ‘Stop Making Sense’, and you should see why I think so highly of it.

One thing he seems to bypass that makes the film great is the fact that it was directed by Jonathan Demme. Demme was coming into his own when he filmed it, not unlike Martin Scorsese was when he made “The Last Waltz” with the Band. His talent is what transforms a great show into a great film. Later Demme went on to make other concert films of Neil Young and Justin Timberlake, but neither of those had the impact that “Stop Making Sense” did. You need a groundbreaking show for that.

And it was groundbreaking. Before the cameras start, David Byrne already had a vision of what it would be like. He had been gathering ideas from other artists like Robert Wilson (whose lighting designer, Beverly Emmons, he used) and Twyla Tharp (worked with her on The Catherine Wheel), not to mention Japanese Kabuki theatre (where he got the idea for the Big Suit).  He had a vision of how everyone should look on stage (dressed in drab grays). He had a storyboard for each song performed. And while he didn’t have a choreographer, he had a ton of talented performers who brought their own moves to the performance. All that, combined with the narrative of the film, makes it compelling to watch.

Pareles believes the narrative is…”of a freaked-out loner who eventually finds joy in community. The concert starts with Byrne singing “Psycho Killer” alone, to a drum-machine track, with a sociopathic stare. By the end of the show, he’s surrounded by singing, dancing, smiling musicians and singers, carried by one groove after another.” And that is partially the narrative.  But it’s also a narrative of the band itself, a story of a small stiff group of “slightly angsty white” art school students that grew into a large ensemble capable of fluidly and energetically incorporating punk, funk, new age, world, R&B…you name it…onto one stage for 90 minutes of eclectic dance music. It’s smart, it’s gotta beat, and you can dance to it.

If you think of “Stop Making Sense” as a documentary or an art piece, you’ll be missing out on the fun. And fun it is. It’s been playing off and on at the Bloor Cinema / Hot Doc cinema on Bloor near Bathurst in Toronto since the time it came out, and everytime people go they treat it as more like a concert than a film. If you ever have the chance to see the it in that theatre, grab a ticket and an adult beverage and you’ll see what I mean.

I think the film is best described by the second song in the film, “Heaven”. Just like in song, the band in this film plays your favorite song. Everyone is there. When the film is over, everyone leaves, only to return to the next showing of it. It plays again, exactly the same. It will not be any different. Byrne wrote, “It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all, could be so exciting, could be so much fun”. And yet it is. The film is heaven to me.

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My first year of the pandemic as told in Instagram stories

Posted on April 17, 2023 | Comments Off on My first year of the pandemic as told in Instagram stories

Instagram stories are an odd thing, at least mine are. I post almost random images of things in my life, not thinking they add up to anything. But if you are living through a dramatic period of time like the first year of the pandemic, and if you collect those images together, as I did here in “Covid: Year 1”, they take on a narrative that was not there when you snapped them and saved them.

The narrative began even before the pandemic was declared. I have photos of me going to Chinatown and eating in many places, because word had gone out that a new illness had broken out in Wuhan, China and people were avoiding that part of the city because people were afraid of coming across someone who had it and then get sick. I was down there to do a small part in keeping some of those places in business by eating as much as I could. (Brave, I know 😊.)

Soon, general precautions started. Hand sanitizer was everywhere, like this one at my work:

Then the pandemic was officially declared in March 2020 and things started to break down. I have photos of the grocery stores being cleared out of flour and potatoes. Toilet paper was scarce. People were queueing up to get into grocers and the liquor store, which both had limited occupancy. Plastic barriers went up, and everything else was shutdown: work, restaurants, stores, gyms. It was a time of lockdown.

To occupy ourselves, we adopted hobbies. People made bread. I drew and made zines. I even wrote some half decent poems.  I continued to blog, and traffic shot up.

We worked at home. Every damn day. Our hair grew long. We finally got masks to go shop for food.

We ordered take out. Lots and lots of take out.  Restaurants pivoted to this to stay alive. Some, like my favorite restaurant Brothers, didn’t make it. Many did, due to hard work and help from the government. We drank pet nat and cremant to celebrate.

In summer we finally ate outside, albeit like this:

Eventually we got to eat indoors for a bit in the fall. Otherwise, if we wanted to celebrate birthdays or Easter, we did it with people in our circle. Collecting with others outside our circle was frowned upon.

We purged our homes to make space. I had a garage sale, and was surprised by the people who showed up and bought things. We were awkwardly happy to see each other, and dealt with money for the first time in ages.

We made the best of it. We watched the blossoms in High Park in Toronto via a TV channel. We watched our talented friends put on shows on Instagram and Youtube and Twitch. We walked on streets closed off to traffic. We banged pots and pans for health care workers. We did not go to the movies, even though the movies tried to open in the summer of that first year.

We downloaded apps to keep track of COVID and to know what to do. We downloaded apps to finally travel in the fall. We wore our masks everywhere. We wore sweat pants almost as much, if not more.

We dealt with bad people. The anti-maskers. The anti-science people. We celebrated when Trump lost.

If we were parents, we tried our best to help our kids. We took them out on Hallowe’en and let them get treats delivered by chutes. We made them get up for virtual classes via Zoom and other technologies. We ordered them Christmas presents online because the stores remained closed in many places like Toronto.

Most of all, we awaited the coming of vaccines and yearned for a normal time. For many, it was the worst of times, losing their livelihoods and their loved ones. Getting ill. For some, it could also be the best of times, as it often was with me.

It was quite the year. Historic. Memorable.

P.S. I wrote at the beginning of 2021 the following post: On recording (why you should think about it differently, why you should resolve to do it), and closed by saying:

Your life has value and meaning. Recordings help show that. So get making them.

I hope you do that, in some form or another. Even if it is a collection of stories on Instagram. It all counts, just as you do.

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I started tracking a group of users to see if Twitter usage was declining and twitter was dying… I was surprised by what I found

Posted on April 2, 2023 | Comments Off on I started tracking a group of users to see if Twitter usage was declining and twitter was dying… I was surprised by what I found

Like many people, I thought twitter usage was going to decline in 2023 due to all of the shenanigans of Elon Musk. While it seemed like usage was dropping off, I wanted to take some measurements to be certain.

To measure usage, I started by creating a list called good_twitter. It contained 98 accounts. I figured if the users on this list stopped tweeting, I would stop too. Then I wrote some python code to call twitter’s API and count the number of times each person on the list tweeted. I started counting at the beginning of January.

My first thought was that people would tweet less and less each day. However, as you can see from this chart below, on average the people on my list tweet around 250 times / day. Some days it’s over 350, some days it drops to around 150. (And one day my program died and I only counted 50. :)) So people are not tweeting less as time goes by.

My second thought was that some people were dropping off, but other people on the list were tweeting more, and hence the total amount of tweets was not dropping. To measure this, I counted how many people on my list tweeted once or more per day.  The chart below shows approximately 50% of the 98 people on the list tweet at least once a day.

Given these two results, my final thought is that people are not giving up on twitter, even with all the problems we all have with it. I found that surprising. I expected a big decline initially. Then I expected a gradual decline. I don’t see either.

I don’t know why only 50% of users in the good_twitter list tweet while the other 50% does not. I am sure some people have quit twitter. But the hard core — like me — seem to be sticking around.

P.S. A fascinating byproduct of this study is how individuals tweet. I would have thought everyone uses twitter the same way. Wrong! Look at this chart below:

It turns out most people on my good_twitter list (and me) tweet/retweet 0-10 times a day. We are all part of the Long Tail to the right.

However there are two other types of people on the short end of the tail to the left. There are power users who tweet/retweet between 20-50 times a day every day. And there are a number of super users who tweet/retweet 50-100 times a day. (Power and super users are my nicknames.)

Some of the power users are obvious: they are mainly news and government accounts. Less obvious ones tend to be activists. They use twitter as a soapbox, pulpit, what have you. I have a few super users I follow: Shawn Micallef, Anthony DeRosa,  Deray and a couple more. For power and super  users,  retweets make up most of that content.

All that said, it’s been an interesting experiment, but I am not sure if I will continue to track usage. It may not be up to me: I expect Musk and company will turn off my free access to the API, and that will be that. And I am satisfied with my final thought that usage is staying constant for now.

Like any study, YMMV. But besides my good_twitter list, I also measured a few of my shorter lists and I found roughly the same result: at least half of the people on the shorter lists tweeted once a day.

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Things I can’t live without – Bernie Michalik edition

Posted on February 24, 2023 | Comments Off on Things I can’t live without – Bernie Michalik edition

So I came across this section of New York magazine called The Strategist which asks people: what can’t you live without? They wonder “what famous people add to their carts. Not the JAR brooch and Louis XV chair but the hair spray and the electric toothbrush.” I enjoyed this one in particular on Rhiannon Giddens Favorite Things, but it also got me thinking: what can’t I live without? If I lost everything and was told by insurers to go out and replace things, what are the things I really miss that I would go out a get right away? That led me to come up with this list. It’s not my answers to the Proust Questionnaire, but it was much fun to do and equally revealing. Here goes:

Roots leather goods. I’ve bought a number of Roots leather goods over the decades and they truly last a lifetime. I have a tan leather jacket that just gets better year after year and a weekender bag like the one below which is perfect for short trips. Get something classic from Roots and it will serve you for life.


Large Banff Bag Cervino | Roots US – $598 US

New Balance Shoes. For a long time I’ve been a fan of New Balance for running. Great shoe maker, I thought, but typically not very fashionable. I changed my mind when I saw the 327 models shown: a great shoe that’s also very stylish. I have them in Black on Black and they’re great, but New Balance has a wide selection of color combos. Perfect for being out and about.

327 – New Balance – $99 USD

Apple Products. I really can’t live without my Macbook, my iPhone, or my Apple Watch. I am inseparable from them, literally. I’d still have a Shuffle too if Apple still made them. I’m fortunate enough to get a Macbook Air and an iPhone 11 from work, but I would get them again even if I did not. To go with that I have the Apple Watch Series 8: the health features alone make it great. Like Roots or New Balance, there is not just ONE product from this company I rely on: there are MANY.

Apple Watch Series 8 – Apple (CA) – $529 CAN

IKEA French Press Coffee Maker: I love this thing. I have a small one that makes me my afternoon coffee and it’s the perfect thing to get me through my day. I will generally use a drip coffee maker in the morning to make a large pot of coffee, but this makes a better cup of coffee, I believe. Maybe I need two of them.

Pro tip: get a small wooden spoon with a flat end on an angle if you can: it makes cleanup super easy. Another tip: IKEA sells coffee for the press and I think it’s pretty good.

UPPHETTA French press coffee maker – $14.99 US

Lodge Cast Iron: recently I got over my hang up with cast iron and started cooking with again. I am so glad I did: food just comes out better in cast iron, I think. And taking care of it is less trouble than I thought. I am a fan of Lodge cast iron in particular and I have a number of their pieces, including this skillet with the hot handle holder (the holder is very useful – trust me).

12 Inch Cast Iron Skillet with Handle Holder – $29.95 US

J. Stark Bags and travel cases: I love my Roots weekender bag. When I am travelling, I’ll fill it with travel bags from J Stark. Plus I’ll use their Sentinel backpack and store it under my seat with all my valuables. Not only is it great for travel, but I can use it once I get on the ground. (Not to mention using it when I return.)  I love the quality of their goods: plus the people that run it are really fine people. If you can get to Charleston, drop by. Meanwhile, visit their site to see what they have to offer (a lot!).

Sentinel Backpack in Navy Heavyweight Canvas  – $195 US

Grado SR80x Prestige Series Headphones: I have not stopped using Grados since I bought my first pair of 60s many years ago. I’ve tried more expensive ones, but as someone who uses them mostly with an iPhone (and formerly an iTouch), the 80s are the ones I find suit me best. In Canada you can get them at Bay Bloor radio and other fine places.

 

Grado SR80x Prestige Series Headphones – $189 CAN

Pilot v-pen Fountain pen: I love pens. Pens of all sorts. However when it comes to writing cards or notes or even cheques, I am a huge fan of these disposable fountain pens from Pilot. Sure, they aren’t Mont Blanc, but you can get 10 for just under $18 at Amazon! I also have found very few problems with leaking, and I also find they work better than cheap fountain pens elsewhere. I usually get mine at Deserres because I like to support local art stores, but you can find them everywhere.

V-Pen – Fountain pen – $2-4 US, depending on where you get them.

Muji Notebooks: I use Muji notebooks to go with my Pilot Pens. I have them in all shapes and sizes, but this particular one shown I love. I get one out every work day and write down whatever I need to capture quickly and focus on. But honestly they have a notebook for every use.

Double Ringed Plain Notebook – $2.90 US

The Lenovo Smart Clock with Google Assistant: I depend upon Google Assistant more than I care to say. And while Google has their own devices, if I had to have only one such device, I would pick this one. I have one near me at all times when I work at home: it’s a one stop shop for quick information and tasks.

Lenovo Smart Clock – $79 US.

I am sure if I sat her more I could come up with more items and even services.  There’s many things I have that I can’t do without, but I would be worse off  without the things on this list.

What things are on your list?

 

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On restaurants loved and lost of my youth (Woolworth’s in Glace Bay and Midtown in Halifax)

Posted on December 17, 2022 | Comments Off on On restaurants loved and lost of my youth (Woolworth’s in Glace Bay and Midtown in Halifax)

It doesn’t look like much in this black and white photo: just another store with an awning in downtown Glace Bay. For me though, it was the first place I got to go that was a restaurant. Inside was a food counter, and my mom (Ma) would take me there as a kid and she might get a club sandwich and I would likely get a coke float. The idea of going someplace to eat felt special to me and I learned to love that feeling from going there.

It may seem underwhelming to you as an adult, but as a kid, pulling up in one of those seats, being given a menu to choose what you want, and then having one of the ladies (it was always women) get it for you was amazing. Plus I never got to have coke floats outside of there, at least not for a long time, so that made it a special treat.

The Woolworth’s of Glace Bay is long gone. Later when I moved to Toronto there was one on Bloor near Bathurst and I used to go and get taken back home for a spell. Just like having a coke float takes me back to when I was a kid, sitting at that counter, sipping my drink with a straw, being happy.

This string of posts on restaurants loved and lost will be ending soon for me. But before I do, I wanted to mention another place of my youth: the Midtown Tavern in Halifax. It still exists, but the version I loved and lost was in downtown Halifax (see below). When I was in university, I would go there the few times I had some cash and get some draught beer and steak. The meat was thin and well done, but it was cheap, and the combo of the beef and the beer made me feel wealthy. It was unlike any other place in Halifax for students drinking beer. You could be a fool in other establishments, but act that way in the Midtown and their no nonsense waiters would toss you out on your ear. We were well behaved in the Midtown. In some ways it was a rite of passage where we learned to behave as much as anything else.

I loved both those places when I was young, just like I loved Mike’s Lunch in Glace Bay. They may have seemed like everyday places to some, but they left an indelible mark on me and think of them often, and with great affection.

All images you see are links. The top image is from Commercial Street_Glace Bay_Cape Breton_1965_Black Diamond Pharmacy_F.W. Woolworths. There’s also a great story in the piece I found the second image: Debbie Travels – Reviews and more: Midtown Tavern Halifax – End of an Era! A great story plus it has lots more photos of the Midtown.

P.S. I wanted to write about one other restaurant loved and lost from my youth: Fat Frank’s. When I was going to university I never had much money. I would constantly see the same ad for Fat Frank’s restaurant, and each time I saw it I thought: when I have money, I am going to eat there. It was my dream. For Fat Frank’s was one of the finest places to eat in all of the Maritimes.

Alas, it closed before I ever got to go. I never got to go inside nor eat any of its fine food. Even now it is elusive: I have a hard time finding images and stories of it on the Internet. The closest I can get is this 1976 review Craig Claiborne in the New York Times. And this blog has a shot of Spring Garden Road: Fat Frank’s would have been in one of those brick buildings on the right, I believe.

I never got to live the dream, but I dreamt about it for a long time…. an unrequited love, for a place now long gone.

 

 

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On gamification of my time to get tough things done

Posted on December 7, 2022 | Comments Off on On gamification of my time to get tough things done


I had been using a skillful form of procrastination: I was been doing things I don’t mind doing rather than doing things that are hard or that are important. For awhile this was ok: I still needed to complete the things I don’t mind doing. Eventually, though, I was getting really far behind on the hard and important things. I needed a solution.

My solution so far is to gamify my activities. Its based on achieving so many points per week. I assign a point for every minute of the day. Most minutes get 0 points for now. Some minutes get assigned positive points in the following way:

  1. 5 points for everything important I hate doing
  2. 3 points for important things I don’t hate doing
  3. 2 points for everyday chores I don’t like doing
  4. 1 point for everyday chores I like or don’t mind doing
  5. 1/2 point for staying organized and doing chores or important things I love doing

What I was doing before was spending no time on 1 and 2, some time on 3, and most of my time on 4 and 5. Not to mention fun things, sleeping, eating which I give zero points for. Now if I spent 30 minutes on cooking I get 30 points; 30 minutes shovelling snow is 60 points; 30 minutes helping my kids is 90 points and 30 minutes dealing with financial stuff is 150 points.

Once I had that system, it was pretty easy to measure my points in a day. I have a little spreadsheet to do it but you can use a paper pad or pretty much anything to do so.

The hard part of this is determining what is a win under this system. My first goal was a win would be 1000 points a week. It’s pretty hard to get that doing activities with 1-2 point activities; you need to really focus on 3-5 point activities.

In my first week I got to 1000 points by Thursday. So I decided on a different approach. 1000 points would get my Bronze level. 1500 would be Silver Level. 2000 would be Gold. Platinum would be 2500. The idea is that Bronze should be hard but achievable, Silver should be a stretch, and Gold should be an occasional win. Platinum should be rare.

It’s been successful once I calibrated it that way. The weeks I get the most important things done, they correspond to medals. The weeks I slack off lead me to get a DNF (Did Not Finish). I pledge to do better the next week. (Unless I am vacationing or sick: then a DNF is perfectly fine.)

The next hard thing: what is the benefit of winning? At first I tied physical rewards to point amounts. That might work for some people. It even worked for me for awhile too. Eventually I just found it satisfying to see there were weeks when I was getting important things done. That in itself was a reward, the win.

Overall gamification of my life has resulted in me getting the most important things done. I recommend it for people who like games and/or are stuck.

P.S. you are thinking this is like the idea of putting the big rocks in first, you are right!

For more on gamification and apps that can help you, see this: 9 of the Best Apps to ‘Gamify’ Your Life.

(Image via https://xkcd.com/2679/)

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Some thoughts on the genre of food writing, after reading about Chantal Braganza’s cake

Posted on October 30, 2022 | Comments Off on Some thoughts on the genre of food writing, after reading about Chantal Braganza’s cake

Good genre writing tends to make us forget it belongs to a genre. Atwood and Kafka and Borges all can write in the genres of SF and fantasy, but we don’t think of them as genre writers. They are good writers who happen to (sometimes) write genre fiction.

I thought of that when I read this piece by Chantal Braganza in Maisonneuve: An Ugly Sweet Thing. Food writing is also a genre, and while Braganza is a food writer here, she is first a good writer who in this case is writing about food. It’s a really fine piece and I encourage you to read it. It’s about food, of course, but it’s about so much more. That’s what good food writing does.

Food writing gets knocked about these days, and that’s too bad. So many food writers that include a recipe in their writing have a button at the top that allows people to skip just to the recipe. People who click on that button are missing out. The writing is important too, not just the recipe. If you just want a recipe, go to AllRecipes.com. If you want to learn more about food and what the author thinks about this particular dish and why it is important to them and perhaps you, too, read the writing. You’ll be glad you did.

More and more I buy food books not for the recipes, but to get inspired to cook and to create in the kitchen. Preparing food is work, and some times that work gets us down. (Ok, it gets me down.)  We need things to lift us up. One of those things is good food writing. Here’s to more of it.

Now go get some cake.

 

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What is good food? What is fine dining? These are things I considered while thinking about Michelin stars and eating pasta in Montreal

Posted on September 17, 2022 | Comments Off on What is good food? What is fine dining? These are things I considered while thinking about Michelin stars and eating pasta in Montreal

I’ve been thinking a lot about food since Michelin recently announced the awards given to restaurants in Toronto. When they announced the winners, I thought: how is it that I eat so much good food in Toronto and yet I have not gone to these places? Maybe I don’t know good food at all?

I thought about it more as I travelled to Montreal and ate on my trip. Two things I ate on my travels were pasta. This dish of pasta was part of a tasting menu at Cabaret L’Enfer on St. Denis.

And this was a dish of pasta I had while on the train from Toronto to Montreal:

The first pasta was good, as was the second. The first pasta was carefully handmade, precisely cooked, smartly accompanied with intensely flavoured sauces and extras and wine and finally presented artfully and with a detailed explanation. The second pasta was factory made, warmed up, accompanied with not bad wine and presented politely without much explanation. Given these differences, how can I say both were good? 

While the first pasta was excellent and superior to the second in many ways, the second pasta was still good. The second pasta’s temperature was neither too hot nor too cold, it had mild but pleasant flavours, and it fit in with a nice variety of other food. Eating it, I was reminded of all the meals I’ve enjoyed while travelling on planes and trains, and that made me think of all the joy I’ve had while travelling. I was hungry when it arrived, and afterwards I was pleasantly full. While it was not exquisite like the first pasta, it was far better than any of the other food I could have picked up at a train station. In this context, it was good — very good — and I was glad I had it.

While the first pasta was excellent, it was in no way filling. When combined with the overall meal I was no longer hungry, but it was not sufficient on its own to satisfy my hunger, nor was it meant to be. It did not remind me of other joys, though I enjoyed it. And while the overall meal was excellent, it was also very expensive. 

Perhaps food is very important to you, and any food that doesn’t approach Michelin level is not considered good by you. But to me, good food is dependent on context. A rich cheese is no good to someone who is lactose intolerant. A fine steak is undesirable to a vegan. Likewise, if you are famished, fast food you can have right now may be better than a rich stew that takes you hours to prepare. On a bitter cold day, a simple hot chocolate may taste better than the finest champagne. Or you may desire a chocolate chip cookie that reminds you of your mom’s cooking over a slice of gourmet cake. We eat with all of ourselves, and the more we bring of ourselves to the food we eat, the more good food becomes a matter of the individual who is eating it.

Good food is also dependent on qualities. The next time you are eating, think of all the textures and the tastes you are experiencing. Think of the temperature and the toughness, the sourness and the saltiness and the softness. How does it look in front of you? What are the colours? How hard is it to make? How easy is it to eat? What do you think when you are eating it? How do you feel right after you swallow it? Or an hour later? All those thoughts and feelings that you have will help you to better appreciate your food and its qualities. It will help you realize what is good food — to you — and what is not. It will make you appreciate fine dining, whether it is in a beautiful restaurant or eating at a cafe counter or on a picnic blanket. 

Michelin stars do not solely define good food or fine dining. Only you, the individual, can do that. Bon appetit. 

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On Bades Bake Shop and the Chip Wagon of Glace Bay

Posted on August 26, 2022 | Comments Off on On Bades Bake Shop and the Chip Wagon of Glace Bay

It can be notoriously difficult to find images of Glace Bay on the Internet. Google is no help: I had been searching for “Bades Bakery Glace Bay” and came up with nothing. It was only through searching for the specific phrase “Bades Bake Shop” did I find it.

I loved Bades as a kid. It was on my route to the hockey arena, and depending on the time and how much coin I had, I could drop in and get a doughnut or something sweet. I don’t recall there being any other such establishment nearby, so it was an oasis for someone like me who loved sweet things. I recall the lettering for the sign being yellow against a brown backdrop. It was a great place, long gone. (You can read more about it, here.)

Here’s a good piece on another place I loved as a kid and as an adult: the Chip Wagon. When I was a kid it was in the main part of town. Later as an adult I would line up like these people to get a sample of those delicious fries. I don’t know if it is still in operation. If not, that’s sad. Like Mike’s Lunch, it was a must visit whenever I went home to Glace Bay.

If you are feeling nostalgic like me, you can see lots more images of Cape Breton at Caperpics or here at the flickr account of the Beaton Institute. Forget Google: go directly to those two places.

(Images: links to images at the Beaton Institute and Caperpics).

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The seasons of the quiet house

Posted on August 16, 2022 | Comments Off on The seasons of the quiet house

There are seasons of the year when the temperature outside is somewhat close to room temperature. Neither my furnace nor my air conditioning comes on for long periods of time. Without them on, the house can be totally quiet. So quiet you can only hear the occasional noise outside or you can hear a mechanical clock. Maybe you can hear the wires in the wall humming. It’s the season of the quiet house.

I love those times of year. Nothing is more relaxing to me than sitting in a quiet house.

Right now it’s one of those seasons. I treasure it.

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How to grow old, and other things I learned from my Father and his Father

Posted on June 19, 2022 | Comments Off on How to grow old, and other things I learned from my Father and his Father
My dad in 2012, around his 72nd birthday, looking over the land he would someday buy

My dad had two dreams late in life. One was to win a (relatively) big lottery, which he did. The other was to buy the property behind his house, which he did some time after winning the lottery. He had played the lottery for years and played the same numbers consistently each week. I thought he would never win but he prevailed.

When I was a child my grandfather planted new fruit trees in his yard. I remember being stunned when he said that they might yield fruit in a decade or so. I could not see the point in spending effort on something you might not get to enjoy soon, if at all.

The lottery tickets and the fruit trees were small acts in support of a belief in a better future. That better future may not come, but the only way it could come would be to take some action and increase — if only in a small way — the chance it would happen.

Fatherhood is like that. You plant roots and you try your luck and work and hope for a better future that may not come, or come after you’re gone. You do it regardless.

Sons and daughters live off the luck and the land of their Fathers and Mothers before they set off to find their own. During their stay some seeds are taken, some luck rubs off, some lessons (intentional and otherwise) are learned along the way. Then they go.

After you go, you think there is nothing left to learn. But then you are old like they were old, and you learn lessons even then. Lessons like the importance of having dreams and goals no matter how old you are. Lessons like living like you will never die and acting accordingly. Or the overriding lesson of believing in a better future no matter what. Though the person passes away, the lessons are passed on, like the fruit that falls from that long ago planted tree.

Happy Father’s Day to us Fathers, living and not. We the living have much to learn, and trees to plant. Wish us luck.

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On being able to walk through your old home

Posted on June 5, 2022 | 2 comments

Have you ever wanted to go back and go inside homes you once lived in? I have. I still have memories of places I lived in as a child, and I have a yearning to go back to them, go back to Minto Street or Borden Street, and walk through and touch the houses I once inhabited.

The last and longest place I lived in was 110 Castlefield. I can’t go back there, but thanks to that Youtube video above, I can virtually go through it. I can see all the changes that were done to it by me and others. I can have countless memories of it as the video progresses.

It’s true, I have hundreds of photos as well, and those are great. But I really love that video. I hope it never comes down.

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How to use the motivation equation to get more motivated

Posted on May 16, 2022 | Comments Off on How to use the motivation equation to get more motivated

On Saturday I wrote about how the motivation equation explains why you are or aren’t motivated. I want to write now on how you can use the same equation to get more motivated.

Here’s the equation again. Recall we replaced the I with F, for Friction

In short, to get more motivated, you need to:

  • Increase the chances you can do something (E)
  • Increase the value of doing it (V)
  • Decrease the things that make it harder to do something (F)
  • Decrease the delay in it occurring (D)

Remember, we all have alternatives (A) in terms of what we can do. And this is where context C comes into the picture.

Let’s take some classic examples to walk through this. I’ll underline the approaches you can take to motivate yourself and emphasize how it relates to the formula.

First example: lie on the couch or go to the gym and get in shape? V may be the same for both, but E is low and D is big for getting in shape. Plus there is hardly any friction F in being a couch potato. Going to the gym means getting ready, getting to the gym, dealing with people at the gym, washing up, and then going home. So much friction! If only you could motivate yourself to get off the couch and do something!

The way to motivate yourself with this is to reframe things. Change the context. That will help you change the equation and bump up the Vs and Es and decrease the Ds and Fs. If you need motivation for getting in shape, the question should not be: lie on the couch or go to the gym and get in shape? The question should be: 1) lie on the couch and feel bad later and sink into poor health or 2) go to the gym and feel good now and get in shape? In that context, V for #1 drops and V for #2 increases. Next, tackle the friction F for going to the gym. People do all sorts of things for that: find a gym near them, have a gym bag packed, find a friend to work out with, or skip the gym altogether and workout at home. There are lots of actions to decrease F. Likewise, if you focus on the short term goal of feeling good on the day you go to the gym,  E increases and D decreases and your motivation goes up.

This leads to my next approach: you need a plan. Plans help increase expectations E and decrease delay D. If you want to run a 5K or a marathon, if you want to learn a language, if you want do achieve anything worthwhile, it helps to have a plan. Plans help with E:  if you have an authority (coach, instructor) telling you that if you stick to the plan you will succeed, E goes up. Plans help with D too because now you can imagine/see D decreasing with every day that passes. Likely V increases every day too. Finally plans decrease F. Uncertainty of what to do is a source of Friction. A plan decreases uncertainty and thus F.

Planning is easier than you think. Can’t come up with a plan? Do this. Say: I will do this today and tomorrow. Or today and the rest of the week. After you do it, make a record. Write it down. Mark a calendar. Whatever works. After a week, tell your stupid brain: that was the plan, dummy…I tricked you because you were telling me I couldn’t do it and I did it and before you tell me I can’t do it again you told me I couldn’t do it at all and I did so I know best and I will do it! (It’s worth a shot). Don’t let planning stop you. Any plan, even a bad plan, will help. Here’s a plan: buy a dozen beer or Gatorade. Put them on a shelf. Plan to drink one every time you work out. Put the empties next to the full ones. Plan to finish them all. Voila! Who said you can’t plan?

Another way of dealing with expectations E (and your stupid brain) is visualization. Chances are you use visualization already, just in a bad way! You imagine all the reasons you cannot succeed. Now be like a professional skier or runner and imagine all the ways you can succeed. Whenever you imagine failing, imagine successful alternatives instead and practice going over them in your mind. You will see increases in E if you work at it.

Related to visualization is internal chatter. In sports, coaches will tell players on the bench to “talk it up!”. Why? Because it encourages teammates and defeats their negative internal chatter. You should do the same. When you motivate yourself to do something and you are done, what do you do? Do you just move on to the next thing? If you do, you are telling yourself: that didn’t matter. If a team scores playing a game, they get excited! They cheer! When a team is defending, everyone yells “Defense!” All of these things increase the value V of the thing they are doing. You need to do the same, and by doing so, increase the value of what you are doing or what you did. And when you succeed, you give yourself a cheer and your brain thinks: I can do it! And with that, the next time you try and do it, E is increased.

Another way to motivate yourself is overloading. If you aren’t motivated to go to the gym to get in shape, come up with several reasons to go. You aren’t just going to the gym to 1) get in shape. You are going to the gym to 1) get in shape 2) get out of the house 3) meet your friend 4) reasons of vanity 5) reasons of pride 6) etc. Give yourself as many reasons as possible. Brainstorm ideas. Ask friends. List them all out. Get as many high value ones as possible.

Related to overloading is overshooting. Didn’t do any of your hobby last month? Missed meeting up with friends? How about planning to do it every day next month? Twice on Sunday even! Imagine making huge improvements on your drawing or sewing or photography. Think about all the enjoyment you’d get seeing all your friend or just contacting them. List all the ways you could derive value V from that. Now after a month, look back. You likely didn’t do it all. (If you did, awesome!) But look at the improvements you made. As they say, you aimed for the stars and landed on the moon and that in itself is incredible. No doubt all the effort resulted in ways you learned to decrease friction F and improve expectation E. You will find you are much more motivated to do things by planning to overshoot.

Refuse to fail.This is useful if expectations E are low and is related to overloading and overshooting. So you and your friend skipped the gym but you had a good time and you needed a break and you went the next day. Or you didn’t create anything but you cleaned up your work area and made it easier to draw the next day. Sure you could beat Today You up for not doing the thing. But give yourself credit for helping Tomorrow You be more motivated by reducing the friction  For the expectations E for tomorrow. You don’t fail if you get up the next day. There is no timeclock.

If you should do good things for several reasons, do bad (or not so good) things for one reason. Don’t lie on the couch and eat cake and watch movies and talk with friends, etc. If you do, you are going to be very motivated to be a couch potato! If you are tired, lie on the couch. If you want a slice of cake, go get one (preferably as a treat…maybe after the gym.) Talk to your friends in person. You want to decrease the value V of lying on the couch. Heck, pile stuff on the couch (increase the friction F) or lie on the couch only after you do some other things (increase D) or only lie on the couch if you flip a coin and it comes up tails (thereby decreasing E).

Understand what does motivate you and apply it to other areas. If you still are struggling to motivate yourself, sit down and write down what you are motivated in doing and understand the V, E, F and D for them, Then look at what you are not motivated in doing and see how they are similar. Is there any way you can change the unmotivating ones to look more like the motivated ones. You should see ways to increase your motivation.

Keep a log for things you regularly struggle to find motivation for. Write down the V, E, F and D for the last time you did them. Maybe you are imagining F and D as being worse than they are. Likewise, maybe it was easy for you and you enjoyed some aspect and the value V and expectation E are higher than you imagine. If so, great! If not, keep logging and log what you changed to motivate yourself this time. Keep tweaking those values until you are doing better.

Choose the next best alternative. Can motivate yourself to go to the gym? Go for a good walk rather than lie on the couch. Can’t call that one friend you should call due to high friction F? Call someone else where the value V is high but F is lower. Can’t do the creative thing you think you should be doing? Do something else creative instead. Eventually you will need to understand your lack of motivation for not doing that one thing; doing a close alternative can help.

Lastly I want to mention two last things: Habits/Routines and Novelty. Habits/routines are very good at decreasing friction F and increasing expectations, E. But they can also cause you to feel a decrease in value V, because things get stale and boring and less enjoyable. That’s where novelty comes in. Novelty decreases expectation E (who knows what will happen) and increases friction F (because it is new), but can also increase V (less stale and boring) . If habits/routines are the main dish, novelty are the herbs and spices. You need both.

If you’ve read this far: wow! you were motivated! Good work! I hope the value V was high and the fraction F was low.

If you were wondering: why did he keep repeating those letters? It’s because I really think the key to motivating ourselves is to think in those terms: V, E, D and F. Repeating them helps reinforce that. Also there is nothing new here when it comes to approaches to motivation. What I think is new (at least to me) is applying them in light of the formula. I hope you found it the same.

Now go and do good things. Great things, even!

 

 

 

 

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How the motivation equation explains why you are or aren’t motivated

Posted on May 14, 2022 | 1 comment

I was having a hard time getting motivated last week. I knew there were a number of things I needed to work on. For some of them, I had no problem tackling. For others, I really struggled. Why was this?

This simple equation, from this article, The motivation equation, really helped me. But I also felt it was lacking something:

For those who hate math, the “M” stands for motivation, “E” stands for Expectancy, “V” stands for Value, “I” stands for Impulsiveness, “D” stands for Delay.  E is the likelihood of getting something, and V is how much you value it. D is how far away it is, and I is impulsiveness. Let me walk through an example.

Let’s say it’s lunch and you have a choice of leftovers or something new. You value something new over leftovers, so all other things being equal, you are more motivated to eat something new rather than the leftovers.

Now let’s say there is a chance that the new thing you want to eat may be sold out before you get there. With leftovers, E is high: you know you can eat them right now. For the new thing, E is lower: it might not be there so expectation has dropped. To bring E up, you think: well, there are many new dishes you can try…one of them will be there for sure.

To further complicate things, let’s say it is 11 am and you are hungry but the place selling something new doesn’t open for an hour. The delay for something new is larger than leftovers. That means your motivation for eating something new may drop.

Finally, impulsiveness. I would like to replace that with F, for friction. Friction is impulsiveness and more. Friction is all those things that put a drag on you doing the things you need motivation to do. In this case, getting something new may mean having to go out in bad weather to get it. Bad weather is friction. Or you may not like the food court where the new food is because it is too crowded or noisy. Unpleasant atmosphere is friction. Or you may be hungry or tired or bored and want to eat right away. All those feelings are friction. The more friction you have, the less motivation you have.

Two other things to consider are A: alternatives and C: context. Sometimes we may be motivated to do something in one Context and not the other. On a cold day I may be motivated to have a hot chocolate. On a hot day I may not. The value of something can change in different context. Likewise, my motivation for something may change if there are alternatives. I may be motivated to eat a frozen dinner because the alternatives (make my own, get take out for the 4x this week) are worse for me at the time.

I recommend you do what I did this week and list some things you are motivated to do and NOT motivated to do and run them through the formula.

For a work example, I had two things I wanted to do on Friday, write a report and solve a hard technical problem. I worked on the latter. D E and F were the same for each. But for the report, I felt it had little value. I have to do it, but it was hard to motivate myself to do it because V was Low. On the other hand, V for the hard technical problem was High. I learned alot (which I value), I have more value as an employee because of what I learned, and I felt proud of this accomplishment. Given this, it’s not surprising I chose the hard technical problem. Now, if the expectation (E) of me solving it was lowered, then my motivation would have dropped too. Likewise, if I thought it would take a week or more (delay, D) to solve it,  motivation would have decreased.

For a home example, I have two chores to do: organize the basement and organize the living room. Both have a high value (V) for me. But D is higher for the basement: it’s much more work and will take much longer. E is the same: I can accomplish both. Also F is higher for the basement, since there is so much stuff to go through and move around. Naturally I am motivated to tackle the living room.

Finally, a personal example. I have several hobbies: painting and website design. D and E are the same, but V and F are different. I am good at web site work and poor at painting, so the outcomes are better for web site work than the outcomes of my painting. Likewise, for painting, there is setting up to paint and then cleaning up. For website work I just sit down at my computer: no setup and no cleanup. Painting has higher friction F and lower value V, so I tend to do it less.

Ok, Bernie, you say, that’s great. How do I deal with that to get motivated. That will be in part 2 of this, since this is already too long and you are likely losing your motivation to keep reading. (V is dropping, D is getting longer, E may be dropping too. Likewise you may have alternatives A that you are more motivated to do.) That will come out on Monday.

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Essays on aging, from Oliver Sacks, on my birthday

Posted on April 27, 2022 | Comments Off on Essays on aging, from Oliver Sacks, on my birthday

 

 

It’s my birthday. I’m into my seventh decade. Born in ’61, now 61.

 

My first decade was one of being shy and smart and tall and skinny and bullied. My second decade was one of growth: growing out of everything, from my clothes to my hometown. Cruising into my twenties I became independent and anxious and happy. By my thirties, I became responsible. In my forties, I became lost. In my fifties, I was crushed.

I expected worst things still to fall on me in my sixth decade, and I was surprised instead by things that uplifted me. Where I will land in my seventh decade, I don’t know. On good days I look to remain open, on bad days I hope for a close.

In all that time, with rare exception, I have taken off every day since I started working in the early 80s. Often those free days were filled with simple pleasures. Mixed in with that was some contemplation.

I think two good things to contemplate on this day are these two essays by Oliver Sacks. One was written when he was still vibrant and turning 80: Opinion | The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding.) in The New York Times. The second one when he was dying of cancer not much more than a year later: Opinion | Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer, also The New York Times.

What impression they will leave on will depend on your current perspective. I encourage you to move around, literally and figuratively, to have to best perspective on life that you can have. The days will be what they are, regardless. How you perceive them depends on where you stand and how you look out.

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A critique of the weird counterfactual history of Matt Yglesias and his case for the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Posted on April 4, 2022 | 1 comment


Recently, Matt Yglesias wrote one of his contrarian essays arguing the case for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There’s so much wrongness about it that it’s hard to know where to start.

Perhaps the best place to start is some basic history of the empire over the 19th century. As the Holy Roman Empire was dying off, the Austrian Empire was formed from it and lasted from 1804 to 1867. From there it transformed into the Austria-Hungary Empire.  During the 19th century the Empire, led by the Hapsburgs, had stability issues. It was battered from the outside by leaders such as Napoleon of France and Bismarck of Prussia/Germany. It was torn internally, with revolutions like those in 1848. Even under less dramatic situations, it struggled to manage large parts of it due to things like the divisive actions of the Kingdom of Hungary.

Given all that, the idea that Yglesias puts forward that:

In today’s light, the idea of the Habsburg realms evolving into a multi-lingual democratic entity doesn’t seem particularly absurd.

Well, it is pretty absurd. The Emperor took all forms of actions to prevent the forces externally and internally from defeating the Empire, but those forces only grew stronger over that time. To imagine it evolving into a singular democratic entity is based on nothing and counter to the history of the Empire during that century.

Yglesias goes on to propose:

The empire wasn’t doomed by its diversity of linguistic groups — it started and then lost a major war.

Actually, it was doomed by its diversity in war and peace. In peacetime it was doomed by too many political groups it could not reconcile. In wartime it was doomed too. (This is covered in depth in the book,  A Mad Catastrophe.) The army of the Emperor was terrible for many reasons, and a key one in particular that led to their downfall was the inability of its soldiers to communicate with each other.

Yglesias drives forward:

And this, I think, is the thin point: had the continent not plunged into war following Ferdinand’s assassination, I think the empire could have survived.

This overlooks why there was a war in the first place. The Empire was looking to flex their muscle in the Balkans since they made aims to move into that area that was once part of the Ottoman Empire. After the assassination, an ultimatum of demands was put to Serbia. The demands were difficult and still Serbia made an effort to agree with them. Despite being agreeable to all but one, Austria-Hungary would not accept this and this ultimately lead up to the Great War. The continent was plugged into that war because of the Empire.

Assuming no war – a tremendous assumption – he goes on to imagine an optimistic future for the Empire:

My optimistic view is twofold:

Absent the pretext of war, the Viennese authorities would recognize the need to return to parliamentary government, even if that meant dealing with socialists as a counterweight to the grab-bag of nationalists.

Franz Ferdinand wanted to cut Hungary down to size (literally) and the Hungarian nationalists might have realized that this was actually in their interests and would have let them be masters of their own domain.

Again no. Hungary had been fighting against the leaders in Vienna for decade. There’s nothing in their history that indicates they would have changed their minds. If you are going to be a contrarian historian, at least have some facts to support your counter history.

He also has a fantastical view of how the Empire might have operated:

I think a more workable version of federalism would have been to leverage the Empire’s small administrative divisions and create a state where a lot of power was devolved to local government with the national government handling national defense and foreign policy, plus the kinds of things that are run out of Brussels and Frankfurt in contemporary Europe.

This is also counter to the facts. Facts such as how Hungary would subvert any kind of spending that was not in their interest, including defense, to name just one.

More fantasy in the form of how schools would run:

The expectation would be that schooling would be available in one or two local languages of instruction in every locality, that every non-German student would be taught German as a foreign language, and that every German student would choose from one of the other languages of the empire. I think that absent the outbreak of war, this would have proved to be a sustainable model

Again, no. Not based on history.

Finally:

And by midcentury, the script has sort of flipped on the Habsburg domains. Far from a feudal relic, the empire starts to seem progressive and modern.

That certainly wasn’t going to happen when Franz Joseph was emperor. He truly was a feudal relic, and the only purpose of the empire was for him to be Emperor. Preferably an empire that was based on those of centuries past. He and the land he ruled was notoriously conservative and antiquated. Nothing in their history would indicate this would become anything other than that, short of dissolution.

In summary, Matt Yglesias imagines an Austria-Hungary that never existed and never could exist, but if it did, it would form a model of some ideal federation within Mittel Europa. The only place that might fill that bill is Switzerland.

If you want to read what the empire was really like at the end, read A Mad Catastrophe. As well, AJP Taylor has written several essays and books on the subject, including this. I’ve found all those worthwhile The Guardian has 10 more books on the topic, here. Finally, consider reading Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.

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On the things parents tell their kids and the things kids remember

Posted on January 6, 2022 | Comments Off on On the things parents tell their kids and the things kids remember

Vihos Sweets

This is a picture of a street in downtown Glace Bay. Next to the Dominion is a small place called Vihos Sweets. It didn’t exist when I was growing up, but it did when my mom was a teen. She worked there for a time, and she occasionally talked about it.

Though she didn’t talk about it a lot, it stuck in my mind and I often thought about it. I don’t know why. Maybe I liked the sound of it. Maybe the way she described it made it seem special. Perhaps I was trying to imagine having my own job someday. I am not sure.

I wonder of the many things I’ve told my kids what they remember. You hope that the big lessons you try and impart to your kids are the things that stick. But often times it is the little things. Things like the name of a place you worked at for a short time when you were younger.

Try and be comfortable with the notion that  you have less control than you think.  You can only live and speak as best as you can, and hope that is enough to send them in the right direction. They may recall the important things you passed on. They may recall something you said in passing. They are their own person, and they will absorb and recall what they need.

(Image via http://capermemories.blogspot.com/)

 

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To my daughter on her big birthday

Posted on February 8, 2021 | Comments Off on To my daughter on her big birthday

It’s my daughter’s birthday today. It’s been a better quarter century with her in the world and in my world especially.

Fifteen years ago I helped her set up a blog where she could write about her summer: SRM @ 110. Just a few years ago I helped her set up a home page on github: Sophie Reich-Michalik. And twelve years ago I wrote this advice to someone who is (more or less) 25 | Smart People I Know.  Perhaps she can find some value with this too. I give her lots of advice. Some is even taken. 🙂

Happy birthday, Sophie! You’re the best! (I know, she always replies. :))

 

 

 

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On restaurants loved and lost: the Boulevard Cafe

Posted on January 24, 2021 | 2 comments

On Harbord Street in the 1980s I fell in love with the Boulevard Cafe. My life was just starting, and my girlfriend and I were living just up the street from it, on Brunswick Avenue. We would stroll down and line up with the other people in the area for the wonderful Peruvian style food they had there.

It was the first time I learned to love fish. I come from Nova Scotia, but the fish was prepared terribly when I was growing up. Plus fish was associated with poor people food, unlike all the packaged food I wanted. I hated it.

Or I did until I had the Boulevard’s sea bass. (Sea bass was big in the 80s.) They would gently cook it and serve it with a perfect combo of delicious salad and fragrant rice.  I was instantly transformed into a fish lover after that first meal. Many a fish meal I had after that, and all were great.

And their soups. Their soups were incredible. I once had a garlic soup there that was so good that I still recall it decades later. It was simple, and yet I have often had garlic soup elsewhere and it never compared. They had many great dishes there, but the soup and the fish kept me coming back.

When we first started going, it was popular but not too busy. There was seating on both floors, and half of the upstairs was just a seating area where you could sip your drink and enjoy their  fireplace. I remember one night we were sitting there next to the fire, looking out over Harbord Street as a nice snowfall floated down covering everything. I could have stayed all night.

Later on the word got out and it got busier. The lovely seating area was replaced with more tables. The patio area in the summer was jammed with everyone enjoying the wonderful flavours that came out of the small kitchen in the back.

I was shocked to be riding my bicycle across Harbord Street a few summers ago and seeing it all closed up. It was then I took those photos. It was so good, I thought it would last forever. I stood there for quite awhile and remembered all the wonderful times of my youth sitting outside under the awning and living the good life with great friends and great food. I am lucky to have had such a time.

(In the top photo you can see the chimney where the fireplace was. In the bottom photo you can see the main doors that led to the dining room on the lower floor. The bulletin board would list all the specials. There would be tables put in front of the benches, and you either sat on the benches or chairs opposite. In the evening the lights would come on and it would seem magical.)

P.S. Over at Zomato there is still a copy of the menu and some other photos.

 

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How to improve and get better by using taboos and your dark side

Posted on December 7, 2020 | Comments Off on How to improve and get better by using taboos and your dark side


How to improve and get better by using taboos and your dark side seems like a contradiction. But sometimes using your dark side can be just the thing you need to improve.

Now this can be harder to do than you might suppose. Our culture (from Faust to Star Wars) says appealing to the dark side leads to your ruin. This can cause you to not want to do this. But anger (against injustice), pride (in becoming the best), gluttony (for hard work) and lust/vanity (to self improve) can sometimes motive you and drive you much better than love and happiness can.  Sure, excessive vices can destroy you, I agree. But vices well harnessed and in moderation might get you through the difficult days of changing and help get you to the other side.

To see a good example of what I mean, read this: A Spiteful Guide to Self-Improvement.

You may not have an enemies or rivals or arch enemies. Fine. Invent some. Then go out and take them on and in the process become a better person. Then be magnanimous and graceful in your victory. There: now you are a better person and a good one too.

(Image by Gustave Doré, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1855) from wikipedia)

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On blogging/writing online in 2020 (how I write now)

Posted on December 5, 2020 | Comments Off on On blogging/writing online in 2020 (how I write now)


In 2020, blogging is back. At least blogging as newsletters. Think Substack and all the people flocking to there. Blogging on WordPress (or Blogger or Tumblr or other blogging platforms) is not as hot but still going strong.

That’s good. I am a fan of more writing and better writing, whether it comes in blog form or newsletter form. Bring it on.

I continue to write here as I have been for some time.  I’ve written a number of pieces on blogging over the last decade; this piece will join that.

I’ll likely to continue writing here until I get 1,000,000 hits (currently at 976,745 hits) but given the limited readership, that may never happen. I’ll keep writing, regardless. We all need goals, and the million hits is one of mine.

Currently I sit down every Saturday morning and review interesting things I’ve found on the Internet and saved in Pocket. I have over 1000 things still in Pocket, not to mention a spreadsheet of old links that were noteworthy. There’s always something of interest to write about. Plus the Internet never stops being interesting.

I usually take 3-4 hours to write about these things. Then I schedule them to be posted throughout the week. My thinking is that this is more likely to bring a wider readership to them. My SEO skills are limited, but this is my thinking.

I enjoy this writing time. I grab some breakfast and a coffee and craft the posts. I grab images from Unsplash.com to illustrate the posts. It’s a hobby and something I enjoy doing. I love doing it. I’m an amateur writer and thinker.

I try and mix up the posts for readers. Something on Monday to help you get your week started. Something fun on Friday. Something to make your weekend better on Saturday. Perhaps a more thoughtful post on Sunday.

As always I think: would someone reading this get any benefit? Much of my posts are advice, but in areas I am interested in. I want to share things of interest to me but that will also interest others.

Once a month I go back over posts from other years. Today I will go back over the December posts. It’s fascinating to see what was interesting to me in other years.

Whenever I am lost for what my audience is, I think: would someone in my family want to read this? Or one or more of my friends? Once I have that one reader, I can write to them. Many of my posts are letters to people that may not realize it.

Since the pandemic, I have started a newsletter within the blog. I haven’t broken it out into its separate media. Just like I never moved to Tumblr or Medium or took up podcasts. This blog is sufficient for what I want to communicate and record.

I have a few other blogs on WordPress: one on cooking that I enjoy writing from time to time. A few others that are experimental. I use Instagram still because it is easy, but photography is a very separate and different media.

I’ll continue to write here, writing for smart people I know. I’ve been doing it since before the World Wide Web.  Why stop now?

As always, for those who have read this far:

An appropriate thank you card for this era.

(Coffee Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash. The other image is also from Unsplash but I could not find who to attribute it to)

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On being moderately gifted, and the pain and pleasure that brings

Posted on December 4, 2020 | 1 comment


This piece by Austin Kleon on being moderately gifted got me re-thinking this idea he discusses.

I say re-thinking because it is something I have thought about since I was a young man. Back then I was getting into  jazz (as one does) and someone told me: the problem with being a jazz musician is your new album is always competing with the albums of Armstrong and Fitzgerald and Davis and Coltrane and Simone. People putting out pop music don’t have to worry about that. It’s tough to be moderately gifted in jazz, I thought, for you are always competing with the best. But in pop music, you are usually competing with the now. There’s more room to get by being moderately gifted. (Especially in the era I grew up when three chords was all you needed.)

If you have a creative spirit but moderate talents, it is easy to get dispirited and put your tools away. You will never be great you say, why bother? But I think the answer comes from looking at pop music. You may never be great, but you can enjoy putting in play whatever talent you do have. Maybe you can only paint flowers, or knit scarfs, or bake brownies. Do it with gusto! Do it like a punk rocker pounding away on his guitar with the 3 chords he knows! You might never be great, but in the moment, you are living large and the audience at the time is loving it. That’s enough. And enough is as good as a feast.

Perhaps you will go on to greatness. Whether you do or not, shine on as brightly as you can. Not all of us can be the sun, but sometimes being a campfire is fine.

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On making a mediocre dinner and appreciating mediocrity

Posted on August 14, 2020 | Comments Off on On making a mediocre dinner and appreciating mediocrity

I just made a mediocre dinner. You can see it above. It’s not styled in any way. The lighting isn’t great. The ingredients are cheap and basic. The side of mustard looks awful. it’s a pile of food on a plate to feed a hunger.

While it is mediocre, it isn’t bad. The food is fresh. It’s filling. It may not be the most nutritious meal ever but it’s nutritious enough. It killed my hunger and I enjoyed eating it.

While I was making it, and even before, I thought: how should I prepare this so that it will look good enough to share on social media? Should I make a sauce? Chop up some herbs to make it more photogenic? Plate it attractively?

Then I thought: I just want to eat some food that I like that is ok. It’s like a hot dog or a bowl of cereal: it can satisfy a need without being of interest to anyone but the person eating it.

And maybe I need to think more of food that way. I am not a chef or food professional, but the way I share my food photos and think about my meals, you would think I am aspiring to be. I think that aspiration is a problem at times, just as it can be for anyone with aspirations on social media. Maybe it’s time to revisit my relationship with food and my relationship with social media.

Social media can be a force of good. It can let us discover people with talent that we might not otherwise notice. It can help us celebrate the finer things in life. But it can also distort things and get us seeking attention when we don’t really need it. Perhaps a simpler and more basic approach to things outside of social media is better.

Enjoy things for what they are. Understand there is a place and a time for the most basic to the more advanced. Know when it is right to share things and when it is right to just live and be in the moment and then let it go. Those are all imperative sentences that can apply to me. Perhaps they can apply to you as well.

To many people, grey is a dull and boring colour. But for people like me, there is so much to appreciate in the colour grey. Likewise for things mediocre. My meal was mediocre tonight, but it was filling and tasty and nutritious and economical: all things I appreciate. May you appreciate all the grey and mediocre things in your life too.

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Swedish death blogging: on my favorite parts of my blog and more


I have blogged for over 13 years. I have almost 3900 posts, over 964,000s view and over 221,000 visitors. I’ve also made over 200 dollars from ads. 🙂
At one time I had hoped to get over a million views, but at 50 views a day, that is unlikely to happen. When I first started, I wrote blog posts because blogs were new and big in social media. Then I was added as a noteworthy blog on the New York Times Fashion blog list (for bizarre reasons) and I had 10 times the current traffic and I blogged to keep it going. Then that changed and I kept going to practice writing, to share ideas and advice with people, and to journal things that were happening at the time.

But in the back of my mind I had a thought that some day my kids would want to know more about their dad and they might go through my blog the way kids go through our diaries and letters after their parents pass on. To find out what made him tick. What he thought about when he was sitting on the porch those many years.

I realized though that they were never going to go through thousands of posts to find the ones I thought the most of. As a way of ensuring they would at least read some of them, I’ve tagged my favorite ones and put them here: favorites | Smart People I Know

.They are a range in different ways. I can’t say all or even most of them are any good. But of the thousands of posts here, these are among the better ones, I thought. They span the years. Some of them are about me. Others are about things I loved at the time. A few of them are historically interesting.

In a way this is like Swedish Death Cleaning: throwing away most things that you own to simplify things for people who come later.  I don’t plan on going anywhere yet, but I thought I would get started on the process now.

As well, it’s been a way to go through it and say, has any of this been worthwhile? I think I can say, some of it has. If you go through my favorites, you can see so for yourself.

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Posted on June 7, 2020 in blog, blogging, blogs, new!

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On recipes

Posted on May 26, 2020 | Comments Off on On recipes


After the controversy regarding Alison Roman written about here and elsewhere, I started thinking about recipes, where they come from, how I use them, and how I think about them.

A recipe is usually instructions for how to do something. Typically we associated it with food preparation. Recipes list ingredients and steps to prepare the ingredients. They tell you how many people the recipe typically feeds. Sometimes they tell you other things, like nutritional information.

Some recipes are like open source software. You can take a recipe and modify it to make it your own, just like open source software. Other recipes are not open and kept secret, like the formula for certain soft drinks, or the recipe for a certain fried chicken. Some are even patentable (although good luck with that).

Some recipes are associated with regions or cultures. If you think of bouillabaisse,  you think of France. Risotto: Italy. Sushi: Japan. Some recipes and dishes transcend regions and become universal. Dumplings are like that. Noodles too. The same goes for ingredients: you can find basil and oregano in many recipes all over the world, and garlic is about as universal ingredient as any.

Some are associated with certain people, such as Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce. You can claim making tomato sauce with butter and onion and tomatoes is a recipe of yours, but by now it is associated with Marcella Hazan. Likewise with Martha Stewart’s One-Pot Pasta. It’s not like no one has ever made such a dish before, but now we associate them with one particular person.

Alison Roman is a person who has had success with  recipes that became associated with her, namely her chocolate chunk shortbread cookies (” the cookies”) and her chickpea stew (“the Stew”). The Stew in particular got me thinking about recipes and ingredients and how people go about making recipes. For example, if a recipe is based on another recipe, should the author mention that? It likely depends on the publication and other factors. For example, with someone like Deb Perleman, you get a lot of detail about the recipe before she goes into it. Or with Hugh Acheson where he talks about the origin of his catfish stew recipe before proceeding to list the steps and ingredients.

Some people (like me)  prefer recipes with those details; other people just want the recipe. Anyone creating and publishing recipes needs to decide how much detail to include, depending on their audience. In publications like Bon Appetit, there is often space allocated only for the recipe itself. I don’t know what the text was wrapped around this recipe for a  Zingy Red Sauce when it was published, but I assuming it matched the minimum detail found on the web site. Now is this recipe a derivation of a Romesco Sauce (also in Bon Appetit)? Possibly. Likewise this Seafood Stew for Two Recipe  in Bon Appetit.  This stew shares a lot of ingredients with this classic Cioppino Recipe also in  Bon Appetit, but it is also varied enough to consider it to be it’s own recipe.

I think Roman does variations of recipes not infrequently, which aligns with her belief that she won’t ask you to do any more than you have to, while still making it a good dish. So this recipe for Summer Greens with Mustardy Potatoes and Six-Minute Egg Recipe in Bon Appetit is not unlike a stripped down Nicoise salad, but it is not a Nicoise salad despite some commonality. That I think explains the success of her recipes: she takes ingredients and recipes and strips them down somewhat while still making them look good, taste good, and accessible for home cooks to make.

She has not been called out for making recipes with strong European origins. But where she ran into trouble with The Stew is that she seemed to take some ingredients that resembled a curry and had it identified with her. If The Stew associated with her was the seafood stew above or this Fish Stew with Fennel and Baby Potatoes, then she still would have had a problem for the insulting things she said, but it is less likely she would have been criticized with terms like “Columbus Cuisine” and accused of ripping off other cultures and enriching herself at their expense. I don’t believe she does that, but that has been a lively topic of debate with smarter food writers than me.

I don’t think her approach to writing recipes is wrong. I can’t say that recipes  going viral is bad. What I will say is ultimately  it is better if we read from  a diverse range of food writers who can bring not just interesting recipes to publication, but the interesting stories that go with them. I also think it is good when people from different backgrounds can explore the recipes and ingredients of other cultures and make something new with them while acknowledging what the inspiration is. This is much better than remixing an older recipe without attribution. I’d add that acknowledging the origins of an ingredient can’t hurt either. After awhile some of those ingredients may seem universal. Perhaps kimchi will become as common as dill pickles in North American kitchens, and turmeric becomes as frequently used as cumin.

I think publications can do a better job of not just publishing recipes but educating their readers. Likewise, I think sharing, innovating and educating others on food is a great thing, and I hope recipe writers from all background can borrow and improvise and create new dishes. They won’t be quite as eclectic as these recipes that resulted from a collaboration with IBM’s Watson computer and Bon Appetit, but they will inspire us and help us prepare better meals and make our lives better.

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My six month rule that destroys my negative certainty

Posted on April 29, 2020 | Comments Off on My six month rule that destroys my negative certainty

Sometimes – ok, often – I will be down and despairing and I will strongly feel I will never be happy again. When I think that, I fall back on my six month rule.

For my six month rule, I think of the times in my life I’ve been happy and I picture that time. Then I picture the time six months earlier. In that earlier time, I think: could I have predicted that I would be happy six months later? The answer is no, I never could. Then I ask myself: is my ability to predict any better now? And the answer again is no. Then how can you predict you won’t be happy again in the future, I wonder? And I have to answer: I can’t. For me that is enough to break out of my negative fortune telling about the future.

Maybe I won’t be happy in six months. Maybe I will be worse. Who knows? I sure don’t. So I get in with things and hope and work for the best and I stop trying to predict the future and I stop letting this predictions determine the way I feel right now at this moment.

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On specific Agile (software development) traps

There’s much positive to be said about the benefits of Agile software development, and the shift of software development teams is one sign that many feel this way.

However, I think there are some limits to Agile, and this leads teams to fall into certain traps over and over. Indeed, the Wikipedia page highlights a common criticism of Agile, namely:

Lack of overall product design
A goal of agile software development is to focus more on producing working software and less on documentation. This is in contrast to waterfall models where the process is often highly controlled and minor changes to the system require significant revision of supporting documentation. However, this does not justify completely doing without any analysis or design at all. Failure to pay attention to design can cause a team to proceed rapidly at first but then to have significant rework required as they attempt to scale up the system. One of the key features of agile software development is that it is iterative. When done correctly design emerges as the system is developed and commonalities and opportunities for re-use are discovered.

Now, it’s not the case that teams either do design or not. But I have seen that there are a number of specific traps bigger that Agile teams fall into that arise from lack of design. These traps arise from making tactical or limited decisions outside of a larger framework or structure, which isn’t surprising since Agile followers are guided by the principles that the “best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams” and “working software is the primary measure of progress”. Unfortunately what I’ve seen that lead to is:

  • Poor middleware/database system decisions: with this trap, you get teams making a decision on deploying a specific middleware package or database system that will support the software development they are doing. However, while that may be great for the Dev, it may not be great for the Ops. If you have enough teams making tactical decisions, you may end up with a more complex system than is necessary and greater technical debt that you want. Once you get enough data into your database systems, trying to reverse the decision may result not result not only in new development and testing, but a small (or not so small) migration project as well.
  • Poor infrastructure decisions: likewise, with this Agile trap I have seen teams using IaaS pick different images to deploy their software onto. Like the database problem, developers may choose one operating system (e.g. Windows) over another (e.g. Debian) because they are comfortable with the former, even if the production environment is more of the latter. The result can be your organization ending up with multiple VMs with many different operating systems to support and thereby increasing the operational costs of the system.
  • Poor application framework decisions: I see less of this one, although it can happen where teams pick an assortment of application frameworks to use in creating their software, and as with middleware and infrastructure, this will drive up the support effort down the road.

Given these traps, I think the way to avoid them is to inject some specific design phases into the overall software development lifecycle. One way to do that is to revisit a software development lifecycle (see diagram below) used by practitioners at IBM and documented in places like this IBM redbook. It has a waterfall quality about it, but it doesn’t have to be limited to waterfall type projects. It can be highly iterative.

The lifecycle process is shown here (taken from the redbook):

 

GSMethod

The part of the lifecycle in the large box is iterative and not all that different from an agile sprint.  But here you take time to explicitly make design / architecture decisions before building  software. You continue to iterate while making important design decisions before building.

Now, before you start your iterative software development lifecycle, you should need to  make specific architectural decisions. You should make these specific decisions in the solution outline and macro design phase. For smaller teams, these two phases may blend into one. But it is here in solution outline and macro design where you make decisions that are fundamental to the overall solution.

For example, in solution outline you could make overall architectural decisions about the application architecture, the choice of infrastructure technology, what application frameworks are the target for the team. These overall architectural decisions guide the dev, test and ops teams in the future. You may also decide to park some of these decisions in order to do further discovery.  Macro design could be next, where each of the dev teams make certain design decisions about their technology choices before they proceed with their iterations. As they are building and deploying code, they can run into issues where they need to make further design decisions, either due to problems that arise or technology choices that have to finally be made: and this is where the micro design phase is useful.  Micro design decisions could be quickly made, or they may require spikes and proof of concepts before proceeding. Or there could be no decisions to be made at all.  The main thing is more design checkpoints are built into the development lifecycle, which can result in less complexity, less maintainability costs, and less technical debt down the road. What you lose in velocity you can make up in overall lower TCO (total cost of ownership).

There is a risks to this type of approach as well. For example, if the project gets hung up with trying to make design decisions instead of gather requirements and making working software. The key stakeholders need to be aware of this and push on the design teams to prevent that from happening. If anything, it can help the key stakeholders better understand the risks before getting too far down the road in terms of developing software. Overall I think the risks are worth it if it helps you avoid these common agile traps.

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Posted on March 31, 2020 in IT, new!

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My favourite Friday Night Christmas Music links….

…are here!

Years ago (2011, 2012) I used to post music links every Friday night (as well as other days and nights). On December, I would focus on Christmas music. These are some of my favourites.

Enjoy! And joy to the world….

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Posted on December 20, 2019 in music, new!

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Why I post mostly random nonsense on Twitter (as opposed to trying to influence the world with my tweets)

Many years ago I gave up on the notion of having any form of influence using Twitter, either as an individual or as part of a bigger force united by some such thing as a tag. Indeed, I gave up on the idea of using Twitter for anything other than sharing things with the few people who engage with me at all on this site.

I don’t think I can accomplish much of anything positive on this site. Anything I do share has a life span of 18 minutes on average (see below). For the few people who follow me and engage with me, that life span is likely longer. I know there are people who read tweets posted hours or even a day earlier. But those people are exceptions. Exceptions I appreciate!

Occasionally I share something and it gets shared by someone with more followers, but that rarely gets me more followers or other forms of engagement. It’s something odd to note and move on.

I treat this site as a coffee shop I wander into from time to time. I overhear some distorted form of the news, I get some weird opinions. From time to time I hear something brilliant. Often I’ll laugh at something odd or funny. Then I log out. This site is no longer the Cafe Central in Vienna, with Trotsky in the corner plotting revolution. If it ever was.

Besides, I am aware that there are people here who do try to use the site to foment small bursts of unrest and unhappiness. Why encourage that in any way?

If you still believe or witness positive change happening because of your engagement here, then that’s great. I suspect for the vast number of people updating statuses and reading them, that does not occur.

As far as mediums go, I still like it. I have given up on most other social media, save this and Instagram and my blog. I still get some social engagement from this and Instagram, which keeps me coming back. And Instagram and my blog are good ways to leave a record (something twitter is pretty poor at doing).

So if you wonder why I post mostly random nonsense on Twitter (as opposed to trying to influence the world), now you know.

P.S. Regarding the lifespan of a tweet:

Tweets have the shortest lifespan of any social media post, about 18 minutes. And there’s not much you can do about it. Twitter is fast-paced, and messages get buried more quickly. The newest algorithm  means that posts are no longer displayed chronologically, so yours might live a little longer, but your tweet will still get pushed down the page quickly.

via What Is The Lifespan Of Social Media Posts? – Epipheo

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Posted on December 6, 2019 in new!, socialmedia

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How I came up with the web page: All the books I have read since 2017 (somewhat technical. Involves python, S3 buckets)

 


I used to be a haphazard reader and my reading had slacked off. In 2017 I decided to have a goal of reading more and recording the books I had read. For the record, I had a simple Excel spreadsheet. This was good, but not easy to share.

 

To build this page, All the books I have read since 2017 | Smart People I Know, I wrote a Python program to convert the Excel spreadsheet to HTML. After that, it make it look modestly better, I stole some ideas from here. I was going to put the HTML directly into WordPress, but there were formatting issues. I instead put the page in an S3 bucket at AWS. And voila! Done!

 

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Posted on May 18, 2019 in new!

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On having fallen from the grace of god

Posted on February 27, 2019 | 4 comments

Having walked for seven plus years, having lost so much, so much dead, so much broken, he accepted he had fallen from the grace of god. He walked through the years, and recalled them, picking over broken things, things he had built now gone, things he had saved now lost. He had walked for seven plus years and lost so much from the lack of grace from god. And he despaired, and fed the fires of despair. And when his despair had burned away, he looked around once more and saw what still remained, what was good, what could be built up. And this was the true gift, not this thing or that, not the vain hope of never losing. This vision was the gift. With this vision, he could see that he had regained the grace of god, though it had never left him.

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The joy of being out of and in a storm at night

Posted on February 25, 2019 | Comments Off on The joy of being out of and in a storm at night

There is a joy of being out of a storm at night. You can listen to the wind blast and watch the trees whip while the rain or snow fills the air. You can experience that from inside a warm room, dry and safe. You can think: thankfully I am not out in weather like that. It is a pleasure to be sheltered in such a night.

There is a joy in being out in a storm at night. Dressed well, you can move through the elements, complimenting yourself for being able to handle such weather. Even in a big city, you will have little if any company. If you do come across another hardy soul, you can nod and smile as if you met another member of your secret society.

There are not many things that can bring joy no matter how you experience it, but a storm at night is one of those rare things.

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44 short books to help you overcome your reading difficulties

This is brilliant: 44 Short Books to Help You Reach Your Reading Challenge Goal – Goodreads News & Interviews.

It’s a great list of books, for starters. Second, they tell you how long they long they are and a number of them are under 100 or 200 pages.

If you are trying to reach a reading challenge goal, or if you are stuck trying to get started reading, or if you find you never finish books due to their length, then you should check out that list.

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Posted on December 5, 2018 in Books

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Some thoughts on Philip Pullman, free speech and de-platforming

I think often of this speech Philip Pullman gave regarding the rights and limits associated with free speech. I like what he says, and I like how he says it.

I’d like to see a similar one for de-platforming. No one has a right to be popular on social media. No one has a right to access and use a specific platform. No one has a right to stay on the platform if they don’t abide by the rules. If they get kicked off, they can complain on other platforms. They can complain to the owners of the platform. They can build a platform of their own and make their own rules and say what they want in a law abiding way.

But wait, isn’t that a violation of someone’s free speech? I don’t think it is. It gives too much power to existing platforms to treat them like utilities. They are not utilities. If they are utilities, then they should be heavily regulated. Better that they are not regulated, that they do not gain too much power, and that people that want to exercise their free speech build their own platforms.

Free speech should be defined within the context of a citizen and their government. People should be able to say what they want within the law. People should also be willing to accept the social consequences if they say something that offends others. That is what Pullman is saying in some ways. If his book shocks and offends you, you can take action that may harm him by reducing the number of books he might sell. That is the consequence he is willing to take in order to write the book he wanted to write. He understands that free speech has consequences. The one consequence he is not willing to accept is to be prevented from speaking. (I would add that the other consequence he is unwilling to accept is to be physically threatened, an all too common threat that hangs over discussions of free speech on the Internet.)

People who are deplatformed are not prevented from speaking either. They are being prevented from speaking the way they prefer, and that is a different matter. They want to speak their way without the consequence of being deplatformed.

 

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Posted on December 4, 2018 in ideas, new!

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I create a super simple set of tools to secure your Ubuntu server

Posted on November 10, 2017 | Comments Off on I create a super simple set of tools to secure your Ubuntu server

And you can get it here: blm849/supersimplehardening: A super simple way to harden your server.

I create a lot of Ubuntu test servers, and I find that as soon as I create a Ubuntu server on a cloud environment, it gets immediately attacked by automated software. This is obviously a concern. A bigger concern is that when I went  searching for recommendations on how to harden such a server, I found  a wide variety of recommendations! It can be hard to know what to do. Still, I needed something. As a result, I created this package of scripts. The scripts do a number of things:

  • prevent direct root login to your server via ssh. This was one of the things I saw consistently happen and once someone cracks the root access on your machine, it’s game over.
  • stop some basic security holes, like IP spoofing
  • download some useful software, like logwatch, ufw and others
  • upgrade all software on the server

This is just a very very limited number of things to prevent attacks. But it is better than nothing.

If you install Apache, PHP, MySQL or other software on your machine, there are even more attacks that will be launched against it. I recommend you get a firewall up and running and at least run logwatch on a regular basis to look for potential attacks being launched against you.

Finally, if it is important for you to secure your server, don’t stop with my scripts. Go out and consult with IT security specialists right away.

Good luck!

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