Recent Posts

Quick Hit: A Memory of 2015

First, it’s amazing that this memory is from over ten years ago. In some ways, it feels much more recent, but in other ways, it feels like it’s from an entir...

Meta’s Non-Failure Acquisitions

In a sort-of-recent podcast1 from In Bed With the Right, Adrian, one of the hosts, talks about Meta’s big, successful acquisitions but then points out some o...

Hell, Horns, and New Metrics

Recently, a FB mentioned that he was “H as H”1. Of course I wanted to properly quantize this, and perhaps be able to create a metric of sexual arousal. If we...

Photo of the Day: D and P

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Pacific Northwest was the center of bootblacking. There were multiple international titleholders, national winners, an...

Photo of the Day: Moffet Field

This is from a 3-day bike tour in Australia with my dad and a friend of the family, around 2011. For me, there were two memorable moments. One was on the fir...

Photo of the Day: Dust Storms in London

This would have been mere days after I officially moved to London, and, at the time, it felt like the end of the world. Facebook was still primarily in 10 Br...

Photo of the Day: Somehwere in Australia

This is from a 3-day bike tour in Australia with my dad and a friend of the family, around 2011. For me, there were two memorable moments. One was on the fir...

Photo of the Day: Acadia National Park

This was a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine in 2021. Bar Harbor is most famous for Acadia National Park, but also has The Jackson Laboratory. My family has been goi...

Photo of the Day: A London Fox

Today’s photo is a London fox. I had my first encounter with a London fox around 1998 or 1999, when I was there for a Lucent meeting. I was staying in an bed...

The Return to Work: A Live Blog

In a “normal” employment dispute, the employee and the employee’s lawyer believes that the employee has a job, and the employer believes the employee has bee...

Photo of the Day: Botallack Mine

Today’s photo is from the Botallack Mine, along Cornwall’s Tin Coast. It’s in a UNESCO world heritage site, the Cornwall Mining district. The mine is old: th...

Photo of the Day: Gold Rush

Today’s photo is from that glorious time before COVID where gatherings of large number of people in a small space seemed…fun, and not a way to juice your R-v...

Adventures in Homekit: The Shelly Button

The Shelly Button is exactly the kind of nightmare that I had hoped to avoid in Homekit. On paper, it seems remarkably simple and straight-forward: a small W...

Bacon Strip: January 2024

It was the first Bacon Strip of 2024, and there was a vibe. But more on that at the end. The official theme was “Punk VS New Wave Bacon Strip,” although it t...

Paper Gears, Part I(ish)

In late spring, I took a class on pop-up books. It was a lot of fun, and although I made a good start at trying things out, work and life interfered (as alwa...

Thinking About Model Trains

I’ve always loved trains. Somewhere, there is a picture of me as a three year old playing trainspotter at the Knoxville L&N yard1. I’ve got endless pictu...

Everything Turns Into a Chat

For one of my teams at work, a key metrics we goal against is something called “Creator Comment Deletes.” This is what it says on the tin: how many comments ...

A Legendary Train Trip: The Pennsylvannian

On Saturday, I flew to Pittsburgh to see a show. The flight was uneventful: a 737 from Seattle to Atlanta, and then a 757 from Atlanta to Pittsburgh1. On Sun...

I Guess I Can Talk About it Now

Sometime this morning, my watch buzzed, and I saw the news that the plane Yevgeny Prigozhin had been flying on had crashed, with all ten passengers / crew ki...

The Relentless Quest For Average

I’ve been wondering a lot about how good GenAI can ever be. I think I’ve convinced myself that at least in my lifetime, it will never be much more than avera...

Mumbai and Losing My City Literacy

I think I’ve talked before about my concept of “City Literacy:” navigating, understanding, and thriving in a city is a skill set. Without this skillset, citi...

Iceland (South) - Recommendations

Among others, TMIWTM has asked me about Iceland stuff. I can’t really say I know Iceland particularly well. Despite going there three times, I’ve really only...

Bacon Strip - Gay Anthems

The evening opened with Sylvia and Honey coming out and chatting. Sylvia was looking fetching (as always) in a bright rainbow dress. We learned that the dres...

Magic Lens, Try 1.

First, apologies to TMIWTM. A while back, I referenced a “paper that changed my life,” and he asked for the full series. I replied with three, and the list d...

Mark’s Recommendations For London

Reecently, I’ve been averaging one request per week of things to do in London. I mostly blame Meta allowing business travel again. I figured I should write t...

Bacon Strip - The Seven Deadly Sins

As Cunard used to say, “Getting There is Half the Fun.” I ended up walking to Jules Mae again. At one point, I walked by a restaurant, and there was someone ...

An Old Mystery Solved

In my wayward youth, I helped to digitize a journal from the Harriman Alaska Expedition1. As I was looking through the journal, the other notes that were in ...

Quick Hit: Carkeek Salmon Run

It was a perfect late fall day in Seattle: the air was cold, but clear, and the sun was shining brightly, taking a bit of the edge off the chill. I had a laz...

Every Restaurant on Broadway

In February 2020, I had the idea that I would do everything1 and try everything that was advertised in Highbury and Islington tube station2. I very carefully...

Genius or Savant

I’ve been thinking about Boris Johnson, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump a lot recently. This is mostly because it’s nearly impossible to follow the news and not ...

Bacon Strip: Sylvia’s Casserole

This was my first drag show in Seattle since I moved here, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. NADC has an astoundingly high bar; just off the top of ...

Three And a Half Thoughts on Twitter

There has been a lot of ink spilled about Elon’s takeover of Twitter, and his “Friday Morning Massacre,” and I’m unlikely to make any insights that haven’t b...

Smartphones: Complement or Replacement?

While visiting Frankfurt, Mat stopped by the Leica store, but neglected to grab an M11 and a Noctilux-M. Over WhatsApp, we were discussing the long-term impa...

Quick Hit: Isle of Wight Railway

For the first quick hit1, some ironwork at Shanklin Station, on the Island Line. I normally try to write at least 500-1000 words in a post. Q...

I wont’t see NCII

One of the things that the social media / tech industry has not gotten enough credit for is the efforts around stopping things like child sexual abuse materi...

Miss Ellaneous

N.B. This was written about two months after the actual event, so I am working from notes and (dim) memories. It was all so much better than I could ever hop...

A (Partial) History of chi.queers

Tonight’s chi.queers party was another big success. I think it was one of the larger parties at CHI this year, and I was proud to be a co-host, along with JC...

Duck Brook Bridge and Quarry

I’m back in Bar Harbor this week, and as could be expected for Bar Harbor in late April, the weather is variable. The past two days have been beautiful, but ...

Wales, Part 1: Cheap Hotels

Zuck gave all of us five extra holidays in 2022, and the first one was 18 March. Even though I had just gotten back from the US, I decided to get out of Lond...

Changing at Euston and Sweating The Details

I was heading home from dinner1 with M., and Apple Maps told me that the overground to Stratford was cancelled. That was very useful, and meant that I headed...

Radio Silence, Redux

I am in the process of moving my (very) occasional blog from a relatively obscure CMS (Anchor1) to Jekyll, which involves pulling out all the old content fro...

The Northernest Line

Contra Jago Hazzard’s well-researched and historically grounded exploration about the origins of the Northern Line, I’d like to suggest that the reason why i...

Organizational Taxes

There are some papers/books that are transformative for me; after I read them, I simply don’t see the world in the same way any longer. Off the top of my hea...

Tim Versus Zuck

I feel like this is painfully obvious to say, but I don’t remember actually reading it anywhere:

A journal, Again.

I never really got in the habit of keeping a blog or regularly posting to the socials. But, I keep journals pretty consistently, and have maybe thousands of ...

Morally Bankrupt Business Plans, #38

In the spirit of “The Player,” here’s my pitch, “Well, we’re building on the proven success of GPT-3, adding in deepfakes, to disrupt the business of sextort...

Paul Tol’s Colors: Cut and Paste

I’m a fan of Paul Tol’s color schemes. They are attractive, colorful yet not too garish, distinguishable, and color-blind safe. He documents them well, but n...

Range of 1970s Soviet Commercial Airplanes

Airline maps asks “did Aeroflot not have an aircraft that could fly nonstop from Moscow to Vladivostok in the 1970s?.” Because I’m that kind of nerd, I looke...

Airbus and Brexit

Minor Prediction: Airbus will make a major announcement about Brexit in the next six to eight weeks: they have purchased property outside of the United Kingd...

Radio Silence

Good News: I have a new job, one that very successfully integrates a wide range of my talents and interests.

PrEP Demographics

Following up on the previous post, some people on the Facebook PrEP group were asking about general demographics of PrEP users. This data is again from the s...

PrEP and Drug Use

A few weeks ago, someone asked about drug use and PrEP, asking if it was more common for people on PrEP to be using drugs. At the time, Website A had just st...

Japan And The Toyota Production System

One of the fundamental paradoxes I’ve found in Japan is the contrast between the justly-famous efficiency of their manufacturing operations (in particular, t...

City Literacy

For a while, I’ve believed that there is a set of skills about how to live and navigate in larger cities. I call it roughly “city literacy,” and have noticed...

The Lies of the Six-Billion Dollar Man

Marky Mark has announced he will star in a re-make of the “Six Million Dollar Man.” Of course, these days, six million dollars doesn’t seem all that much, so...

An alternate Approach to Facebook

Every six weeks or so, a Facebook friend announces (s)he is cleaning up their friend list, and the “weaker” friends are going to get the axe. (I’m using “wea...

Uber versus Taxi

A few days ago, a friend needed to get home on a rainy morning. He decided to call a cab. “Great. We’ll be there in 15 minutes,” the dispatcher said. Fifteen...

PrEP Disclosure Online: Still not happening

It’s been a while since I’ve looked at data on degree of PrEP disclosure in web-based real-time dating sites. The past few months were pretty busy for me, an...

Scottish Independence and Peak Oil

It seemed to me, as a casual but occasionally interested observer, that Salmond’s major economic case for Scottish independence was something along the lines...

Facebook as Global Maxima

With recent news that Twitter is moving towards a Facebook-style filtered feed, we start to see the convergence of the various social networks towards an unh...

Slightly Bad Infographics, #1

I probably shouldn’t pick on Vox for my very first rant, but this entry bothered me a bit. It shows the number of deaths per outbreak (roughy categorized by ...