Blistered hands

In a sign of the kind of work I usually do, a few hours raking leaves yesterday has left my hands hilariously blistered. Woodworking’s been good for nothing with toughening those up! I intentionally spent those hours with nothing in my ears—lately I’ve reached too often for podcasts or music, but it was good to be alone with my thoughts. Or, more accurately, with my thoughts and the cacophony of birdsong we’re treated to during these fine spring mornings.

That we’re at issue 450 is a better indication of how I usually spend my days—reading, writing, talking, and so on. But I remain humbled by the difficulty and reward of all kinds of work. Just as there’s labour to organizing a yard, so too is there labour to organizing one’s thoughts. They’re not so different as they may seem. While one leaves physical reminders of its toll, both can tire and wire you just the same.

Anyway, it’s been a happily full weekend! On to some links:

• These are difficult days for so, so many people, on so many fronts. For those faced with increasingly unstable employment and uncertain job prospects, or struggling with the work they’re doing, Mandy Brown has some advice on “ways of moving”—whether just a little or a lot, Mandy’s metaphors offer nudges for how we might approach such uncertainty more head-on.
• On that note, if you’re considering a career in the vast umbrella of “technology policy”, Christopher Parsons has an excellent long post on what that can mean, how you might educate yourself, and all the ways it may go.
• Conceptual walkthrough, in the American context but applicable elsewhere, of “capability-based budgeting” for services, as opposed to line items for individual technical products or systems. (via Jennifer Pahlka)
• Paul Craig with an exploration of why generative AI systems run so contrary to government compliance regimes, with some great data analysis building on the Auditor-General’s report on the Canada Revenue Agency’s contact centres.
• Aadam Jacobs has been recording concerts since 1989, and they’re all slowly making their way to the Internet Archive. I have a tag in my bookmarks called internet-culture and even though the earliest of these recordings predate the World Wide Web’s public debut by four years,¹ this is 10000% what I mean by “internet culture”. (via Kottke)
• Speaking of the internet, the web, and links, I quite enjoyed Marcin Wichary’s dissection of the classic web rule not to link by saying only “click here”. The struggles he discusses of where to put links are so relatable—I tend toward overly long, “self-contained” links, which some of you have identified as being hard to read. I continue to try to strike a good balance!
• “Hollywood’s World Map of California.” Reminds me of how the location selection for so many films and shows from the early through mid 20th century (and maybe later?) was heavily influenced by Hollywood union rates—beyond a certain radius, there were extra travel fees, creating an incentive to maximize whatever scenery and landscapes were available within X00 miles of the big studios. (I’ve no idea the radius, nor have I been able to turn up a source for this with a quick search. I recall this coming up as explanation for some of the Star Trek: TOS location selections, where so many alien planets looked suspiciously similar.)

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas