Hi new readers. I see some folks on Twitter think I'm suggesting we eradicate everything I mention below. Nope. I (Linux user since 1998, open source contributor since 2006, Wikimedia open source community manager 2011-2014) …

Yesterday I helped a friend debug her Python code. I had never seen it before. She was nearly finished with a huge project refactoring a code base new to her, and had gotten all but …

I just reread Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, the classic lesbian coming-of-age novel that screams from page 1 and never forgets the intersections of class, gender, and sexuality. I just reread the bit where Molly …

I recently got to catch up with my brother-in-law-in-law John and we talked about books a bit, and I started thinking about books I would recommend to him. John, my apologies if you've already read …

A few miscellaneous links: On the magic of land registration. Darwin's lament. The wonder of Wonder Woman. (Watch that vid, by the way, even if you have never been a WW fan.) On statistics and …

A few memories. First. One morning in May 2001, I looked through my apartment, gathered together a bunch of items into plastic bags, and walked a few blocks to a man's apartment. I broke up …

When I tell people about grants they could get to help them work on open source/open culture stuff, sometimes they are surprised because they didn't know such grants existed. Here are some of them! Grants …

Today, July 27th, is the ten-year anniversary of Barack Obama's super cool 2004 Democratic National Convention speech. That one. Remember that? Remember how good it was? That we can say what we think, write what …

When I worked at Salon.com I got to work with Scott Rosenberg. I never reported to him and barely got to collaborate with him directly, more's the pity, but I did get to witness him …

Wordsworth tells us that his greatest inspirations had a way of coming to him in the night, and that he had to teach himself to write in the dark that he might not lose them. …