22 Dec 2013, 11:46 a.m.

Long Takes, Spit-Takes

A week ago, I saw the excellent Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at the museum. Akerman's singular avant-garde epic -- which surveys with unprecedented detail the mundane daily routine... Akerman creates a …

Read More
22 Dec 2013, 9:42 a.m.

Why Julia Evans's Blog Is So Great

Some writing is persuasive; it aims to cause you to believe or do something. Some is expository; it aims to cause you to understand something. A lot of tech writing is persuasive or expository. Some …

Read More
20 Dec 2013, 13:18 p.m.

JavaScript and How I Learn

From yesterday's JavaScript explorations: "I have now discovered that element.innerText works in Chrome and in Epiphany but not in Firefox." "This is why you use jQuery." And now I do! My "presidential" "speech" generator is …

Read More
15 Dec 2013, 18:59 p.m.

Giant Linkdump of Activism, Tech, And Silliness

Improving your project's hospitality. And Angela Byron on hospitality in "The story of my first DrupalCon". An October 26th tweet: "We only solve the problems that cause us pain. That's why design thinking starts with …

Read More
12 Dec 2013, 21:29 p.m.

Hacker School Gets an A on the Bechdel Test

When part of the joy of a place is that gender doesn't matter, it's hard to write about that joy, because calling attention to gender is the opposite of that. I want to illustrate this …

Read More
10 Dec 2013, 20:05 p.m.

Narrator

On New Year's Day a few years ago, I went on a long train trip next to a white guy in his fifties who'd lived his whole life in South Carolina. As we talked, I …

Read More
05 Dec 2013, 7:51 a.m.

Fisher-Price's My First Twitter Bot

On Sunday I wrote my first Twitter bot, with a bit of help from Leonard. (A Hacker School colleague inferred, understandably, that Leonard and I just write Twitter bots on the weekend, to relax.) Then …

Read More
30 Nov 2013, 17:37 p.m.

Round Seven of OPW

Congratulations to all six of the Wikimedia's chosen participants in the current round of FOSS Outreach Program for Women internships. I'm especially glad I was able to help Maria Pacana and Be Birchall, my colleagues …

Read More
30 Nov 2013, 10:11 a.m.

Colons: A Retrospective

I am working on another silly project, and it led me to look at winners and finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. There are way more colons in the titles of those books …

Read More
27 Nov 2013, 14:45 p.m.

Shiny

I hereby recommend to you the super-readable, witty, on-point analysis of cosmetics ad claims at "Brightest Bulb In the Box: Beauty for Critical Minds". Much thanks to terriko for the link to BBItB! If you …

Read More