Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Posts for 2020

21 Dec 2020, 9:31 a.m.

Graduating From The I-Didn't-Graduate Dream

I used to have dreams that, oh no, I didn't actually finish high school and need to go back and finish a class or exam. I hear this is pretty common. I thought I'd graduated …

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11 Dec 2020, 16:50 p.m.

Two Upcoming Sumana-Talks-At-You Events

Most urgently: You have just over 24 hours to back the Mermaids Monthly project on Kickstarter, supporting a fun, independent speculative fiction magazine for 2021. If you back at the $100 “Subscription, Pin, and Poetry” …

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11 Dec 2020, 11:17 a.m.

On Realizing There Was Still Some American Exceptionalism Lurking In My Brain

One of the most valuable things I treasure about the Internet is that I can have a glimpse into the lives of people who live a very different life from mine. I regularly read the …

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07 Dec 2020, 7:55 a.m.

Reflecting on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The other night I watched two films in a row: Knock Down The House, the documentary about four progressive candidates running to unseat Democratic incumbents in the 2018 US election, and Douglas, Hannah Gadsby's comedy …

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02 Dec 2020, 17:35 p.m.

Ashwatthama (The Elephant)

I read the comic book version of the Mahabharata as a kid (thank you, Amar Chitra Katha!) and many of its stories stayed with me. As I recollected in a newspaper column in 2005: Yudhisthira …

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02 Dec 2020, 16:24 p.m.

Getting Autoconf Unstuck

For most of this year, Zack Weinberg and I have been working on a pretty ambitious project: to make a fresh release of GNU Autoconf, a crucial free and open source build tool that hadn't …

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01 Dec 2020, 14:15 p.m.

Frances, Thanksgiving, And Potatoes

Because it's World AIDS Day, today I want to tell you a story about Thanksgiving, food, breaking and remaking tradition, and family. Caution: death because of AIDS. Back in 2005, when my now-spouse Leonard and …

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01 Dec 2020, 10:36 a.m.

Potomac Jokes

When my spouse Leonard was young, his mother told him a joke about President Richard Nixon: Nixon fell into the Potomac River and was in danger of drowning. A local kid jumped in to save …

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25 Nov 2020, 11:55 a.m.

Situation Normal Giveaway, Preview, and Pre-order

My spouse Leonard Richardson has written a second novel, Situation Normal! Publishing house Candlemark & Gleam will publish it on December 14th, 2020. You can preorder it now in ebook (Kobo, Nook, Chapters Indigo, Kindle) …

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19 Nov 2020, 10:45 a.m.

Thank You

Today I finally fiddled with the Universal Access settings in GNOME to: make the mouse cursor bigger, and add a contrasting outline, so it's easier to see where it is add a visible alert every …

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