Notes

Funny tale of Lucasfilm IP guardians getting mad about a pacifist. To their point, I guess it is “Star WARS.” — toot

I remember taking Ethical Decision-Making. It was a 200-level Philosophy elective. We had a conversation about so-called lifeboat ethics, and even the one Reaganite in the class described that as an extreme metaphor. Like, even he thought “save that one for actual lifeboats.” My so-called “progressive caucus” city counselor — he isn’t in the DSA, though — talks about the “deserving poor” at town halls. Lifeboat ethics is pretty much entirely how we’re socially organized now. — toot

Say what you will about the CFO coming around and saying “I’m in a group chat with some other CFOs and they had some ideas about IT ratios,” at least it was a group chat with some other CFOs, not Sonnet on low effort. — toot

“The agonized ego is a ring of defense around nothing.” — Alan Watts Management and ego sort of travel together. On my worst days at work, I usually trace it back to ego, meaning things that seemed really god awful sort of diminish to “more annoying than tragic” once I ask “was this tragic or am I protecting myself from something?” I think that’s work for everybody, not just managers, but in the midst of a tough transition, I know my team is watching and appraising and there’s an extra burden: They want stability, advocacy, and a sense of up- and across-managing effectiveness. It’s not my favorite zone. Hero managers — performative “us against the world” types — feed off the cheap energy of a team they’ve quietly convinced is dependent on them for protection from whatever is out there. That’s unchecked ego. Gratification of the self at the expense of whatever common purpose we can somehow cobble together at work. I had my hero manager, Man of the People phase, and it hurt my team. My mode is more subdued these days, and that’s an opposite swing of the pendulum that doesn’t always read well in hard times. — toot

Life in IT is a series of interactions with technology that sometimes get you the expected outcome and sometimes do not. Leadership in IT is a series of decisions to delegate those interactions, then learning how they went. Sometimes things go wrong, and depending on how you choose to retrospect, you can undermine continuous improvement: “Understanding an issue is not the same as fixing it. A good explanation can make things worse. Once everyone agrees that the behaviour was reasonable, the urgency to change anything disappears.” I’d like more of a culture of “I don’t want the details,” but hold open some space for stepping through the details in another context, after the urgency to improve has been preserved. There are coaching opportunities in those kinds of conversations, and sometimes people just want to be reassured that they had done the reasonable thing. — toot

Saw Sleep here in Portland a few nights ago. Like I said, I dig Hempispheres. Seeing them live, playing their new stuff plus closing the night with Dragonaut, was great. The crowd loved it all. It’s def not the Sleep of before, but it is good in its own right. I was on the fence because early reviews of this tour were poor. I’m so glad I went. It is hard to convey how such a spare, heavy, bass-forward trio can elicit the kind of energy Sleep does. Try this 4:20 cut of “Have Spacesuit Will Travel.” It’s pretty much the thesis statement of this iteration of the band. https://youtu.be/KhwiNPsaPfA?is=ngb1r5p-KlfOetXa — toot

You generally want politicians to understand what politics even is, and I gotta say things are not looking good. Plainly some of these people don’t think they even have ideologies. — toot

Gonna go see Sleep tomorrow, so here’s a few seconds of Snoop completely getting Sleep. https://youtube.com/shorts/qs30veDZho0?is=g_ldQtRmQo4cckgA — toot

I’ve been on Threads for 37 minutes for the first time since it launched. I think I understand its place in the ecosystem. Between X, Threads, and Mastodon, it’s all just horned poodles and Problematic Kirk. — toot
Finally got around to building the iOS version of my POSSE app. Mastodon and Bluesky text posting Add a title, publishes to Hugo, links from Mastodon and Bluesky +300 chars and no title: Complete post to Mastodon + first 300 to Bluesky with a link to Mastodon Images go to Pixelfed and boosted on Mastodon Saves drafts, toggle-able channels, saves photo markup to add inline in blog posts. The backing worker also quietly adds a Standard Site post to my AT proto PDS as the system of record for all of it and commits to a repo. Doing this as a PWA was just okay. Much better as a native app with OTA install via a private deploy site (so no App Store or TestFlight rigmarole). I didn’t know about ad-hoc installs until today, so more of my PWAs are going to be native apps as I get to them. — toot

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