Year of Linux on my Desktop 🔗
Now that I am running Xorg instead of Wayland on this desktop machine, I am into it. For a while I wasn’t willing to spend much of the workday on Linux because I never knew when I’d need to share my screen on Zoom, and I spend too much time on calls to want to flip back and forth. I can spend all day with Linux now, because Zoom works fine.
Weirdly, in fact, this machine is working better than my Mac in that regard. My Jabra Engage 75 “just works” in a way it didn’t with my Mac, and the AirPods I adopted because my expensive Jabra headset stopped working with my Mac had stopped working smoothly with Zoom on Mac, too. I had to do this thing where I opened the audio preferences and did a sound test before every call, or the audio out only worked about half the time.
Slack, Emacs, Chrome, Firefox, my terminal app … now that I’ve moved all the SF fonts over from the Mac it is not easy to tell which machine I am on from just looking because I hide docks and toolbars on both, have similar wallpaper, and all the apps look and act pretty much alike.
Tactile for simple GNOME window tiling 🔗
I miss Rectangles on the Mac a lot. I am not sure there’s anything quite like it in Linux, but the Tactile extension gets me close enough to my main use case, which is getting editors and browsers into a “takes up 90% of the vertical and 40% of the horizontal, but centered” state.
It lets you set up four layout maps, so it’s possible to do combos. Terminal windows, for instance, don’t need that kind of room, so I mapped layout 2 in such a way that I can hit Super-T to invoke the tile map, then tap 2 to activate the second map, then the specific key to place the terminal in the right tile for that map.
We’ll see how it goes. For now it’s a way to quickly get unruly windows into the right state when they appear.
Race wordplay is a bad idea 🔗
Today someone on my team asked me how to interpret a comment made to them:
“I’m as racist as any white American, but I’m not racist.”
Which … please no.
The person this was said to is not a native English speaker and isn’t white, and what probably seemed like a sort of self-deprecating but amusingly paradoxical thing to the person saying that didn’t land that way with the person hearing it: It was confusing and seemed a little nonsensical.
Since the person identifying as a non-racist racist is a fellow Gen-Xer, it wasn’t hard to untangle the whole thing and make it make sense: People of a certain age remember when “racist” was more synonymous with “bigot,” “klan adjacent,” etc. It meant “possessed of prejudiced thinking and racial hostility.” Well, it doesn’t anymore, and whatever we think of that, it is a more … I dunno … theoretical word, redolent of institutions, systems, power relationships, and unconscious bias. From the perspective of someone who has been around for a while, it’s just a different word now.
Personally, when I encounter people who are bigots or prejudiced, I just think of them as “bigots” and that’s the word I’d use if put on the stand. I’m on board, with reservations, with the newer usage and try to save it for when I’m describing a racist policy, a racist law, a racist belief, or racist behavior.
I don’t do the whole “I’m racist” thing because the memo on this particular usage has not distributed evenly, and that person on my team reminded me that people don’t uniformly agree on or understand “racist” as a people label, or how to handle it when someone deploys it on themselves or another person.
“Is this some kind of weird white people thing?” they asked, legitimately unsure of whether they were being fucked with or if perhaps this person was telling them something deeply unsettling about themselves.
“No,” I said, “it’s someone who remembers a different time and they’re trying to navigate this split usage and tell you something about themselves, but honestly they shouldn’t have done it that way and you’re right to find it confusing. They just wanted you to know that they understand they were raised in a racist society and have some racist ideas, but don’t consider themselves personally possessed of racial hostility or what we’d maybe better call bigotry.”
“Well, it embarrassed me because I had no idea what it meant and I was afraid to ask because it sounded like they were telling me they were, like, racist.”
When it comes to something as charged, uncomfortable, and frankly fucked up and backwards as race in this country, maybe save the wordplay and speak plainly.
Inhibitor Phase 🔗
I’ve always been fond of most of Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space stuff. The first one in the series left an impression, but Chasm City is my favorite. I’d seen a few mentions of Inhibitor Phase here and there, but the descriptions didn’t work for me. Last night it popped up again so I decided to read a few actual reviews, and now I’m several chapters in and really liking it. It helped to know there was some continuity with previous Revelation Space characters.
Reynolds has gotten smoother and better over time. I was a working editor when I first read Revelation Space, so it was my job to see all the mechanics, and I couldn’t unsee some of his. Once I understood that the book evolved out of his earliest fiction writing and had started life as a short fiction contest entry I felt a little more forgiving and quit comparing him to Iain M. Banks.
Anyhow, I’ve been casting about for some fiction after digesting that giant book about the MCU, and I’m glad to have this.
How’s the job going? 🔗
Okay.
It’s good, on the days I feel frustrated about pre-IPO tech company life, to remember that I gave myself a lot of time and space to choose, and this is what I chose. Again. With ten years of previous experience to guide the decision. It’s not a hard place to be useful, and the frustrations are easy to keep in context. It remains hard, some days, to be back toward the bottom of the hill building trust with new people.
But today was also an interesting day for feedback:
- “Susan was right. You do look like Christian Bale’s older brother. And your voice is mesmerizing.”
- “I have forgotten there was ever a time you weren’t here.”
- “I’m glad you hired Mike. It’s great to have another adult.”