1. Saw #slift and #rhododendron last night.

    Slift reminded me of the first time I ever heard “Interstellar Overdrive,” but crushing.

    Rhododendron was a little slower burn but made me happy to be out on a Wednesday night.

  2. I’m very attached to Superpowers because it made coding with an agent more useful and more predictable. Superlite addresses the part of Superpowers that always made me think Superpowers might be making fun of me behind my back. After months of use, it remains genetically incapable of saying “this person almost never disagrees with a single spec or plan … I should just ask him ‘want me to just go do it?’”

    So I’ve got a small thing to try it out on. We’ll see!

    ↪ contextfirst.blog/superlite-hand-an-agent-a-spec/

  3. Some quick blog test — edited via Micropub update. And edited. Then re-edited.

  4. Last night we watched “Return of the Archons,” and that means tonight is “Space Seed” in the periodic re-view of TOS. That means it’s also time to rewatch The Wrath of Khan. That means it’s probably best to do ST:III and ST:IV to wrap up the Spock saga.

    Left in S1, of note:

    • This Side of Paradise
    • Errand of Mercy
    • City on the Edge of Forever

    I think I’m actually an S2 kinda guy. S1 has its charms, but there are a few real stretches of horse latitudes in there.

    My S1 nostalgia is for:

    • Arena, which is the first thing I ever remember seeing on tv.
    • Where No Man Has Gone Before, for the freaky eyeballs
    • The Enemy Within, for the good/evil horned poodles
    • The Menagerie, coz it’s cool but also just a clever way to reuse a failed pilot.
    • What Are Little Girls Made Of (freaked me out as a child when Lurch did other peoples’ voices)
    • The Galileo 7. As a kid I completely identified with Spock. As an adult, I think most of my leadership mistakes are pretty much me acting like Spock in The Galileo 7.
    • Tomorrow Is Yesterday, because it’s so hammy
    Keep reading →

  6. Not sure it’s possible to completely kick LinkedIn, but I did cancel my subscription and turned off anything that isn’t a message from a human.

    Every so often I come across people who don’t have profiles. It’s rare, but I guess I decided to convert my admiration to a step in the right direction.

    I could carry on about the slop-posts and all, but it really comes down to the fact that it somehow feels compulsory, so I hate it and don’t want to think about it.

  8. 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.

    ↪ kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/portland-shelter-village-sta …

  9. 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.

  10. “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.

    Keep reading →