August 6, 2023

Hit and Miss #309: Good summer

Ah, August—the good part of summer. Still hot, yes, but less consistently so. Cooler nights, the occasional balmy day, little treats to make the heat more bearable, comfortable and nice before we again give up the heat for so many months.

Several links from this week:

• “I don’t want students to be able to finish each other’s sentences. I want the ethics layer to be sufficiently thorny that a variety of design approaches would have to be considered.” (Sara Hendren, “shearing layers and finishing sentences”)
• “But more often than not, organizations are completely incapable of executing on any plan whatsoever and they hire the consultant as if that’s a magic cure that will fix whatever is keeping them from changing on their own. Consultants are really bad at doing that. They don’t have the authority to fix what’s broken for you.” (Marianne Bellotti, “The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All The Consultants”)
• Why transparency in municipal finances can help win support for funding from other levels of government. (Neil Saravanamuttoo and Catherine McKenney are on a good roll with Fix Your City.)
• “They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to do their art, because they assumed (because we’re conditioned to assume) that every thing we do costs time. But that math doesn’t take energy into account, doesn’t grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back. By doing their art, a whole lot of time suddenly returned. Their art didn’t need more time; their time needed their art.” (Mandy Brown, “Energy makes time”)
• Ethan Marcotte gathers a number of thoughtful posts on social media, relationships, and internet culture in the wake of Twitter’s continued demise.
• Jeremy Keith, a few years back, shares his experience crossing the Atlantic on an old-style ocean liner. Turning back the clock each day (almost) was one of the coolest bits for me!
• “This is the Phone Challenge: to use my phone as little as possible without sacrificing its real utility. … The point isn’t to limit my contact with the internet — I still get to use my laptop as much as I want. But my laptop use is more deliberate than the way I used to pull out my phone for no reason, and my laptop doesn’t go everywhere with me.” (Elizabeth Lopatto, “Let’s all play the Phone Challenge”)
• “We've let ourselves get away from building websites that can do normal web things. … In the end, it's usually because we've JavaScript'ed our way out of these things.” To the great bit about letting links be links, I’d add making links functional—that a link I bookmark or share should bring me back to the same information (more or less). (Heather Buchel, “Just normal web things.”)

Okey, time for some rest and fun this long weekend. C’s in town, we’re having a picnic with S and V later today, and tomorrow is gloriously unplanned. All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas