Career support and new reading material
Hi, loyal readers. It’s been a while, but I have a really good excuse: I left the country. I’ll explain in a second, but there is more important news, which...
Liberation, or lock-in? The disability innovation trap
One thing you all should know about me is that I have a relationship with gadgets that, for an extended period, bordered on obsession. If it’s a tablet or a...
On labor and AI
Happy Labor/Labour Day/bank holiday to you. Seems like a good day to talk about the elephant in the room again. The predominant storyline around labor, of...
The fall
First things first. I promised that office hours would be back this week, and here they are. Sign up now for slots on Thursday, the 21st. As a reminder, I...
How I spent my summer… vacation?
Happy summer! I’m going to kick this off with the most important news first: office hours return next week. I’ll post the link here and on LinkedIn next...
A Practical reboot
Hi, all. It’s been about a month since my last newsletter. I went on a long vacation (with a COVID chaser!), and since then I’ve been doing some thinking,...
The changing center of gravity
Last week, I went to Anaheim for the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference, the biggest disability-and-tech conference of the year. I think this was the 22nd...
The end of an era
When I was 13, my family moved to Tuba City, Arizona, a small town northeast of the Grand Canyon, on the Navajo Nation. I’m thinking back to a specific event...
How to grey-rock Meta
(This post is structured like one of those recipes where you might not care about the preamble because you came here to make the damn thing. The operational...
They’re not layoffs. It’s worse than that.
Last week, I made an off-the-cuff list of Trump administration actions, and I could do another one just as long this week. But then, I’m going to be able to...
The purge
Well, that was a lot. To quote Inigo Montoya: “Let me explain...No, there is too much. Let me sum up.” In the first week of the Trump presidency, and this is...
Something for today
I don’t want to talk about politics today, so I’m going to talk around politics. I’m writing this particularly for those of us in the United States, who are...
Meta-discussion
Welcome to 2025. It’s been a while. This is a kind of state of the union, and it’s explicitly political, so if that’s not what you want over your morning...
A letter from the CTO re: the hiring process
Hi, all. It’s been a while! Six weeks, by my count. As it turns out, building up a business is like eating a clock: it’s time-consuming. Here’s a quick...
To hell with the business case, again
I told you so. One of my first posts to this newsletter was titled To hell with the business case. It begins: I’ve had a lot of positions on a lot of issues...
Some news about Practical
Happy Monday! A bonus happy Canada Day to those who celebrate. Practical Equity and Inclusion was formed a year ago last week. I’ve been writing this...
The engineer problem, part 2
In my last newsletter, I outlined a problem I see in a lot of tech spaces, to wit: efforts in the DEI space tend to work around companies’ engineering...
The engineer problem, part 1
A couple weeks ago, I did a thing. I stumbled across a property auction with literally lots and lots of iMacs, and I won. Several times. Ultimately, I ended...
The accessibility community is not the disability community
Happy Monday! Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) was last week. Those of you from the accessibility side of the house will surely have seen an uptick...
“We”
Happy belated Mother’s Day, whether or not you’re on America’s schedule for that. Over the weekend I listened to an interesting interview on BBC radio, about...