Officially disguised as a Canadian
At the end of April, my best friend died. To clarify, I married my best friend: my husband is my best friend now. But for a significant period of my life, Chris Esterhuyse was my best friend, and I still miss him. At the risk of writing a navel-gazing post, I want to encourage youContinue reading On the nature of what it means to be an adult in 2024
While on holiday last year, a travel companion asked a question at dinner about kids these days and pronouns, that I wish I’d answered better. This is that answer. — Why do you wear clothes? Why do you wear those clothes? Is is out of habit? Have you ever wondered why you behave the wayContinue reading What’s in a pronoun?
I have moved my work and personal WordPress sites from WP Engine because they use Cloudflare for their CDN, and I didn’t want to support a company that supports Cloudflare. Terrorism is bad. So now I have my own dedicated physical web server again.
Back in the good old days of app.net (a social network you paid to be on) there was a good bunch of people who experimented a lot with the API Dalton and Brian came up with. One of the apps was called Whisper, and it allowed you to chat to people in your DMs withoutContinue reading Twitter needs a DM-only app
Some light reading: Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know littleContinue reading On America’s freedoms
I recently upgraded my home lab server, so I’m selling my SuperMicro SYS-E300-8D. If you would like to purchase it, you can make me a reasonable offer. PayPal is not accepted. If you live within the Canadian province of Alberta, I’ll pay for shipping. Outside of Alberta, you pay for shipping and insurance. You canContinue reading Home lab server for sale
The coronavirus has taken over. South Africa has been locked down for three weeks. Canada is under self-isolation orders. I read somewhere that there are something like a billion people staying at home, like you’re supposed to when trying to reduce the global pandemic of a bug more virulent than the flu. Italy is levellingContinue reading Nothing has changed; everything has changed
In 1987, a new file format was released by CompuServe, the Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF for short. While the format has been surpassed by better compression algorithms with no loss in quality (for example, PNG), GIF files made a comeback because they support animation. Animated GIFs are the bread and butter of modern informalContinue reading Gender pronouns and the pronunciation of the word “GIF”
On 19 June 2018, I wrote on Twitter that I was available for hire. https://twitter.com/_randolph_west/status/1009234713167347713 The economy in Calgary, where we live, was going through a slump. My regular customers in the energy sector weren’t doing the consultant thing, and I was not busy. I even considered going back to full-time employment, as long asContinue reading Thank you from the bottom of my heart
One thing I’ve been saying for many years, even as a young twink, was that if you have any questions about queer stuff, just ask. I’ve answered a lot of questions over the years, and wrote about some of them in a chapter in a book last year. Increasingly I’m finding myself answering questions onContinue reading Just ask