In the last month I've encountered the term Technical Debt a great many times.  If the term is unknown to you, consider it a sort of borrowing against your future (e.g., time in most cases, but also money to pay for employees' time) in order to more quickly deliver…

Living in the country, one of the yearly jobs one has to do, which my city friends miss out on, is cleaning out a septic system filter.  It involves removing a man-hole sized cover, which is fastened with 8 three-inch screws.  Once open, you have to reach the length of…

I've written before about my frustration with big media using the web as a supplemental mechanism for reusing content first delivered in a traditional format.  When the web is viewed as a table of contents or handout to your main presentation, you miss the entire point of what the web…

The girls and I drove to the dump, with CBC on the radio.  Brent Bambury was interviewing Canadian Astronaut Julie Payette.  When it was our turn, and I had to turn the car off, we were all sad at the thought of having to miss the last few minutes.  But…

"The original is unfaithful to the translation." --Jorge Luis Borges A post with this title could take me one of two ways, and tonight I'm going to follow it down the road paved with silicon.  I had a guy tell me this week that the holy grail of…

David Eaves is thinking about the current implications of America's move post-9/11 to tighten its borders.  As Obama and Oprah learned from the IOC members when the Chicago bid failed, getting into the US is increasingly a harrowing experience, even when you are not breaking any laws.  It's not…

I'm too tired to do it tonight, but soon I'll have something to say about Derrida's book, Archive Fever.  I'm reading it in response to Walter Benjamin's essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which I'm reading in order to properly understand Luke's post on the…

And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. One of the lessons I'm learning, and I'm still learning it despite working on it daily, is that my relation to others cannot be about fixing problems, and instead must be based on a willingness to be…

I blame Steve Lee for the fact that I'm having to write this.  Previously I wrote an account for my students about what it's like to fix a bug in an open source context.  The occasion of my post was a bug related to the use of a deprecated (and…

Yesterday I had to go out and run some errands. I asked my eldest daughter if she wanted to come along for the ride and join me. She did, and while I got some things ready, she went out to the car ahead of me. When I got out to…