Personal
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Behind the Eye Ball
Here’s not looking at you, kid Three and a half weeks after cataract surgery on my left eye, vision improvement seems to have plateaued. I’d say it’s 20/80. The new lens is fine, but the corneal edema persists, so it feels like it’s smeared with vaseline. My right eye, which had its cataract replaced with Continue reading
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Where Are We?
While the Web isn’t a place, we know it as one. The language we use to describe it is concrete and structural: domains at locations, with sites that are built and have pages that are authored, and contents that are uploaded and downloaded. For a generation or more, we have searched through the Web’s vast Continue reading
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Whatknot
Boston wins We had some deep snows when I lived in Arlington, Mass (next to Cambridge), but nothing quite like the thick blanket of white that got dumped on the Boston metro two days ago. The screenshot above is part of an NWS snow-depth map that will soon age out. So enjoy it while you Continue reading
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Friday Afternoon Lights
Let there be a FHS bulb Osram Sylvania MR13 300w 82v 3300k GX5.3 Bought a used Kodak 4200 Carousel projector for pocket change at a garage sale a few months back, so I could go through my large cache of slide photos shot between 1950 and 1972. Turns out the bulb was dead, so I bought a Continue reading
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Keeping the Light On
2 B Bob Weir is gone. He and Jerry Garcia were (at least to me) the sonic and vocal backbone of the Grateful Dead. He was less than two months younger than me. Jerry was older, but dead at 53. Phil Lesh made it to 84, dying in October 2024. Bill Kreutzmann is still with us Continue reading
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My Three Hooks
For many years, I attended an annual gathering of folks who wanted to save the Internet for future generations. Aspirational guidance was provided by the metaphor “big hooks:” ones meant for catching big fish. Since I was a kid, my life has always been about big hooks, especially ones that maximize personal and collective agency, Continue reading
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How about ASO, for Attention Surfeit Order?
Royal Society: Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging. To which Thom Hartman adds, The Science Catches Up: New Research Confirms ADHD as an Evolutionary Advantage, Not a Disease. Which I’ve always believed. But that didn’t make me normal. Far from it. In my forties and at my wife’s urging (because my ability to listen well and Continue reading
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Departments of Correction
Fortunately, we've already got it here: unlimited 2GB/s symmetrical service for $59/month. Bloomington's city fiber rollout has been paused by the mayor. Here's square's story about it, which is also in Bloomdocs—an example of a news commons at work. One more reason to move off Chrome? A URL that begins with chrome-extension://efwhaddfugisallthisjiveepwnj/ before it gets to http:// is not Continue reading
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Hear in Near L.A.
Just loving the hang time we got yesterday with Tony after two long flights and one short drive from LAX. Continue reading
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iPhone 16 Pro or Pro Max?
I got an iPhone 16 Pro twelve days ago. I have two more days to swap it for an iPhone 16 Pro Max, which will cost me $100 above the mint I already paid for the Pro with 1 TB of storage. Why so much storage? I want to maximize storage because this thing is Continue reading
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On Intelligence
Now that AI is a huge thing, it’s worth visiting what intelligence is, and how we mismeasure it—for example, by trying to measure it at all. I’ve been on this case for a while now, mostly by answering questions ab0ut IQ on Quora. My answer with the most upvotes is this one, to the question Continue reading
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Personal vs. Personalized AI
Personal AI is personal. It isn’t personalized. Context: There is a war going on. Humanity and nature are on one side, and Big Tech is on the other. The two sides are not opposed. They are orthogonal. The human side is horizontal, and the Big Tech side is vertical.* The human side is personal, social, Continue reading
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Feed Time
Two things worth blogging about that happened this morning. One was getting down and dirty trying to make DALL-E 3 work. That turned into giving up trying to find DALL-E (in any version) on the open Web and biting the $20/month bullet for a Pro account with ChatGPT, which for some reason maintains its DALL-E Continue reading
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Getting Us Wrong
Several thousand years ago, when I was on leave from journalism and working as a marketing dweeb, my small North Carolina firm learned about PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), a techy new service that told me that my rural zip code was “Hardscrabble,” while the next one over was a suburb PRIZM called Continue reading
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What shall I call my newsletter?
I’ve been blogging since 1999, first at weblog.searls.com, and since 2007 here. I also plan to continue blogging here* for the rest of my life. But it’s clear now that newsletters are where it’s at, so I’m going to start one of those. The first question is, What do I call it? The easy thing, and Continue reading
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Why the Celtics will win the NBA finals
Marcus Smart. Photo by Eric Drost, via Wikimedia Commons. Back in 2016, I correctly predicted that the Cleveland Cavaliers would win the NBA finals, beating the heavily favored Golden State Warriors, which had won a record 73 games in the regular season. In 2021, I incorrectly predicted that the Kansas City Chiefs would beat the Tampa Continue reading
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Remembering David Hodskins
A hazard of aging well is outliving friends and other people you love. For example, two of the three in the photo above. It dates from early 1978, when Hodskins Simone & Searls, a new ad agency, was born in Durham, North Carolina. Specifically, at 602 West Chapel Hill Street. Click on that link and Continue reading
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TheirCharts
If you’re getting health care in the U.S., chances are your providers are now trying to give you a better patient experience through a website called MyChart. This is supposed to be yours, as the first person singular pronoun My implies. Problem is, it’s TheirChart. And there are a lot of them. I have four (correction: five*) MyChart accounts Continue reading
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Remembering Kim Cameron
Got word yesterday that Kim Cameron had passed. Hit me hard. Kim was a loving and loved friend. He was also a brilliant and influential thinker and technologist. That’s Kim, above, speaking at the 2018 EIC conference in Germany. His topics were The Laws of Identity on the Blockchain and Informational Self-Determination in a Post Facebook/Cambridge Analytica Era (in Continue reading
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Going west
Long ago a person dear to me disappeared for what would become eight years. When this happened I was given comfort and perspective by a professor of history whose study concentrated on the American South after the Civil War. “You know what the most common record of young men was, after the Civil War?” he Continue reading