from the dial-up days

“If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.”
George Orwell
“It takes much longer to get up north, the slow way.”
Ian Dury
“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.”
Aaron Swartz

notes

printed from bluesky
connecting to bluesky…

writing

  • Stephanie talked me into signing up for the Bellahouston Park 10K, on the 22nd of August, right as I finish Couch to 5K. Her reasoning: I won’t run it well, but that’s exactly why it’s useful. A number now, however rough, is something to measure everything else against by the time I stand on the Paisley 10K start line next summer.

    read on →

  • I have spent three years arguing that automation taking work away from us is a reason to want it rather than a reason to fear it. I still think that. But almost every objection worth answering comes from the left, and working through them one at a time has landed me somewhere more specific than enthusiasm: the technology is not the question, ownership and permission are. Including the part…

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  • I wasn’t there to race anyone. I was just curious whether the training was actually going anywhere. Turns out it is.

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  • A throwaway line in Pulp Fiction about finding your food waiting for you when you get back from the bathroom. On why noticing small good things is a skill rather than a mood, and why it is not the same thing as being told to count your blessings.

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  • Health and safety reps have had legal standing since 1977. Equality reps get theirs this October. Green reps have nothing, and a net zero target with no plan behind it is just a press release.

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  • A bowl of plant based udon at Wagamama in Silverburn, a note on why an RSS feed beats an algorithm, and how Stephanie’s chillies ended up in my broth.

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  • I spent a few evenings adding excerpts to years-old posts and accidentally read my own life back in fast-forward. On running threads, hospital wards, a screaming modem, and why the archive, not the audience, is the best reason to keep a blog.

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  • I’m 46 and just getting back into running. Here’s my one-year plan to go from Couch to 5K to running the Paisley 10K in under 50 minutes.

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  • After an MS diagnosis and one too many “I’ll start tomorrow”s, I got moving. Calorie counting, Couch to 5K, and logging it all on my own terms.

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  • I got tired of Google treating my search history like a diary it owned. So I built my own private search engine. Here is how, and why you might want to do the same.

    read on →