Not much time for original content today: a Link Gourmand, my own links, the wastebook, and quick chair.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, March, 2023

For several years, I took a lot of pictures of thrown out chairs in Amsterdam. Here’s a small selection of early ones - I’ll have to upload all of them to a gallery someday. I did a few videos as well. This is one of those things that you don’t notice until you notice it. And then, you see them everywhere.

Why are there so many garbage chairs? My theory is that (1) Amsterdam is a population dense place, (2) it’s not easy to just take things to the dump (first, you probably don’t have a car, let alone a pick up or even a friend with a pick up), and, (3) people move a lot…or just buy new chairs. So, people throw out chairs. You’ll often see what looks like an entire apartment’s worth of furniture just out on the curb.

Anyhow. I haven’t taken too many garbage chair pictures in a year or so. We moved to an enclave suburb and people are much tidier here! Here’s one from this past Saturday. Hopefully I’ll find more.

SpringOne CFP Now Open

SpringOne @SpringOne

Calling all Spring Experts! 📢 If you have a software story to share with the community at VMware Explore, we’d love to hear it. The CFP is now open for SpringOne@Explore through March 31: ow.ly/mImB50N7wPo

The SpringOne conference call for papers is open. This year it’s along side VMware’s annual conference in August, which will make it even bigger. If you have something to say about development, operations, DevOps, platform engineering, kubernetes, agile - all that! - you should submit a talk.

The Link Gourmand

I like links, you like links, they like links. This edition’s “how do you find your links” contribution is from my long-time friend Robert Brook. I got to know him back in my RedMonk days, and I’ve played the cat-and-mouse game of keeping up with him online ever sense. He's one of those people that just goes and deletes all his stuff from time to time. It’s a fun, multi-decade game of keeping up with him. We also share a Freeform mood-board, which is incredibly fun.

Robert says:

See the thing is, I don’t actually write anything on the web any more. In fact, I haven’t for some time. Almost everything I post is just photos I’ve taken, on Mastodon. I like Mastodon. I have a short but very compelling list of reasons not to write on the internet. Of course all this makes no sense at all once I admit that I’m delighted that other people ignore those reasons.

My being-online was in three phases. First, when there wasn’t much at all. Then, RSS. And now is now. There, I admit it: I have recently sort-of given up on a quite unnecessarily heavyweight RSS feed setup that I’d put together with FreshRSS, Pagekite and Python.

I used to follow links from the web, to the web. Now, quite often, I find myself following links suggested by things I’m listening to in audiobooks. I picked up a serious audiobook habit a few years ago and that’s led me down some rabbit holes: I’m always looking stuff up.

RSS is great, but it is a medium and not the message. There have been some attempts to rewild the web: “digital gardens” being one which I do enjoy. There’s also the very good https://ooh.directory - “a place to find blogs that interest you”, from Phil Gyford, may the saints preserve him. I’m tending to find a lot there.

I’d like https://fraidyc.at to have gone further, faster. I’d also like a more fragmentary, mesh-like approach to RSS. I think I might be describing parts of ActivityPub.

I also have a few scripts that surface things people have posted on various Mastodon instances, which seems to be going reasonably well.

I wouldn’t say I did actually manage the flow of stuff that comes towards me. I do think I have been able to focus a bit better on things that catch my eye. Friends are usually appalled to find that my information management is basically nil. I rely on search and novelty more than any structure I’ve imposed myself. I don’t feel like I’ve given up on anything there.

It does feel a bit weird that we have to “make sense of the web”, when the web was supposed to be making that sense in the first place. And our presentations of the web back to ourselves look like graphs - all nodes and edges: Tinderbox, Obsidian, all that. What if the thing we read and the way we read it was the same?

Anyway. I hope people do keep ignoring those reasons not to write.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, Jan 1st, 2020.

Wastebook

A lot of Rick Rubin’s advice is about getting beyond tinkering, stopping and getting to shopping. He helps here by dividing things into the open-ended creative process, where you intuit where things are done, stare at the wall, procrastinate in the hopes of stumbling onto inspiration, etc…and then the post-production crafting and finishing phase where you have a deadline and you do the work.
(I had ChatGPT fix this autogenerated YouTube transcript, so I’m not going to list it as a direct quote, but I think it is:) “Brands which are very much in the DNA of the company Levi Strauss and Company certainly is an apparel retail company, but is also one of the most valuable brands in the world. That signifies even more than a piece of clothing to me. Having grown up in communist Bulgaria, it was a symbol of freedom, of democracy, of the unattainable, and I will never forget the picture of the crumbling Berlin Wall in 1989 and all these young men and women sitting on the top of that wall, all dressed in Levi’s. This is not something Levi’s paid them to do. They were just wearing Levi’s because of what it symbolizes.” Katia Walsh.
“‘[Toil]’ is just a fancy SRE word for the boring stuff we don’t want to do anymore.” Mandi Walls.
“I envy—or rather intend to be, one day—a woman like her. Or those older women writers I’ve met, who at sixty live alone in a lovely flat, work calmly and with recognition, have friends.” Helen Garner.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, August, 2020.

Relevant to your interests

90% of US B2C marketing execs plan to use CharGPT - "10% of US B2C marketing executives have no intention of using ChatGPT in their marketing efforts. To the contrary, 19% indicate that they’ve already used ChatGPT, while an additional 41% are currently exploring use cases for it. "
Stream Automator - Unbundling is turning out to be really annoying. Paying for the full cable bundle with Tivo was probably better. // “I have better things to do with my time than figure that shit out.”
How to be interesting - This is from 2006 and it still applies. Also, it’s a reminder of how naive and different the “interwebs” were. His interview someone for 20 minutes a month is pretty good. I think “interesting” is a synonym for “weird”: rather, weird is a tool for being interesting.
The Current State of Continuous Deployment - From the CD foundation: “Less than half of software development professionals are using continuous integration (CI) or continuous deployment (CD).” See next link. The Gartner surveys find plenty of benefits, of course. The number one problem people hope to solve: “Overly complex deployments to multi-cloud environments rose to the top of app development and deployment issues that engineers must address, with 59% listing it as the most significant problem.”
State of Continuous Delivery Report: The Evolution of Software Delivery Performance - CD Foundation - “47% of developers use either continuous integration or deployment but only one in five use both continuous integration and deployment approaches to automate all building, testing, and deployment of code to production.” // It should be astonishing to you that so few people automate their build.
Technology Chiefs Seek Help Wrangling Cloud Costs - Among the usual enterprise FinOps stuff, some cloud forecasts and TAMs from Gartner and Forrester. “Information technology budget pressures and digital business complexities will drive 70% of enterprises to become more adept at managing their cloud spending by 2024, according to International Data Corp.” And, some TAM’ing: “Cloud spending worldwide is expected to grow 18.5% this year to $576.5 billion, slightly lower than the 18.8% growth forecast for 2022, according to market research and consulting firm Gartner Inc.’s latest projections. In the U.S. alone, cloud spending grew by 27% in the fourth quarter of 2022, lower than the 31% average growth rate of the previous four quarters, according to Synergy Research Group, a market analytics firm.”
Company Lays Off 8,000 While Paying Matthew Mcconaughey $10 Million A Year - “A sane financial decision to make for a $160 billion dollar company, we’re sure.” // I feel like there’s something wrong with the facts here.
The Hidden Link Between Workaholism and Mental Health - Work can feel better than the alternative, and you get rewarded for it. // “Don’t leave those downtime slots too loose. Unstructured time is an invitation to turn back to work, or to passive activities that aren’t great for well-being, such as scrolling social media or watching television. You probably have a to-do list that is organized in priority order. Do the same with your leisure, planning active pastimes you value. If you enjoy calling your friend, don’t leave it for when you happen to have time—schedule it and stick to the plan.”
If you’ve enjoyed it so far, you can get more of this daily-ish if you subscribe, it’s free! There’s usually longer essays and drafts on, let’s be honest, computer stuff.

Logoff

I’ve started using the video feature in Reader more. I think it’s pretty good. It still doesn’t solve the problem of me losing track of the content when I try to listen to videos in the background.

My next experiment is to skim the transcript first and see if there’s anything remotely interesting, listen to those bits, and then maybe creep to the rest. Despite being someone who gives lots of presentations professionally…I don’t really like presentations. A lot of it is because I do give a lot of presentations. I’m like that meme of the guy looking inside the bookcase instead of just enjoying the books in it.

See y’all next time!

They were just wearing Levi’s because of what…