Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I took Friday off to take some folks visiting us to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. It’s a beautiful place I used to pass daily on my way to work prior to the pandemic turning the world on its head.
It’s both impressive and sad. To know that Monticello was built and maintained by enslaved people puts a stain on an otherwise beautiful place.
What’s worse is Jefferson hated slavery but kept enslaved people because he knew he couldn’t run a 5,000 acre plantation without them.
Bryant Francis • gamedeveloper.com
The cost of using Unity as a game engine is once again about to increase. Starting in January 2024, the company will begin charging what it’s calling a “Unity Runtime Fee” that is based on the number of users installing games built on the widely-used engine.
This has been a huge topic this week. I feel really bad for smaller game devs because it’s going to really hurt their ability to continue operating, much less making great games for folks to enjoy.
I hope the Unity folks come around with something more agreeable.
It’s been nearly a year since it became clear Elon Musk was going to buy Twitter, and I wanted to take a second and just say thank goodness for Mastodon.
Yes indeed! Thank goodness for Mastodon! I don’t regret for one moment spinning up Curmudgeon Cafe and I hope I can keep it going for years to come. 🤞🏼
Aaron Rodgers out for season after MRI confirms Achilles injury for Jets QB
Welp, the Aaron Rodgers story takes a strange turn four plays into the 2023 season.
The big question on everybody’s mind is, is this career ending? He’s 39 years old, which now doesn’t seem so old for an NFL Quarterback, but it’s more difficult to heal as we age and does he have the desire to get healed up and put in the grueling work to get prepared for next season?
Perhaps rubbing a little Ivermectin on it will heal it up sooner?
Too soon?
This two part musing reflects the conversations I’ve had with some good friends and former teammates of mine as well as reflections on some of my own observations over the last few years as I prepare to join one of the few Bay Area VC-backed startups using .NET on the backend.
A VC backed startup using .NET? Outrageous! 😁
Yeah, not really. I like .NET and C#. If you’re coming from another curly braced language like C or C++ you should feel right at home with C#. And the .NET runtime and supporting libraries are feature rich and give you the tools to do anything you’d like.
News continues to trickle out of ESPN’s on-air layoffs and another former NFL player is among the cuts.
This is a piece from July. I’m not sure how I missed it. I like to watch Sunday NFL Countdown and the opening weekend of the 2023 season the crew had a new member, Alex Smith. That got me asking questions and I find out Matt Hasselbeck was let go.
I’m not a fan of the new set. The old round table in their waterfront studio was nice and different than any other pre-game analysis show. They were all in reaching distance of each other. It had a more intimate feel. It was nice.
This year the crew is spread out along your typical long desk in a drab set. I suspect it’s in the basement of some building to cut costs, which is fine, but why’d you have to make it so drab?
Anywho, enough bellyaching. The NFL is back! 🏈
Don’t let Chrome’s big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome’s invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the “Privacy Sandbox,” is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today.
I’m not a fan of Chrome. They’re definitely the new Internet Explorer.
I’ll stick with Safari and Firefox. They’re both great browsers and are more concerned about user privacy.
Developers, it’s time for you to choose a side: will you help rid the web of privacy-invading tracking or be complicit in it?
This isn’t a blog, rather a site encouraging web devs to clean up their act and fight against privacy invasion. Here’s hoping it works.
Of course we all know every news site is all about tracking and advertising. Good luck getting them to change.
FRANK BRUNI • The New York Times
But was there a bevy of headlines about a brain ravaged by time? Were there notations that Trump, at 77, was already as old as Ronald Reagan at the end of his presidency, and that after another four years in the White House, Trump would be a touch older than Biden at the end of his first term and thus the oldest president ever?
Yeah, why is the focus 100% on Biden? Sure he’s older than Orange Man but three years isn’t that much older.
Also, who in the Democratic Party is ready, willing, and able to beat Orange Man in a general election?
I still wish we had a Hillary Presidency but that ship has sailed.
I moved to Seattle for a high-paying tech job. It turned out to be the loneliest time of my life.
I can’t imagine having to adjust to a new city — across the country — in our new COVID-19 world.
When we moved to Seattle in the early 1990’s I had a family to care for and enjoy time with at night and on the weekends. Oh, and there wasn’t a pandemic raging across the planet killing folks.
I’d also imagine the transition from college life right into a place like Amazon could be rough. It’s my understanding Amazon is a tough place to work and if you’re a social person I could see it putting a dampener on your social calendar.
Stephanie Keith • commondreams.org
The slow-mo wave of fascism engulfing Florida - book bans, more guns, no drag, cheerleading for slavery - took a big goose-step forward with the latest incursion of a snarling horde of swastika-swathed Nazis screaming “White Power!” and “Did you thank Hitler today?”
The MAGA loving GOP has given white supremacists groups the courage to crawl out from under their rocks and show their true colors.
The GOP needs a boring old conservative to become the head of the ticket.
The MAGA movement needs to die in a fire.
The City of Vancouver is exploring ways to support existing and new corner stores, and other small-scale shops and services in residential areas.
When I was a little fella growing up in Lindsay and Exeter we had little markets nearby. In particular I remember Lynwood Market near my grandparents house in Lindsay. It’s long gone now but we neighborhood kids would collect our pennies and trek down to Lynwood Market to buy sarsaparilla for the entire gang. I really enjoyed that and still think about it from time to time.
Seeing Vancouver work toward this is encouraging to me.
He fixed things often and silently. Grandpa just cared about things working. He had an instinct for not just broken things but soon to be broken things. He would point out risky work, bad decision making in the form of shoddy materials or shifting angles. He was offended by the trace measures left in the world that signified short-term planning. So I learned that this too had something to do with craft. He had a visual vocabulary that amazed me. I think about how he could see these details. He saw choices and constraints and tensions and frictions where I just saw chairs. He saw effort where most people just saw end products.
Craft. No matter the thing we do for a living we should always work on our craft. I believe I grow a little every day I’m working on developing software. I’ve had so many influences over the years who I believe have collectively made me better at the craft of software development.
It’s a never ending process!
