Sorry, but I don’t think there is much hope — I can’t tell you how many posts I have read recently about the demise of Medium. According to what I have read, it’s Tony Stubblebine’s fault, or maybe it’s ChatGPT, or who knows what caused it, but views are down, money is shrinking, and everything is wrong, wrong, wrong. My…

But you do you, ‘kay? — Yes, I suppose that if you think a cheap clone running Linux is the same as a Mac, then the Mac certainly does cost more. But that’s not why I have a hard time seeing a new Mac as an expensive purchase, because for you, some dirt cheap Linux or…

Don’t Be a Tightwad. Writers Need Your Support — Last night I went to a terrific book talk at the public library down the block by a pair of local authors who had exhaustively researched and then published a book about a civil war era discharge camp a few miles from here. …

The Sweetie Jar Principle — and why it never gets adopted — All newly appointed top bosses want to stamp their authority — some do it by making changes. My new boss wanted a revamped appraisal system. It wasn’t a bad idea. Our process was open to human error. I say error; I mean incompetence and apathy. He discussed it with the…

New floor, new carpet — We are having new carpet put into two rooms this week. The house is both neat and a freaking mess; neat because both rooms are nearly empty except for things too heavy to move or two necessary until the last minute and messy because everything else is piled up in…

Because why wouldn’t I want a mouse jiggler? — I guess randomly searching through Amazon isn’t doom scrolling, but I don’t have a word for it. Maybe Zon Scrolling? Whatever you want to call it, I seem to do it fairly often. Sorry, I lied. I do it almost every day. In fairness, I do it because I have…

This will hurt them — There have always been disgruntled Apple employees, but Apple’s recent actions about working at home and their extreme reaction to union organizing activity by retail store employees have changed the mood and minds of many employees who once were quite happy with their employer and their job. I think Apple…

Oh, that was a dangerous sentence — I was staring at the diplomas my customer had lining his office walls. Advanced degrees, at least three doctorates, and the one I stared at the longest was for Computer Science. I shook my head and sighed. “Okay, so what I have found is that someone logged in as root…

Fourteen years old and next to nothing there — Between 2008 and 2010 I set up three Wordpress sites. One was “Working For Yourself”, another was “Unixish”, and the other was “Pretty Much Retired”. I had forgotten about all of them and only came across them because I happened to be searching for something else, and up they popped. …

I’m surprised to see so little enthusiasm for tech — I recently mentioned working with a contractor who doesn’t like text messages. That really surprised me. It truly baffles me. Phone calls suck up much more time and interrupt your day much more. …

For whatever that was worth — In the late nineties and early two thousands, my APLawrence.com was a very popular tech site concentrating on Unix. I know that it was popular because my weblogs showed 300–400 thousand unique monthly visitors and Google Ads paid me thousands of dollars per year. That all fell apart with the…

It would be easy to cast stones, but I had a different reaction — I don’t usually listen to interviews with successful entrepreneurs. Founder interviews can be boring and often infuriating as some accidentally wealthy person babbles on about their alleged business brilliance. I knew I needed to listen to Ev Williams because, well, I write here and he owns the place, so, duh…

This was not my finest moment — You might say I’m a bit mercurial, prone to hasty action, or even worse. I get that, I really do. On the other hand, maybe sometimes what might appear to be an unusual act really is justified. My partner called me one morning. “I’m down at that new client in…

Fun times as an independent consultant — I don’t know how Raytheon got my name. I never advertised, so it could have been a referral from another consultant, they might have found my website, or maybe they had scoured the Unix newsgroups — no, too early for that, possibly BBS groups. I never thought to ask any…

I get it, our rabbit warren is a confusing place, but duh, update your GPS? — Many a decade ago, I traveled New England frequently. I wasn’t sightseeing, I was venturing out to do ‘puter work for clients, often for clients I had never visited before in cities and towns I’d never heard of. This was long before the age of cell phones, so people who…

If you’re earning less, you face difficult choices — High inflation isn’t just coming, it’s here. It is running at 5.4% in the UK, 7% in the United States, 5% in the Eurozone, and 5.59% in India. …

The United States likes to talk about problems. Well, ones we have solutions for, anyway. Others we tend to willfully ignore. This latter strategy is typically accomplished by either a.) pretending the problem isn’t happening at all or b.) dismissing it as one of little importance. …

Work in the time of COVID requires max humanity. — Weird. The world is weird. We read headlines about ‘the new normal,’ but this new normal wasn’t normal before, which is why it’s weird. We got back to business, sort of. We Zoom, we Slack, we try to read between the lines of the WhatsApp group. Some of us go…

Some things are best left unsaid — My oldest sister (Sarah Ouellet here) wants me to write about my father’s business. I can give you the parts that might be spun into an interesting story, but I am not going to tell that story. Not all of it, anyway. My problem is that I was part of…

Ask a different question, grasshopper — Coding is hot! Learn these skills and you’ll make a ton of money! Buy our course now! Yeah, sure. Maybe. But you know what else is a good paying skill? Custom carpentry. I know a guy who does that kind of work. His clients are wealthy people who don’t want…