Rolandt

We’ve seen a lot of Downtown and west End locations where there used to be gas stations – we think there were at least 99 of them in the past where they’ve now disappeared. Today there’s just one left – for now. On the corner of Davie and Burrard, the last remaining Esso station has been bought by a property developer. A block away there was a Shell station, developed in 1951, and seen in this image from the same year in the Vancouver Public Library photo collection. The garage structure is still there, with additional elements added as restaurants. The gas station had closed by the early 1980s, and became a Mr. Submarine store for a while.

Further south, at Seymour and Pacific, Imperial Oil had a gas station, seen here when it first opened in 1925. Townley and Matheson designed the structure, which was built by Purdy & Rodger at a cost of $6,900. The gas bar was replaced with part of the Seymour off-ramp of the Granville Bridge, completed in 1954. If the number of service stations seems low today, that wasn’t the case in the 1920s. This was 601 Pacific, and Imperial Oil had another Townley and Matheson designed gas bar at 740 Pacific, and Union Oil had another on the same block. By 1930 this gas station no longer existed.

In the background is the Bayview Hotel, later renamed The Continental, and in its later years operated by the City of Vancouver as an SRO hotel until it was demolished in 2015. In its early years the hotel was an expensive investment for Kilroy and Morgan, who spent $100,000 to build the hotel designed by Parr and Fee in 1911.

Finally (for the time being), there was a larger gas station on Robson Street, operated here in 1974 by Texaco. In 1985 it was redeveloped with a 2-storey retail building that includes a London Drugs store, and smaller retail units on Bute Street. Initially there were houses built here, but the motoring use of the site was over decades – in the 1930s Webber-MacDonald Garage was here, repairing and selling pre-owned automobiles, which became the Robson Garage a few years later. The corner however had a different building; the Bute Street Private hospital was here for decades. It became a rooming house, but was still here when Hemrich Brothers (who ran a garage on Howe, and then Dunsmuir Street for many years) were running the Robson Street garage in the later 1950s. The big new Texaco canopy, facilities  and forecourt replaced the buildings on the street until the 1980s redevelopment put buildings back along Robson.

Image sources: VPL, City of Vancouver Archives CVA 1399-530 and CVA 778-333

1050

A colleague, Dr. Bridget Burdett who is a Chartered Engineer with MR Cagney in New Zealand sends along a “Safe System Snippet” from Safe Solutions.

Dr. Burdett reminds that a “cyclist dismount” sign is NOT the answer.

If you find yourself in the situation where you want to install a ‘cyclist dismount’ sign on your road network something has gone wrong with your planning, design and/or installation.
The majority of cyclists will not dismount.
The risk remains.
We can do better.

We don’t have signs indicating Motorists dismount crossing roadways~you don’t need them for cyclists either if lanes are planned correctly.

You can take a look at more “safe system snippets” published by Safe Solutions in Brunswick, Victoria State Australia here.

The City of Vancouver has a stated transportation hierarchy.  The hierarchy states that  people using the sidewalks and streets have priority over vehicles in using the city’s road network. That  makes sense in a city that is promoting sustainable travel, and has just amended the zoning by-laws to assist  corner stores to survive in neighbourhoods.

It is part of an overall trend to walkable, accessible places, for citizens to be able to walk to local shops, schools and services. It is also part of encouraging sustainable community that can pass the “ice cream”  or popsicle test~a neighbourhood with shops and  services that are safe, comfortable and so convenient that you can send your ten year old out for ice cream, and have that child arrive back home with the ice cream still not melted.

That is why the City’s latest report to allow the placement of electrical conduits on top of city sidewalks to charge electrical vehicles on the street is so confounding.

Journalist Frances Bula referenced the report on Twitter that is going to Council this week. This report follows a study initiated in 2018 of  “test” locations in neighbourhoods where fifteen residents who had electric vehicles were allowed to trench under existing sidewalks to establish their own personal  electric vehicle (EV) charging station at the boulevard. Some cities like London are providing curbside charging facilities on streets from light poles as I wrote here.

Sadly even in that Vancouver charging demonstration project the goals were stated as “facilitating electric vehicle infrastructure growth” and “promoting green initiatives under the Greenest City Action Plan”. There’s no mention in the goals to not impede the sidewalk in any way.

It is surprising that  in a city that is valuing “sustainability” in transportation to forget about people that might be using the sidewalks in Vancouver, those same people from an equity perspective who walk, roll or use transit because they cannot afford a vehicle, let alone an electric vehicle.

In the report the City of Vancouver is basing their recommendations on the voluntary program run by the City of Seattle that allows  level one charging if a five foot by four foot platform ramp that covers the entire width of the sidewalk is provided to tuck the cord through. (City staff is proposing a 1.2 meter  long platform).

The City wants to make it easier to “remove barriers to EV adoption” for people who cannot charge in their back lane or on their own property. To do that, the City is proposing that moveable conduit platform ramps be placed  on sidewalks by  EV car owning residents. This ensures EV owners can snake an electrical cord to their car to charge it. The ramps are to be picked up once the charging is complete: there is no regulatory body to ensure they do that.

Of course there are lots of people who have EVs that charge at work or various charging stations when using the vehicle. There’s no need to plug in every night, and new EVs with a four hundred kilometer range can charge once a week at a public charging station.

The Level One charge proposed by the City for homeowners using cords over sidewalks  allows an EV to go only about two miles on one hour charging, and is charging at a very slow turtle rate. Level Two can charge from 9 to 52 miles per hour, and Level Three can provide a 170 mile range in thirty minutes of charging. You can read more about that here.

Instead of promoting transit use or enhancing walking and biking, this report wants to make it easier for people to own electric vehicles, while glancing over any challenges the disabled or sight challenged may have on the temporary  ramps plonked on sidewalks for vehicle charging cord covers.

It’s no surprise that the report states there are no “negative environmental impacts” as they kind of forgot what that experience of using sidewalks with many electrical conduit ramps would be for seniors and disabled.  Couple that with Vancouver’s rain and frost on the conduit covers with different surfaces and creating slip hazards.

There’s a  lack of an open public process for residents to see and use the street covered with electrical conduits, and no mention of the impact of snow and rain for pedestrians traversing across the proposed conduit platforms in inclement weather. City staff  did contact the Persons with Disabilities Advisory Committee of Council and the Canadian Institute for the Blind (CNIB). Both of these bodies did not support charger cords being placed in conduits across sidewalks.  Comments included “cord covers will become ubiquitous, making sidewalks less accessible for wheelchairs, people with visual impairments”.

The City did respond that charging EV’s from the front curb might be easier for disabled owners. However, there is no mention on how disabled car owners will pick up and move the electrical conduit ramp once charging is completed.

In many ways the concept of allowing electrical cords under raised platform conduits on city sidewalks is answering a problem that can be solved by charging elsewhere.  At an annual charge of  $5.00 per year per permit, it will be a difficult program to police or to establish who has city permission or not.

There is also a big equity issue in that the vehicle can move to any place where it can be charged, while a pedestrian or person rolling on the sidewalk may be relying on a level, consistent sidewalk access as their sole means of safe transport.

Who has more rights to clear access of sidewalks~sidewalk users, or electric vehicle owners?

Images: thisismoney,theguardian,wayfair

Today Mozilla is thrilled to join the Rust community in announcing the formation of the Rust Foundation. The Rust Foundation will be the home of the popular Rust programming language that began within Mozilla. Rust has long been bigger than just a Mozilla project and today’s announcement is the culmination of many years of community building and collaboration. Mozilla is pleased to be a founding Platinum Sponsor of the Rust Foundation and looks forward to working with it to help Rust continue to grow and prosper.

Rust is an open-source programming language focused on safety, speed and concurrency. It started life as a side project in Mozilla Research. Back in 2010, Graydon Hoare presented work on something he hoped would become a “slightly less annoying” programming language that could deliver better memory safety and more concurrency. Within a few years, Rust had grown into a project with an independent governance structure and contributions from inside and outside Mozilla. In 2015, the Rust project announced the first stable release, Rust 1.0.

Success quickly followed. Rust is so popular that it has been voted the most “most-loved” programming language in Stack Overflow’s developer survey for five years in a row. Adoption is increasing as companies big and small, scientists, and many others discover its power and usability. Mozilla used Rust to build Stylo, the CSS engine in Firefox (replacing approximately 160,000 lines of C++ with 85,000 lines of Rust).

It takes a lot for a new programming language to be successful. Rust’s growth is thanks to literally thousands of contributors and a strong culture of inclusion. The wide range of contributors and adopters has made Rust a better language for everyone.

Mozilla is proud of its role in Rust’s creation and we are happy to see it outgrow its origins and secure a dedicated organization to support its continued evolution. Given its reach and impact, Rust will benefit from an organization that is 100% focused on the project.

The new Rust Foundation will have board representation from a wide set of stakeholders to help set a path to its own future. Other entities will be able to provide direct financial resources to Rust beyond in-kind contributions. The Rust Foundation will not replace the existing community and technical governance for Rust. Rather, it will be the organization that hosts Rust infrastructure, supports the community, and stewards the language for the benefit of all users.

Mozilla joins all Rustaceans in welcoming the new Rust Foundation.

The post Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

For NYT Opinion, Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson returned to the topic of location data logged by our mobile phones. This time though, they turned their attention to the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021:

The data we were given showed what some in the tech industry might call a God-view vantage of that dark day. It included about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones, revealing around 130 devices inside the Capitol exactly when Trump supporters were storming the building. Times Opinion is only publishing the names of people who gave their permission to be quoted in this article.

As the animation plays out, you can clearly see the dots cluster around the rally area and then make their way to the Capitol building.

This surveillance stuff through consumer data (which companies can buy) seems way too easy.

Tags: insurrection, mobile, New York Times, privacy

It’s 2006. I’m at the wedding of a man I’ve never met, taking Polaroids of guests and revelers. I snap a photo of one such guest and…It’s fine. It’s an okay picture. But even then, I know I can do better. There’s something in the composition, the subject, the expression, it all cries out for another try. So a few minutes later, I try again.

If you will forgive the bravado, I nail it, second try. Just fantastic. One of the all-time best photos I have ever taken. I’m sitting in the middle of a field outside San Francisco, giddy with my own achievement.

Once I’m home, all I want to do is hit that note again. And again. And again.

I’m chasing that high, but more than that, I’m (unknowingly, really) getting better and better at taking That Shot.

And that’s what we’re talking about this month: repetition.

Call it creating muscle memory. Call it practice. Call it waxing the floor. Doing the same thing again and again hardwires a skill into your brain.

“But doing the same thing, that’s boring! Where’s the growth? What kind of artist just goes around doing the same thing, over and over again?” you might say. To which I’d answer: The kind of artist that wants to get better.

Repetition in photography is about using the same compositions, again and again. The same settings. Becoming familiar with your camera, your subject. Try the same joke to get your subject to smile. Try the same weird anecdote to get them to relax.

When I was practicing portraits, I had a whole routine I would have every model do. I’d have them jump, then shake their hair, then squeeze my hand, then punch my arm.

That’s right. Punch my arm. And every time, I’d try to get a shot of their reaction to the feeling. I’ve gone through that routine hundreds of times, getting better at photographing the moment when people are in mid-air, the moment when someone’s hair is in flux around them but you can still see their face, the moment of awkwardness holding a stranger’s hand, and, most fun for me, the moment after someone punches me, when they feel both exhilarated and confused.

I’ve now gone through that routine so often, I know exactly what’s gonna happen. My fingers are ready to snap away as soon as I see the moment I’m looking to capture. Most importantly, having done it so much, I know when those moments are going to present themselves.

Repetition allows the photographer to both recognize that famous Decisive Moment AND be fast enough to capture it once it presents itself.

It’s more than just training the reflexes. It’s training the mind as well. Shoot in the afternoon often enough, you’ll know exactly how the light at 4:34pm is going to look. Shoot runners every day and you’ll be able to freeze that precise moment when all their limbs are extended in motion. Shoot models day-in, day-out and you’ll know exactly what to say when they’re being too posed or artificial.

With enough repetition, you’ll always know what you want, when you want it, and exactly how to get it.

Now the first picture of Anne above, this was before I ever asked anyone to pose for me. I’d say, in fact, this shot is entirely responsible for me asking friends if I could come over, take their picture for a bit. I wanted to take a shot like that again.

So I started doing photo shoots. And no matter what we did during the shoot, what kinds of poses we tried, what kinds of situations we set up, I’d always make sure to get at least one that was just like the shot of Anne.

Without being aware of it, I was applying this notion of repetition. I was slowly getting better at taking That Shot whenever I wanted to.

Of course, the shots would look similar, especially once I started putting them all online. It could be boring for an audience, but I wasn’t working for an audience. I was working on myself. As much as those photos were the result of a shoot, they were also part of a longer process of me getting better, improving in small, subtle ways.

At a certain point, I had enough of a body of work that I could look through them. I could look for more than just instances where I tried to get That Shot. I could see other patterns, aspects of photography I was unconsciously drawn toward.

Once I’d discovered these elements, I started using them on purpose. More repetition. More practice. I’d try replicating other aesthetic choices I’d made, working out more and more of my artistic muscles. It was here I began to see my style developing. I was talking to my subjects more, taking note of how what I said elicited certain reactions, and how I could say just the right thing to get the reaction I wanted.

Repetition and communication, working hand in hand.

So go back through those old photos of yours, look for the patterns, the aesthetic aspects you’re drawn to, time and time again. Then try to utilize those on purpose. Do it with every shoot, and in time, you’ll get better, and you’ll also start to see your personal style begin to emerge.

And here’s an album detailing the evolution of this signature shot.

In case they’re interesting or fun to mess with — here’s a zip with GarageBand files for various “Tie & Suit” mixes.

Just a quick post about some new things I am proud to have learned in the past week (plus a bonus from the week before last).

Badgelife
On Friday, I received some new boards from OSHpark from a design I made two weeks ago (yes, just under two weeks from order to receipt). I had originally intended to hand-solder the 0805-sized components. My long term goal is to learn how to apply solder paste with a stencil and bake it in a reflow toaster – but I don’t have a stencil or a toaster. No fear: watching a few videos and doing some reading gave me confidence to go part way – using solder paste from a syringe and heating with a hot air gun.

After a bit of tweaking, I got it to work for me. And, oh, what a great feeling. Having this new skill has just opened up a whole new world of SMD components.

As an aside, I made the boards using Inkscape and the SVG2shenzhen plugin the week before last. I had tried to make a badge back in March, and didn’t know of this plugin, so I wasn’t to enthused to try again. But for my project this month, I really wanted to do a badge, and then found the plugin.

The plugin (new to me) makes it dead simple to make interesting boards based on artwork in Inkscape. So, yes, this means I’ll be making more fun boards.

New chip and circuits
This badge also is the first time I did something with Charlieplexed LEDs (yes, a new thing for me to attempt). No library, as I only have 6 LEDs and simple animation. Also, I’m using an ATtiny402, which is a new chip for me.

For the ATtiny402, I had to learn a whole new chip and about UPDI programming, and needed a new programmer. So I made one. I even used my SOIC8 clip for the first time (new!) to program the 402s.

And speaking of new programmers, I hacked the Chinese USBisp programmer that came with my BLtouch kit (see below) to be a generic AVR programmer.

Oh, my, so much new.

3D printer
As I mentioned, I installed the BLtouch automatic bed leveling gizmo on my Ender 3 Pro. OK, so I really didn’t mind leveling the bed manually – and I was quite good at it. But I hope this new addition to my printer will do a long way to making my leveling even better.

One other thing I did last week was modify the fan on my Raspberry Pi so that I could control it with a GPIO (new thing for me, of course). This is part of adding the RasPi with Octoprint to run my printer. Not there yet, but Octoprint will be the next big addition to my printer.

As an aside, for the past few months, I’ve been staying at my mother’s for a few weeks at a time. So I bring my printer with me, and my maker mother has me designing and printing stuff around the clock. Many of my family members enjoy what I’ve been making for them. This is the first time I have been giving prints to others. The new thing here is this week I got more requests, from folks I didn’t expect to want anything printed. That was a great feeling.

Summary
In the past week:

• used solder paste and hot air gun to put components on a board
• [two weeks ago, I designed that board with software new to me]
• I made a programmer, of a new type to me, to program a chip, that was also new to me
• Hacked another programmer
• Did a Charlieplexed circuit on a board for the first time
• Installed a BLtouch on my printer, and all that entails
• Modified a RasPi fan for use in Octoprint
• For the first time, had others ask for my 3D prints

New new new!

What a great feeling.

With temperatures at around zero, the cool green glass that has been used to clad our residential highrises since the 1980s takes on an icy quality – a foreground to the real ice and snow on the North Shore.

Here’s what the skyline looks like from the north parking lot at City Hall, where above, the view corridor provides a panorama, and below, Vancouverites find another way to keep warm.

Austin Carr and Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg, today published a lengthy investigation of Tim Cook’s tenure at Apple. From his earlier years building out Apple’s supply chain under Steve Jobs, to more recent times navigating the Trump presidency and the building antitrust pressure, the article is well researched and very worth a read. Without explicitly taking a stance, Carr and Gurman highlight both positive and negative aspects of Cook’s level-headed approach to piloting the company. I found some of the descriptions of Cook’s early manufacturing moves particularly interesting:

Cook’s global supply chain greatly improved upon the fabrication approaches that Dell and Compaq had developed. The big PC brands often outsourced both manufacturing and significant design decisions, resulting in computers that were cheap but not distinctive. Cook’s innovation was to force Foxconn and others to adapt to the extravagant aesthetic and quality specifications demanded by Jobs and industrial design head Jony Ive. Apple engineers crafted specialized manufacturing equipment and traveled frequently to China, spending long hours not in conference rooms as their PC counterparts did but on production floors hunting for hardware refinements and bottlenecks on the line.

Contract manufacturers worked with all the big electronics companies, but Cook set Apple apart by spending big to buy up next-generation parts years in advance and striking exclusivity deals on key components to ensure Apple would get them ahead of rivals.

The article also focuses on the stark contrast of manufacturing prowess between the U.S. and China, including Chinese manufacturer Foxconn’s ability to spin up brand new facilities in mere months:

[Foxconn founder Terry] Gou always seemed happy to accommodate, often building entire factories to handle whatever minimalist-chic design specs Apple threw at Foxconn. Jon Rubinstein, a senior vice president for hardware engineering during Jobs’s second tour at Apple, recalls almost having a heart attack in 2005 when he went with Gou to see a new factory in Shenzhen for the iPod Nano—a tiny device 80% smaller than Apple’s original MP3 player—only to find an empty field. Within months, though, a large structure and production line were in place. “In the U.S. you couldn’t even get the permits approved in that time frame,” he says.

Check out the full contents over at Bloomberg.

→ Source: bloomberg.com

It’s in the wording.

At least that’s one premise.

Last week, I posted some notes about five different tools for live captioning a Zoom session. After I posted, I found out that OU had just turned on a new tool that de-necessitates these work arounds.

Zoom has integrated Otter.ai‘s technology to provide an AI-powered live caption. You can turn it on for your particular Zoom room by going to zoom.us and logging in. Then go to Settings. Under the “In Meeting (Advanced)” settings, make sure that the closed captioning is turned on. Then tick the box for “Enable live transcription service to show transcript on the side panel in-meeting”

Once you’ve turned on the AI-generated captions, you should be able to see the captions in your next Zoom meeting.

Excited to welcome Parse.ly to the Automattic family, in an acquisition that’s closing today. They’ll be joining our enterprise group, WPVIP. The deal has been nicely covered in the Wall Street Journal and Axios. As a bonus, here’s Parse.ly co-founder Andrew Montalenti’s first comment on this blog, in 2012.

Great article, Matt. I wrote about this on my blog — Fully Distributed Teams: Are They Viable?

http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/05/14/distributed-teams

In it, I drew the distinction between “horizontally scaled” teams, in which physical offices are connected to remote workers via satellite (home or commercial) offices, and “fully distributed” teams where, as you said, “the creative center and soul of the organization on the internet, and not in an office.”

At Parse.ly, we’re only a couple years old but have been operating on the distributed team model, with ~13 fully distributed employees, and it’s working well. Always glad to hear stories about how Automattic has scaled it to 10X our size.

And, likewise, we blow some of our office space savings on camaraderie-building retreats; our most recent one was in New York, see [here] and [here.]

"Simply put," writes Eric Rescorla, "WebRTC is videoconferencing (VC) in a Web browser, with no download: you just go to a Web site and make a call." Preliminary versions of WebRTC have existed for a while, but as we read here, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) finally published the standards just two weeks ago. " The upshot of this is that it’s possible to write a very basic VC system in a very small number of lines of code," writes Rescorla. Here's more on how to get started. What this means is that we won't be restricted to a small number of videoconferencing services for very much longer. Any web application will be able to build web conferencing right into it. Anyhow, the article includes many more details (including why web conferencing sometimes only works on Chrome) and is worth a look. Image: Hive Streaming.

I am critical enough of other people that it seems only fair that I should hold myself to account when I hand in a turkey. Well, I have two for you. A couple of weeks ago I did a video introducing viewers to Open Broadcasting Systems, and while it was a little rough around the edges, it went fairly well. The same cannot be said of the video I did last week, Introduction to Audacity, nor the one I did today, Introduction to Mailing Lists. In both cases, I had technical problems, commands I thought would work didn't work, I couldn't remember how to do things (like, say, create a new 'audience' in MailChimp (turns out you have to list 'all audiences', and only then do you see the button)). Now I like to have some realism in my presentations, so people can see how even experts sometimes struggle with the tech - that's why I created a 'Stephen Follows Instructions' video series. But this is failure beyond that. So anyhow, I'm feeling a bit chastened, and being called out for it in OLDaily serves me right.

Here's Michael Feldstein talking about Chegg, a website that helps students cheat on their assignments: "If we’ve reached the point where 'to chegg' is considered to be a legitimate verb in the English language, that’s another indication of just how widespread the problem is." But we should look at it another way. Imagine you gave students an assignment to find some web resource, and the site that helped them, Google, became a verb. Is it Google's fault, or is it yours, for creating such a silly assignment? Here's Feldstein again: "the fact remains that the publishers sold the textbooks to students... and then sold the homework answers to Chegg so that Chegg could sell those to students as well." And all of this exists because universities have outsources so much of the business to companies that create and sell standardized question sets, forcing one to ask, just who is it that doing the cheating here?

This is some good advice on podcasting from Alan Levine. Here are the main takeaways from a very rich post: "Record, but not to the cloud. Recording locally lets you get higher quality sound. Set recording options (these are the ones in your settings, when logged in). Record a separate audio file for each participant (so yes, you get a separate audio). Optimize for 3rd party video editor (I believe this gets best quality)." Nothing better than getting specific advice (in a world where 'advice' usually means 'use a good microphone').

People have been talking up Clubhouse recently (for example), but an exclusive Apple-only app featuring famous people does nothing for me. This app, a distributed open source social network based on following conversations and communities rather than personalities makes much more sense to me. Planetary is based on the Scuttlebutt decentralized social network platform and has an iOS app, a desktop version, and more. And I like the ethos: "Experience freedom, practice tolerance and appreciate the diversity of humanity.

Problems like accusations of 'fake news' are faced not only by journalists but by knowledge workers generally, including researchers and educators. This article looks at how journalists have responded, focusing on two major strategies: accountability and transparency. Of these, I think the latter has the most impact, because it shows not only whether something is true or not, but makes clear the process behind what that fact was chosen, what sources were consulted (and what sources weren't) and how the editorial decisions about what subjects to cover are made. We need more of that.

According to this article, " Data can tell us ‘what’, but not ‘why’. This is the message presented by Prof Bart Rienties, professor of learning analytics at The Open University (OU)." I think he's presenting a narrow view of 'data' as (say) the statistics we get from on learning analytics. Data tells us not only 'what', but also 'why', 'when', 'how much', and 'who cares'. But it's all data - the statistics, the conversations, the interpretations, the explanations. I think he is conflating explaining (which is what answers why-questions) and massaging (to help 'shape the narrative' by going beyond the data, or should I say, inserting opinion in place of data). That's why he says, "Understanding what data is useful to improve services and inform decision-making was important... but having the opportunity to discuss the context was key."

Ryerson University professor Kristopher Alexander isn't the first to say that online learning should draw lessons from video games, but the advice is timely and relevant during the pandemic. "Twitch, Discord, YouTube live streaming, this is what we've been doing for how many years? It's just now, that the pandemic has forced people to be like, ‘this is the thing?’ Yes, of course, it's been a thing." Quite right, and of course it's more than just streaming video. "He relies heavily on Twitch’s live chat feature, traditionally used for gamers to 'engage with the person on the other side of the screen.'" The trick, though, is doing everything at once - doing something, explaining it, organizing screens, streaming video, and handling the backchannel. People who can do this have a unique skill.

I think there's a pretty good object lesson in ethics around the GameStop short squeeze (previously covered here) but I hope that instructors discussing the lesson view it more broadly than Oxford research fellow Doug McConnell. For the most part, his discussion is focused on whether it was legal, with a brief excursion into who would be to blame and whether they would get caught. But there are many more things to discuss. For example, do hedge funds deserve the losses they were forced to take? Was RobinHood justified in cutting off trading to retail investors? Is it fair to treat large self-organizing groups of independent investors according to the same rules as large companies with centralized decision-making? I think all of these merit discussion, and are far more interesting than "was it legal?"

My recent blog entries about Llama (my project to allow languages like Rust to be used for .NET development) have generated a lot of interest and feedback, which I appreciate very much.

One common question I see is (concisely paraphrased): Why?!?

Before I take this very legitimate question seriously, would you mind if I pause and laugh at it?

I mean, it's kinda funny, right?

People nowadays think it's perfectly normal to compile every language to JavaScript, but they seem shocked at the notion of compiling any language without "sharp" in the name for the COMMON LANGUAGE RUNTIME.

I don't think this is the branch reality I was supposed to live in.

Increasing adoption for .NET

For the .NET ecosystem, the last five-ish years have been amazing. .NET has become cross-platform, open source, and fast. These are big moves, and they open the door for wider adoption of .NET.

But what's next? How could .NET get even more adoption?

Now that the door is open, how could we encourage more people to actually walk through it?

The Big Idea of This Blog Entry

People would be more willing to adopt .NET if they could bring their favorite language with them.

Despite all the terrific progress that has come with .NET Core through .NET 5, adopting .NET still mostly means switching to C# or F#. That is an obstacle.

What's wrong with C# ?

Nothing.

The point here is not to criticize C#. The point is that people like their languages.

Actually, let's maybe criticize C# just a little: As much as I like C#, it is showing its age just a bit. Many developers today are interested in more modern languages like Rust or Swift, and it's not clear that C# 10, 11, and 12 are the answer for everybody.

But the strengths or weaknesses of C# are not the issue here. My opinions about the need for broader language diversity in the .NET ecosystem would not change (much) if some other language occupied the place where C# currently sits.

But .NET will be spread too thin!

We don't need all languages on .NET to have equal status. C# is the "primary" language for .NET, and I think it always will be, and I think that's okay.

Most platforms have one language that occupies the special seat. C was the primary language for Unix.

Why I'm working on Llama

Well, I like .NET, I like Rust, and I like compilers. What else would you expect me to be doing?

But if I set practicality and realism aside, and if I think big...

It would be awesome to see .NET become a great platform for languages like Rust and Swift, and I would love for Llama to be a part of that story.

I’ve always been fond of Robert Frost’s line “home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” While not an Army Brat by any means, I did go through a series of moves in my early years that left me with a sense that there wasn’t a single place that counted as home. Feeling home became a psychological state that I could achieve in multiple ways.

Losing myself in a book was and still is a reliable way to feel at home anywhere from the couch in my living room to a train car en route from Princeton to Wilmington, Delaware. Over time, I found other couches. One was in the home of a girlfriend’s parents. I adopted them as a spare set of parents and treated them as casually as my own for the next forty years. Read my share of books there and had the full range of random and serious conversations any son might have with parents and siblings. Another is a former one-room school house in Vermont that belongs to my sister-in-law and serves as a Christmas retreat in non-pandemic years.

How do you make an arbitrary place feel like a home? Over time, you can attach memories to places, of course. Can you speed that process up or shape it intentionally? If you don’t have a couch handy, what can you do to make some otherwise sterile place less so?

Why would it matter to do so? Comfort is a reasonable payoff all on its own. If we shift our focus just a bit toward working effectively, however, there’s a bigger payoff. Feeling at home frees up emotional energy and lowers barriers to creative thinking. If your value to the enterprise lies in the arena of creating new insights and innovation, then we have motivation to become adept at making ourselves at home.

As an individual knowledge worker, you can focus on tinkering with and shaping your local environment. Choose the apps that appeal to your mode of working. Slap some stickers on your laptop. Rebel against the furniture and cubicle police just as you might push back against an over-controlling parent.

If you’re in a position of authority, push against the control regimes. The real promise of technology for knowledge work is to make it possible for everyone to have highly customized portals into shared work. Create safe spaces that allow for flexibility that enables greater creativity. It will most likely demand more work from those running the infrastructure, but the payoff in greater effectiveness should more than offset the additional complexity. It’s not a home if only authorized staff can go into the kitchen in search of a snack.

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mkalus shared this story from Fefes Blog.

Das kann auch nur jemand sagen, der noch nie an Bord eines Bahn-Zuges war und dort das Internet nutzen wollte.

Bell Media is continuing with cuts as the company is getting rid of an all-sports format at three of its radio stations.

The Canadian Press reports that TSN 1040 AM in Vancouver, TSN 1290 AM in Winnipeg and TSN 1150 AM in Hamilton will not be all-sports stations anymore.

The website for TSN 1150 AM says that it will become a BNN Bloomberg station and focus on business, technology, innovation and sports. Media reports suggest that the other two radio stations will focus on comedy programming.

In Vancouver, TSN 1040 was pulled off the air during a commercial break and it was announced that the station will be “reprogrammed on Friday.” Following the news, Green Day’s ‘Good Riddance’ was played.

It’s worth noting that the Twitter accounts for TSN 1040 and TSN 1150 have been deactivated as of February 9th.

This change in format comes after Bell Media laid off more than 200 employees last week. The cuts impacted several news outlets across Canada, practically wiping out Toronto’s Newstalk 1010, Montreal’s CJAD 800 and several other local newsrooms. TSN also saw cuts, notably Dan O’Toole of SC with Jay and Dan.

It also comes as news broke that Bell received $122.9 million from the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) program and increased dividend payouts to shareholders.

Source: The Canadian Press

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