“We have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know.”

Yesterday, someone asked if I’m Jewish, and I said “my partner’s Jewish, and because Judaism sometimes explains much better where I am theologically, I’m Jew-ish” and he said I sounded like most natural, well-rehearsed thing he has heard me say.

Two months of onboarding have rushed by in a blink. The new job is absolutely wonderful: the people are great, the work is complex and important, and the office itself is perhaps the finest I’ve ever worked at. I joined this company because the challenges they have seemed interesting to me. I’m very pleased that, two months in, it’s difficult to think that, at one point in time, these challenges weren’t also mine. …

Hey Elliott, so lovely to have you over for coworking this afternoon! I love the way you think about UX; your artistic perspective is so valuable for the Internet and for web design, and you always make me see things from a new angle. Aside from the links I already shared with John and Maarten on June 23rd, here’s some stuff I love:

• Jason Cosper inspired me to get rid of my About page.
• Agile and Scrum are quite complex, and multi-interpretable, but Nielsen Norman Group has a few nice resources.
• When it comes to extraversion and “people-person”-ness, I think the UX industry is quite a good fit for those who aren’t those things. Like I said, your ability to create an icebreaker on the fly isn’t half as interesting as your ability to figure out what UX method can answer a specific question. This reminds me of a talk I attended at UXInsights Festival 2022, which wasn’t about this topic per se, but about making UX research accessible for neurodivergent UX professionals. You might like it!

Hey John and Maarten, thanks for meeting me for coffee! I loved nerding out with you two about IndieWeb stuff, personal sites, the red ThinkPad belly button, and what personal web projects we’re working on. As promised, here’s a list of things I wanted to share with you:

• A few IndieWeb people I like (who are involved in the community in various degrees) are Simone Silverstroni, Manuel Moreale, Mu-An Chiou, Derek Kedziora, and Elliott Cost, the latter two of whom live in Amsterdam as well.
• The friendly PhD candidate we met is Ornella Porcu.

I’ll spend some time in the next few weeks cleaning up my site. I’ll probably also try to establish some form of digital garden again.

I love a good media drama. Like a moth to a flame, or perhaps more accurately like a fly to dog poo, I am drawn to it. I check the news multiple times a day. I scoff at outlets that don’t deem it worthy of the front page. I also scoff at outlets that do. A media drama can antagonize me the way Adele disappoints me with her popularity.

The fact that I’m part of a Titanic-obsessed gaggle of netizens somehow has me convinced I’m not just …

While walking to grab coffee, my colleague tells me about the peculiarities of his seventeenth-century hat making ancestors, proud of the genealogical research his dad has done. After work, I google “Trans-Atlantic slave trade”, looking to see if I can spot my father’s generic colonist surname among those who made it back to his island. I can’t, of course.