RIP Sinead O’Connor

Just heard about Sinead O’Connor’s untimely death. She stood up for black musicians before they were officially recognized at award ceremonies. When told by her record label that she shouldn’t leak that she had a baby because it didn’t make for good optics, she looped her child’s onesie through her belt for her next public … Read more

Fair Use vs. Consent enters a whole new realm

Bruce Schneier is a long-time digital and technology privacy advocate who’s written some of the most important and influential books on those and related subjects. He posted this brief article yesterday, nicely summarizing the grey area issue surrounding what constitutes fair use of material readily available to the public vs. what people should have to … Read more

Too many people like shooting the messenger

The LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario) is the provincially-owned company that, until relatively recently, was the only place in the province you could legally get wine and booze. And it remains the only place to get the latter. The company has always supplied paper bags of various sizes for your various sizes of purchases. … Read more

Enter… Reaper

As I recently mentioned, I’m looking at getting into voice over work to help bring in some money. I did some research and got a good (used) mic and a good (used) interface and in the spirit of continuing to keep costs down, went with a digital audio workspace (aka DAW, aka the recording software) … Read more

Exploring new roads

My time at the liquor store has taught me a bunch of things, including how dirty and sweaty and thankless retail work can be. But it’s also a been stark reminder that you shouldn’t put all of your eggs in one basket. I was hoping that this would be a new career path for me, … Read more

Signs, revisited

I’ve talked previously about how I listen when I get Signs from, for lack of a less new-agey term, the universe. And… well… they’re happening again. To the point of this post, there are significant indications that I’m on the wrong track with my writing. As regular readers of my posts are aware, I’ve been … Read more

So you want to join Mastodon…

I joined the social media site Mastodon three years ago this month, having heard about it as an alternative to Facebook and Twitter, which I’d been growing leery of by that point. You can just look here for a breakdown of what Mastodon is, but in brief: A couple of years back I took a … Read more

Back in the Movember movement

Movember was an idea that became an annual fundraising movement. People grow a moustache over the month of November to help raise money for men’s health and well-being. I participated once over a dozen years ago, inspired by the idea and by how close to home it hit after my grandfather was diagnosed with prostate … Read more

The case against Wikipedia

Wikipedia was established in 2001, the idea being to make an online encyclopedia that anyone could add to and edit as needed to correct. It made sense, in theory: No one is an expert on everything, but there are experts in everything — or even just people who could offer insightful knowledge on any subject … Read more

Update that will shock no one: Tech still hates me

For the love of god. I got in touch with Apple support via chat late this morning to ask what I thought was a simple issue that I was getting run around about with online searches: How to link my iPhone calendar and my wife’s so we could each see appointments the other had made. … Read more