2023
WSJ: Is This the End of ‘Intel Inside’? Intel is competing with nearly every other tech giant, including longtime joined-at-the-hip partner Microsoft.
Notes toward a theory of the Dad Thriller
.. you know the kind of movies I’m talking about: Movies set on submarines; movies set on aircraft carriers; movies where lawyers are good guys; movies where guys secure the perimeter and/or the package; movies where a guy has to yell to make himself heard over a helicopter; movies where guys with guns break the door into a room decorated with cut-out newspaper headlines. … Movies that dads like. I love these movies pretty unreservedly and only somewhat ironically.
This essay starts great and just gets better.
I have seen most of these movies and enjoyed every one. These are the only movies I need to see for the rest of my life.
What went wrong with ‘the Metaverse’? An insider’s postmortem. The Metaverse failed, but metaverses like Fortnite are big and growing, with more to come. By Wagner James Au.
The way we live in the United States is not normal.
I began to notice a learned helplessness in the United States, where people don’t revolt at the notion of a college education costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I wondered why so many people treat it as completely normal that we have GoFundMe campaigns to help people pay for life-saving medical care that their health insurance won’t cover.
I watched as people on social media claimed it was “pro-labor” to tip a person for ringing up your order at a food or coffee chain rather than demanding the multi-millionaire (or billionaire) owner of that company pay their employees a living wage (as is the norm in Europe, where tipping is not expected and the owners of the restaurants and stores are typically not among the uber-wealthy).
I realized there are other places in the world (not just Italy) where life isn’t about conspicuous consumption and ‘crushing’ and ‘killing’ your life goals, where people aren’t drowning in debt just to pay for basic life necessities. There are places where people have free time and where that free time is used to do things they love — not to start a side hustle.
Ends on a hopeful note. The United States can—and should—do better.
Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney? How “Flo” transformed Progressive Insurance and the life of Stephanie Courtney, the actor who plays the role on commercials since 2008.
I found this entertaining and informative article surprisingly relevant to my own career and life.
‘I was told not to make eye contact with Tom Cruise’: meet the world’s most prolific film extra. Over a 60-year career, Jill Goldston has been a face in the crowd—literally, that’s her job—in 2,000 movies.
Raycast has a new feature where you can activate your Mac camera and look at yourself before jumping on a video call. I tried it out as soon as I got to my desk this morning, before having my first sip of coffee. That was a mistake.
So it begins. My Tumblr blog, formerly known as “Atomic Robot Live,” is now “Mitchipedia.” Now to discover the inevitable breakage! Let the wild rumpus of error messages begin!
Hollywood Goes Home: How Celebrity Endorsements Are Helping Dems Win Down Ballot. “In towns across the nation, there is _that _person — the kid who made it big, starred in some movies, became an action hero, maybe even won some awards. What if that person told you about an upcoming local election? Or a candidate who you should consider supporting? They are famous, sure, but they are more than that: They are _your town’s _famous person, someone with local credibility because they know what it’s like to grow up where you did. That’s the theory behind The Hometown Project, an progressive effort that looks to pair celebrities with candidates for state legislature, school board, or other local offices from the areas they grew up in.”
I will gladly endorse any Democrat running for office in my home town of East Northport, N.Y.
I’m having a couple of mandarin oranges with lunch. They’ve been sitting around the house a while. I think I will use the remaining fruits as billiard balls.
I recently discovered the power of not having opinions about things. Was Henry Kissinger a war criminal whose death we should celebrate? I don’t know. Maybe one day I’ll learn some things about him and come up with some conclusions. I have other things to do right now.
I registered the domain mitchipedia.org and now I love it so much I’m thinking about going to the hassle of changing alllllllll my social media accounts and my blog domain to that.
Red Hat kickstarts king-size Kubernetes cloud cost cuts. The Flaming Fedora fellowship debuts OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) with hosted control plane, which it claims can cut costs of running Kubernetes clusters by 20%. I wrote this.
RIP Frances Sternhagen, 93, a solid character actor whom I have always liked. She had prominent supporting roles on “Cheers,” “ER,” “Sex and the City” and “The Closer,” and she was a Broadway veteran, winning two Tony awards, all while raising six children.
She liked playing “snobby older ladies. It’s always more fun to be obnoxious,” she said.
Before I upgraded to Sonoma I heard people saying the screensavers were great and I thought that was ridiculous. How great can screen savers be, I thought. But damn those are nice screensavers.
I’m going to try using this account as my main place in the fediverse. I’ll only use @mitchw@mastodon.social for reading, favoriting, boosting and replying.
If the experiment works, I’ll move my followers on @mitchw@mastodon.social here, using the magic of fediverse automation.
The Washington Post: Race isn’t real, science says. Advocates want the census to reflect that.. Race isn’t real, but racism is.