Howdy-ho, wild and wandering drongos! Here comes another issue of the newsletter named for the most fearless freewheelers known to exist.
The Drongo:
Today's interview guest is Drew Jackson, an old friend from college who's as tall (6'7", ladies!) as he is taken (sorry, ladies!) I've convinced him to spill vast torrents of beans on everything from working in academic libraries to early modern nation-states. Listen carefully: here comes Drew!
Drew Jackson:
Hi, I'm Drew! I currently live in Portland, OR, where I work as a manager in the access services department of a university library. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to Portland to attend Reed College, where I majored in History.
Here comes another Homebrew Website Club. Join us for discussion of websites, blogging, owning your personal data, open protocols, and more!
EDIT: An after-action report.
HWC is always scheduled to run for 90 minutes; in practice, we typically run to about two hours of discussion.
Tonight, though? We broke two hours. We broke three hours. We broke four hours.
By the time Angelo, Kartik, Ben, and I called it quits -- the last four stragglers from a peak of 11 participants -- this evening's club ran to five hours and forty-five minutes. Surely that's a record! And we loved every bit of it.
How can we encourage tool/solution reuse between individual IndieWeb sites, without building more hosted services?
It seems to me that many IndieWeb participants, especially those starting out, end up either (a) relying on Single Point of Aaron services or (b) building their own solutions for every aspect of the IndieWeb "stack" (Webmention, Micropub, a posting interface, etc.) This problem could be addressed with a stronger culture of developing reusable libraries for IW tasks, but turning your own code into a library usable by others isn't always easy.
What are the pros, cons, use cases, and UX considerations of doing real-time chat on your web site (such as communicating with visitors) or via your web site (such as with a hypothetical "chat-message" post type that syndicates to IRC or Discord?)
I didn't expect to write you another letter so soon, but my mind kept piling up phrases which I could tell were destined only for you.
I have continued to spelunk your wiki. Your turns of phrase give me unceasing enjoyment; it would be clear from your diction alone - if it were not already clear from all of the philosophy that wrestle with - that you are deeply immersed in language. I must also note that I adore your term of art "Fireman Time." I often wake up to find I have unconsciously summoned a monster into attack mode. Yu-Gi-Ohhhhhh...
Oh, how I wanted to like this "dictionary novel." Unfortunately, it completely failed to deliver on both parts of that premise.
It is entirely possible to read a topic-specific dictionary and enjoy it in exactly the way that Khazars ought to have aped. For instance, I found it tremendously satisfying to read a 1980s cultural dictionary of Japanese which, apart from being a first-rate dictionary, introduced me to aspects of Japanese material and intangible culture which I had never heard of before. All Khazars had to do was be a made-up dictionary of the same kind, and I would have found it impossible to put down!
Suppose I want to give a gift to person P. I'd like to be able to call up the history of my interactions with P, in as many channels as possible. I'd also like to be simultaneously call up my current finances, including an assessment of whether I have any store-specific credits which would suit their interests. (For instance, I've got $50 of credit for Lululemon fitness wear, which I'm never going to use on myself, but which I'd want the computer to show me when planning a gift for a girlfriend or female friend.)
(Update: I've decided that "planning gifts around store credit" is such an infrequent occurrence that there's no reason to build a program for it. I am, however, beginning to build my own contacts database. Expect that to appear in Q2-3 2021.
Your handle always reminds me of the robot character "Peace" in Ralph Bakshi's Wizards. It's not much of a movie, but somehow I've seen it twice.
I'd been meaning to write you a letter for a while now, but took longer than expected. Why? Carpal tunnel. My couple years of on-and-off hand pain, once ignorable, evolved last November (2020) into numbing of the fingers after mere minutes of typing. In January I was diagnosed, and given a steroid shot for temporary relief.
Welcome once again to The Drongo, available wherever Internet connections are found.
The Drongo: Our guest today is Nick LeFlohic, a biomedical researcher who, outside of work, has cultivated an appreciation for the arts, including film. Here's how he describes himself; ever the modest man, he's chosen to use the third person rather than appear egotistical.
Nick LeFlohic: Nicholas LeFlohic is a twenty-something wandering through days and ideas. He studied Biomedical Engineering in his native Southern California, and now works in a biological laboratory. Being intrigued by the historical, random, and unusual, he can often be found reading articles which are of no practical importance, but are intellectually stimulating (or so he hopes.) He is also perennially drawn to film, whether classic or contemporary, foreign or domestic, avant-garde or conventional, fictional or documentary. In short, he is amused by and interested in everything around.
An email to Aaron Strick, intended only to pay a compliment and secure a Sith holocron, so touched him that he wrote a blog post about how happy he was to receive it. This is why I spend so much time on the Web; why I employ technology to run social projects like The Drongo and the SLC; why most weeks I take on hosting duties for Homebrew Website Club Americas.
Aaron, you're a drongo and a half, and a magnificent mellow, too. I laid down these stanzas in your name, for your pleasure.
