Yearly Archives: 2016
A Letter to Donald Trump
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Filed under Politics
Election Conscience
For twenty-two years, I was a registered Republican.
In the ’90s, it was pretty easy: The Republicans were the party of small government, of fiscal sensibility, of moderation, and of prosperity. The Democrats were the “crazy hippies,” the tie-dyed tree-huggers who wanted us to eat nothing but kale and drive only solar-powered cars. And while I didn’t agree with the social conservatism of certain parts of the Republican Party, or the weird racist crowd in the South, those were small fringe groups, and they were easy to ignore. The Republicans represented centrism and sensibility.
Today, those small fringe groups rule the Republican Party. It has gone from being the party of sensibility and moderation to being the party of extremism and racism and hatred. I cannot support Trump. I will never support Trump. Everything he stands for is something I’m against. He is not “classy.” He is not “yuge.” He is not “tremendous.” He’s an overgrown schoolyard bully, a bigot, a strongman, and willfully a fascist, and he bankrupts and ruins everything he touches.
So today, I reregistered: I am now an Independent.
On the down side, this change comes at a severe cost in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: By doing so, I effectively gave up my right to vote in primary elections. But I cannot associate myself with the elements that drive the Republican Party. They do not stand for what I stand for, and I worry they may never do so again.
But on the plus side, I now join the most-heavily courted of all voter blocs: I am an educated Independent voter, in a swing county, in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania. My vote matters, and today, I just made sure that my vote no longer comes with strings attached. I can vote my conscience, and no-one can tell me otherwise.
So goodbye, Republicans. Goodbye, Gallant Old Party. Goodbye, Party of Lincoln. You were a good thing, once.
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A Smile Posting!
Okay, so it’s apparently been forever since I talked here about Smile. Which is sad, because I think hard about it every day, and I work on its code multiple times a week.
So here goes with a big status update.
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Filed under Smile
UI Tip: The User Is Busy
I’m passionate about user-interfaces. And so I thought it would be worthwhile to expand on a UI discussion I was in on Slack today.
You should never call a user dumb. I prefer to use the phrase busy, one of the great suggestions from Al Cooper’s About Face. I prefer that phrase because nearly all users are not dumb: The bell curve and a whole heap of population statistics say otherwise.
The real issue is that most users are just too busy and too harried to really think about your software or to spend any time with it or to spend any time learning it. They only use it because they have to use it, most likely because some manager at their company bought it and said, “This is your new [X] now.”
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Filed under UX
Windows 10
Microsoft really screwed the pooch with Windows 10.
Over the past six months, I’ve had the opportunity to both install 10 and use it on quite a lot of machines. It’s better than Windows 8, but that’s a lot like saying two broken legs are better than cancer: You really wish there was another option.
So, look, lest you all think I’m just a hater, I have intentionally upgraded my devices to Windows 10, and stuck with it for long enough to get a real feel for it. I want to be using the new operating system. It’s just simply not ready for prime time.
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Filed under Technology
Server Crash
So my site’s been down for a couple of weeks, because we had a server crash. By which I mean, “The server physically crashed onto the floor from a height of about six feet.”
I’m now hosting off of a VPS at Dreamhost, who presumably are less droppy with their servers 🙂
I’ll post more real content later, but my site’s back up, more-or-less. Some of the deeper links probably don’t work anymore (I’m not restoring all of the junk I used to have in weird off-directories), but the blog’s still here, for whatever that’s worth. Which is likely not a lot, since there’s nobody reading, but still, we’re back.
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Filed under Personal