Status:

Mood somewhat improved on yesterday but still a bit gloomy or whatever. Tidying the shed a bit helped, though I hope I didn’t overdo it.

Had a nice neighbour interaction when someone posted on the street group that an elderly neighbour needed a “Samsung charger” because she’d left hers on a train. Since I knew this was just a USB cable, and I’m the kind of person who has a big box of USB cables and plugs, I told them to come over. Of course they thought they were stupid for not knowing what cable they needed and I made sure to say they’re not stupid. It’s the tech companies' fault for making them feel stupid.

Funnily enough I have zero experience with Android phones and I had trouble telling if it was charging off a 10w plug or not, because it didn’t flash up a big battery like the iPhone does. I did some testing with the laptop charger, which it loved, and deduced that the 10w was working, just slowly, which is fine for their needs.

And hey, let the record show my box of USB cables and plugs came in handy tonight. Never diss the box of cables. (No-one’s needed the FireWire ones for a while though.)

Reading:

• It’s 1998, you make a website in the copy of frontpage express that came with your computer, it’s just like Word and it’s very easy. — The specifics might differ (I started with an HTML 3.2 book) but this thread is pretty much the history of my ‘career’ in web design. I particularly like this bit: “For a while people used to say “I’m a web designer” as a synonym for “I’m unemployed,” ‘cause any random sod who was halfway-handy with a computer could make a website and if you don’t have a job then you have more time to figure out how to make websites. We weren’t special, we were just fucking unemployed."
• My students can’t read 🪜 — “My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded."
• Nesrine Malik: What to do as murder is exploited to spread lies about race and privilege? Stand firm – fight back
• Tiny Awards nominations are open — A lovely celebration of the weird indie web.

Listening:

• Origin Story: Evangelicals pt 1 — This was personally very interesting as my dad became a born-again fundamentalist evangelical christian circa 1980 when he moved to Texas after the divorce and I’ve never properly understood what that meant, other than it made him weird for a decade or so. Anyway, this is more about the politics than the theology but even so is a very useful timeline of American evangelism up to that moment.