Despite Universal's false narrative and rhetoric, the fact is they have chosen to walk away from the powerful support of a platform with well over a billion users that serves as a free promotional and discovery vehicle for their talent.

• TikTok, on Universal Music Group’s decision to pull its music from the service

Ha, TikTok really said UMG shouldn’t get mad because they’re getting paid in exposure. In my younger years I might have written a pithy parody of “First they came…”, but now I’m just hopeful people will hear the clarion call of even large corporations demanding to get paid what they’re worth as a sign they should do the same.

At some point companies and orgs are going to learn that when you attune so sharply to the feedback loop, you only hear the loudest voices, who are usually a small minority. If you only cater to them, you’re dooming yourself to irrelevance.

This post was brought to you by my formerly beloved TV series Below Deck

I’ve recently been beefing up my homelab game, and I was having issues getting a Gotify secure websocket to connect. I love the Caddy webserver for both prod and local installs because of how easy it easy to configure.

For local installs, it defaults to running its own CA and issuing a certificate. Now, if you’re only running one instance of Caddy on the same machine you’re accessing, getting the certs to work in browsers is easy as running caddy trust.

But in a proper homelab scenario, you’re running multiple machines (and, often, virtualized machines within those boxes), and the prospect of grabbing the root cert for each just seemed like a lot of work. At first, I tried to set up a CA with Smallstep, but was having enough trouble just getting all the various pieces figured out that figured there had to be an easier way.

There was.

I registered a domain name (penginlab.com) for $10. I set it up with an A record pointing at my regular dev server, and then in the Caddyfile gave it instructions to serve up the primary domain, and a separate instance for a wildcard domain.

When LetsEncrypt issues a wildcard domain, it uses a DNS challenge, meaning it only needs a TXT record inserted into your DNS zone to prove it should issue you the server. Assuming your registrar is among those included in the Caddy DNS plugins, you can set your server to handle that automatically.

(If your registrar is not on that list, you can always use

certbot certonly --manual

and enter the TXT record yourself. You only need to do it once a quarter.)

Now we have a certificate to use to validly sign HTTPS connections for any subdomain for penginlab.com. You simply copy down the fullchain.pem and privkey.pem files to your various machines (I set up a bash script that scps the file down to one of my local machines and then scps it out to everywhere it needs to go on the local network.)

Once you have the cert, you can set up your caddy servers to use it using the tls directive:

tls /path/to/fullchain.pem /path/to/privkey.pem

You’ll also need to update your local DNS (since your DNS provider won’t let you point public URLs at private IP addresses), but I assume you were doing that anyway (I personally use NextDNS for a combination of cloud-based ad-blocking and lab DNS management).

Bam! Fully accepted HTTPS connections from any machine on your network. And all you have to do is run one bash script once a quarter (which you can even throw on a cron). Would that all projects have so satisfying and simple a solution.

Re: Apple’s convoluted EU policies

It’s surprising how often D&D is relevant in my everyday life. Most people who play D&D are in it to have fun. They follow the rule - not just the letter of the law, but the spirit.

But every once in a while you’ll encounter a “rules lawyer,” a player who’s more concerned with making sure you observe and obey every tiny rule, punish every pecadillo, than actually having fun.

All the worse when it’s your GM, the person in charge of running the game.

But there’s one thing you learn quickly - if someone is trying to game the rules, the only way to win (or have any fun) is play the game right back.

For smaller/mid-tier devs, if you’re only offering free apps you should probably just continue in the App Store.

But for larger devs who might run afoul of the new guidelines where apps distributed outside the App Store get charged a fee every time they go over a million users?

Oops, Apple just created collectible apps, where if you have Facebook (and not Facebook2), we know you got in early. Think about it: Same codebase, different appId. The external app stores can even set up mechanisms for this to work - every time you hit 999,000 installs, it creates a new listing that just waits for you to upload the new binary (and switches when you hit 995K). Now your users are incentivized to download your app early, in case becomes the big thing. Lower app # is the new low user ID.

If I’m Microsoft, I’m putting a stunted version of my app in the App Store (maybe an Office Documents Viewer?) for free, with links telling them if they want to edit they have go to the Microsoft App Store to download the app where Apple doesn’t get a dime (especially if Microsoft uses the above trick to roll over the app every 995K users).

Even in the world where (as I think is the case in this one) Apple says all your apps have to be on the same licensing terms (so you can’t have some App Store and some off-App Store), it costs barely anything to create a new LLC (and certainly less than the 500K it would cost if your app hits a million users). Apple’s an Irish company, remember? So one of your LLCs is App Store, and the other is external.

To be clear, I don’t like this setup. I think the iPhone should just allow sideloading, period. Is all of this more complicated for developers? Absolutely! Is the minimal amount of hassle worth saving at least 30% percent of your current revenue (or minimum $500K if you go off-App Store)? For dev shops of a certain size, I would certainly think so.

The only way to have fun with a rules lawyer is to get them to relax, or get them to leave the group. You have to band together to make them see the error of their ways, or convince them it’s so much trouble it’s not worth bothering to argue anymore.

“The big curiosity is what medium a Furby uses to record audio,” one employee wrote. “I would assume that since it can ‘respond’ to certain audio cues that it would use storage similar to a digital answering machine or straight computer memory chips. Anybody know?”

Others said “Furby is only a $35 toy and is not that sophisticated. As a previous [listserv] posting pointed out, the ‘learning’ the doll does is programmed into it so that the longer you use it the more it ‘knows.’”

A great reading of newly FOIA’d documents from the folks at 404 Media. I definitely understand the impetus to understate existing rules about banning personal electronics from NSA spaces, but doesn’t it also smack somewhat of security by obscurity?

I’ll be hitting the lecture circuit again this year, with three conferences planned for the first of 2024.

In February, I’ll be at Developer Week in Oakland (and online!), talking about Data Transfer Objects.

In March, I’ll be in Michigan for the Michigan Technology Conference, speaking about clean code as well as measuring and managing productivity for dev teams.

And in April I’ll be in Chicago at php[tek] to talk about laws/regulations for developers and DTOs (again).

Hope to see you there!

It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since and the rule simply persists through blind imitation of the past.

• Oliver Wendell Holmes

From an article by Jill Lepore. I still do not understand how she’s able to produce so much (deeply researched) content.

Titan was the silliest boy, who at some point was feral and yet constantly slept like this - as if to say, “please eviscerate me.” Love you, buddy. Miss you. ❤️

We need structure. We need rules, we need frameworks, we (for the love of God) need grammar. We, in this instance, are writers, and the things I refer to are often the crutches we employ in order to quickly impart whatever it is we’re trying to get across.

But there’s support a difference between support and constraint. One is there for you to fall back on, allowing you the opportunity to test your wings while still giving you a safe fall. The other informs your actions strictly, restricting your abilities and motion to the point where you’ve almost lost agency.

Guess which category I’m talking about with regard to journalism.

There’s a reason the inverted pyramid exists and has been adopted by the journalism profession as the general template for telling a story: It makes sense for a lot of them. You start out with a very specific idea and then go broad the more you write. It keeps young writers from getting too bogged down in specifics, while also making sure they’re not taking the 10,000-foot view on everything.

It’s a guideline … And that’s all it should be: a guide. It’s not inviolate, and it’s by no means the best format for every story out there. Even more so than the idea that each story should be expressed in the best format possible, there are almost zero stories where a strict inverted pyramid is called for.

I get why it’s taught — it’s much easier to both instruct/grade according to a strict rubric rather than arbitrarily [and arduously] reading and weighing the subjective value of every piece of writing. But the problem is there’s no point where, after the young journalist is instructed in the use of the inverted pyramid, permission is given to leave it behind when necessary.

I’ll use for emphasis the story on a federal judge ruling against one of the NSA’s data-collection policies, from Reuters. For starters, like most stories nowadays, it’s overly long for its ostensible purpose: To inform readers about the specific case. Indeed, all of the actual data from today is imparted before the “Leaks” subheader, which isn’t even halfway through the story. The rest of the story comprises reactionary quotes (“Snowden, in a statement sent by journalist Glenn Greenwald, applauded the ruling”), unnecessary (peculiarly editorialized) background (“Judge Leon has issued headline-making rulings before.") and the wire service staple, tangential information recycled from other stories:

A committee of experts appointed by the Obama Administration to review NSA activities is expected to recommend that the spy agency give up collection of masses of metadata and instead require telephone companies to hold onto it so it can be searched. But intelligence officials and the phone companies themselves are said to oppose such a plan.

Now, you might be able to argue that were this in print, it might be necessary to include some of this information to give readers background. But, since the information is being sent across something literally called the “Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol” (where hypertext is defined as a “format in which information related to that on a display can be accessed directly from the display”), there’s absolutely no reason for that information to be there on its own.

Maybe — maybe — you could leave the lines about the judge’s past rulings and the NSA review if you linked to relevant stories, as that might be of use to the readers. On their own, though, the lines appear to be nothing more than inch-count padding.

At best, journalists only gradually break away when they feel they can get away with it, either on low- or extremely high-profile stories. This, coupled with the mathematical truth that most stories are not situated on either extreme but rather complacently down the middle, means a majority of news comes across in an outdated, unnecessary and (above all) congenitally boring format. It’s a trap that young reporters get ensnared in quite easily, and it goes beyond just the structure.

In the AP story, while the structure isn’t quite so rigid, it still includes drop-ins like “The collection program was disclosed by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden, provoking a heated national and international debate.” This sentence underwhelms so utterly as to be entirely pointless. Reading it contributes absolutely nothing to the understanding of the story unless you’ve already retained a fairly exhaustive knowledge of the context. It’s the equivalent of a series tag, a sort of textual cue to let people know, “Oh, this is part of the Snowden story.” It doesn’t actually impart any information. I’ll resort to a David Foster Wallace quote to drive my point home:

I think the smarter thing to say is that in many tight, insular communities — where membership is partly based on intelligence, proficiency, and being able to speak the language of the discipline — pieces of writing become as much or more about presenting one’s own qualifications for inclusion in the group than transmission of meaning. … people feel that unless they can mimic the particular jargon and style of their peers, they won’t be taken seriously, and their ideas won’t be taken seriously.

In this case it’s more style than jargon, but both manifest themselves eminently on a daily (often hourly) basis, online and in print. Even specific words can easily be overused — and, though they accurately depict something, their frequency of use lessens the impact and clarity.

The standard caveat: I’m not saying it’s wrong to use the technique. Just don’t become beholden to it. Be willing to take risks. Explore and discover the best way for letting people know (Ibid.) the story you’re trying to tell. You can use the inverted pyramid, and the intertextual dog whistle, but you should only do so when you must.

With the advent of the popular internet, there are many literary, journalistic and writerly types who lament the reclassifying of writing as “content.” I would think the best way to fight that trend is to stop treating your own output as content, and start reconceptualizing it (even in your own mind) as true writing.

Hey everybody, in case you wanted to see my face in person, I will be speaking at LonghornPHP, which is in Austin from Nov. 2-4. I’ve got two three things to say there! That’s twice thrice as many things as one thing! (I added a last-minute accessibility update).

In case you missed it, I said stuff earlier this year at SparkConf in Chicago!

I said stuff about regulations (HIPAA, FERPA, GDPR, all the good ones) at the beginning of this year. This one is available online, because it was only ever available online:

I am sorry for talking so fast in that one, I definitely tried to cover more than I should have. Oops!

WordPress 6.2.1 changelog:

Block themes parsing shortcodes in user generated data; thanks to Liam Gladdy of WP Engine for reporting this issue

As a reminder, from Semver.org:

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:
1. MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes
2. MINOR version when you add functionality in a backward compatible manner
3. PATCH version when you make backward compatible bug fixes

As it turns out, just because you label it as a “security” patch doesn’t make it OK to completely annihilate functionality that numerous themes depend on.

This bit us on a number of legacy sites that depend entirely on shortcode parsing for functionality. Because it’s a basic feature. We sanitize ACTUAL user-generated content, but the CMS considers all database content to be “user content.”

WordPress is not stable, should not be considered to be an enterprise-caliber CMS, and should only be run on WordPress.com using WordPress.com approved themes. Dictator for life Matt Mullenweg has pretty explicitly stated he considers WordPress' competitors to be SquareSpace and Wix. Listen to him.

The movie is better than the soundtrack, but the soundtrack still has some good versions of Al classics. “Amish Paradise” is my go-to for karaoke.

Note: This site no longer runs LinkCMS

I knew I needed a new website. My go-to content management system was no longer an option, and I investigated some of the most popular alternatives. The first thing to do, as with any project, was ascertain the requirements. My biggest concerns were a) ability to create posts and pages, b) image management, and c) easy to use as a writer and a developer (using my definition of easy to use, since it was my site).

I strongly considered using Drupal, since that’s what we (were, until a month ago) going to use at work, but it seemed like a lot of work and overhead to get the system to do what I wanted it to. I (briefly) looked at Joomla, but it too seemed bloated with a fairly unappealing UI/UX on the backend. I was hopeful about some of the Laravel CMSes, but they too seemed to have a bloated foundation for my needs.

I also really dug into the idea of flat-file CMSes, since most (all) of my content is static, but I legitimately couldn’t find one that didn’t require a NodeJS server. I don’t mind Node when it’s needed, but I already have a scripting language (PHP) that I was using, and didn’t feel like going through the hassle of getting a Node instance going as well.

(Later on I found KirbyCMS, which is probably what I’m going to try for my next client or work project, but I both found it too late in the process and frankly didn’t want to lose out on the satisfaction of getting it running when I was ~80% of the way done.)

As I was evaluating the options, in addition to the dealbreakers, I kept finding small annoyances. The backend interface was confusing, or required too many clicks to get from place to place; the speed to first paint was insane; just the time waiting for the content editor to load after I clicked it seemed interminable. At the same time, I was also going through a similarly frustrating experience with cloud music managers, each with a vital missing feature or that implemented a feature in a wonky way.

Then I had an epiphany: Why not just build my own?

I know, I know. It’s a tired developer cliche that anything Not Built Here is Wrong. But as I thought it over more, the concept intrigued me. I wasn’t setting out to replace WordPress or Drupal or one of the heavy-hitters; I just wanted a base to build from that would allow me to create posts, pages, and maybe some custom ideas later down the road (links with commentary; books from various sources, with reviews/ratings). I would be able to keep it slim, as I didn’t have to design for hundreds of use cases. Plus, it would be an excellent learning opportunity, that would allow me to delve deeply into how other systems work and how I might improve upon them (for my specific use case; I make no claim I can do it better than anyone else).

Besides, how long could it take?

Four months later, LinkCMS is powering this website. It’s fast and light, it can handle image uploads, it can create pages and posts … mostly. Hey, it fulfills all the requirements!

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still VERY MUCH a beta product. I am deep in the dogfooding process right now (especially with some of the text editing, which I’ll get into below), but I cannot describe the satisfaction of being able to type in the URL and see the front end, or log in to the backend and make changes, and know that I built it from the ground-up.

LinkCMS is named after its mascot (and, she claims, lead developer), Admiral Link Pengin, who is the best web developer (and admiral) on our Technical Penguins team.

I don’t want to go through the whole process in excruciating detail, both because that’d be boring and because I don’t remember everything with that many details anyway. I do, however, want to hit the highlights.

• Flight is a fantastic PHP routing framework. I’ve used it for small projects in the past, and it was pretty much a no-brainer when I decided I wanted to keep things light and simple. It can get as complicated as you want, but if you browse through the codebase you’ll see that it’s fairly basic, both for ease of understand and because it was easier to delete and edit routes as separate items.

• LinkCMS uses the Twig templating system, mostly because I like the syntax.

• The above two dependencies are a good example of a core principle I tried to keep to: Only use libraries I actually need, and don’t use a larger library when a smaller one will do. I could have thrown together a whole CMS in Laravel pretty quickly, or used React or Vue for the front end, but it would have come at the expense of stability and speed, as well as (for the latter two) a laborious build process.

• I don’t hate everything about WordPress! I think block-based editing is a great idea, so this site is built on (custom) blocks. My aim is to have the content be self-contained in a single database row, built around actual HTML if you want to pull it out.

• One of my favorite features is a Draft Content model. With most CMSes, once a page is published, if you make any changes and save them, those changes are immediately displayed on the published page. At best, you can make the whole post not published and check it without displaying the changes to the public. LinkCMS natively holds two copies of the content for all posts and pages - Draft and Published. If you publish a page, then make edits and save it, those changes are saved to the Draft content without touching the Published part. Logged-in users can preview the Draft content as it will look on the page. Once it’s ready, you can Publish the page (these are separate buttons, as seen in the screenshots) for public consumption. Think of it as an integrated staging environment. On the roadmap is a “revert” function so you can go back to the published version if you muck things up too much.

• One of the things that was super important to me was that everything meet WCAG AA accessibility. Making this a goal significantly limited my options when it came to text editors. There are a few out there that are accessible, but they are a) huge (like, nearly half a megabyte of more, gzipped) and b) much more difficult to extend in the ways I wanted to. Again, with a combination of optimism (I can learn a lot by doing this!) and chutzpah (this is possible!), I decided to write my own editor, Hat (named after Link’s penguin, Hat, who wears the same hat as the logo).
  I’m really pleased with how the Hat editor turned out, though it does still have some issues I discovered while building this site that are in desperate need of fixing (including if you select text and bold it, then immediately try to un-bold it, it just bolds the whole paragraph). But I’m extremely proud to say it that both HatJS and LinkCMS are 100% WCAG AA 2.1 accessible, to the best of my knowledge.

• Since I was spending so much time on it, I wanted to make sure I could use LinkCMS for future projects while still maintaining the ability to update the core without a lot of complicated git-ing or submodules. I structured the project so that core functionality lives in the primary repo, and everything else (including pages and posts) live in self-contained Modules (let’s be real, they’re plugins, but it’s my playground, so I get to name the imaginary territory). This means you can both update core and modules, AND you only need to have those components included that you’re actually using.

• I used a modified Model-View-Controller architecture: I call the pieces Models, Controllers and Actors. Models and Controllers do what you’d expect. Actors are what actually make changes and make things work. It’s easier for me to conceptualize each piece rather than using “View” as the name, which to my mind leaves a lot of things out. I’m aware of the MVAC approach, and I suppose technically the templates are the View, but I lumped the routes and templating in under Actors (Route and Display, accordingly), and it works for me.

I don’t think LinkCMS is in a state where someone else could install it right now. (For starters, I’m fairly certain I haven’t included the basic SQL yet.) The code is out there and available, and hopefully soon I can get it to a presentable state.

But the end goal of all this was, again, not to be a CMS maven challenging the incumbents. I wanted to learn more about how these systems work (the amount of insight I gained into Laravel through building my own is astounding, to me), and craft a tool that allows me to build small sites and projects, on my own terms, with minimal dependencies and maximum stability.

Mission accomplished.

Email newsletters are the future. And the present. And also, at various points, the past. They’ve exploded in popularity (much like podcasts), hoping that individual creators can find enough people to subscribe to keep them afloat (much like podcasts). It’s an idea that can certainly work, though I doubt whether all of the newsletters out there today are going to survive, say, next year, much less in the next 5. (Much like … well, you get it.) My inbox got to the point where I could find literally dozens of new issues on Sunday, and several more during each day of the week. They were unmanageable on their own, and they were crowding out my legitimate email.

In a perfect world, I could just subscribe to them in Feedly. I am an unabashed RSS reader, with somewhere in the vicinity of 140 active feeds. I am such a hardcore RSS addict that I subscribed to Feedly Pro lifetime somewhere in the vicinity of … 2013, I think. Gods. It was a great deal ($99), but it means that I miss out on some of the new features, including the ability to subscribe to newsletters. There are also some services out there that seem like they do a relatively good job, but even at $5/month, that’s $5 I’m not sending to a writer.

And frankly, I was pretty sure I could build it myself.

Thus was born Newslurp. It’s not pretty. I will 100% admit that. The admin interface can be charitably described as “synthwave brutalist.” That’s because you really shouldn’t spend any time there. The whole point is to set it up once and never have to touch the thing again. The interface really only exists so that you can check to see if a specific newsletter was processed.

It’s not perfect. There are some newsletters that depend on a weirdly large amount of formatting, and more that have weird assumptions about background color. I’ve tried to fix those as I saw them, but there are a lot more mistakes out there than I could ever fix. Hopefully they include a “view in browser” link.

Setup is pretty easy.

• Install dependencies using Composer

• Use the SQL file in install.sql to create your database

• Set up your Google API OAuth 2 Authenticaton. Download the client secret JSON file, rename it “client_secret.json” and put it in the project root

• Navigate to your URL and authenticate using your credentials

• Set up a filter in your Gmail account to label the emails you want to catch as “Newsletters.” You can archive them, but do not delete them (the program will trash them after processing)

• Visit /update once to get it started, then set up a cron to hit that URL/page however frequently you’d like

That’s … that’s pretty much it, actually. It worked like a charm till I started using Hey (which has its own system for dealing with newsletters, which I also like). But it still runs for those of you out there in Google-land. Go forth and free your newsletters!

Check out the repo here.

I have used WordPress for well over a decade now, for both personal and professional projects. WordPress was how I learned to be a programmer, starting with small modifications to themes and progressing to writing my own from scratch. The CMS seemed to find a delicate balance between being easy to use for those who weren’t particularly technically proficient (allowing for plugins that could add nearly anything imaginable), while also allowing the more developer-minded to get in and mess with whatever they wanted.

I would go as far as to call myself a proselytizer, for a time. I fought strenuously to use it at work, constantly having to overcome the “but it’s open-source and therefore insecure!” argument that every enterprise IT person has tried for the past two decades. But I fought for it because a) I knew it, so I could get things done more quickly using it, and b) it did everything we wanted it to at no cost. Who could argue against that?

The problems first started around the WordPress API. Despite an upswell of support among developers, there was active pushback by Matt Mullenweg, in particular, about including it in Core and making it more widely available - especially confusing since it wouldn’t affect any users except those that wanted to use it.

We got past it (and got the API into core, where it has been [ab]used by Automattic), but it left a sour taste in my mouth. WordPress development was supposed to be community-driven, and indeed though it likely would not exist in its current state without Automattic’s help, neither would Automattic have been able to do it all on its own. But the community was shut out of the decision-making process, a feeling we would get increasingly familiar with. Completely blowing the up the text editor in favor Gutenberg, ignoring accessibility concerns until an outside third-party paid for a review … these are not actions of product that is being inculcated by its community. It’s indicative of a decision-making process that has a specific strategy behind it (chasing new users at the expense of existing users and developers).

Gutenberg marked the beginning of the end for me, but I felt the final break somewhere in the 5.x.x release cycle when I had to fix yet another breaking change that was adding a new feature that I absolutely did not need or want. I realized I was not only installing plugins were actively trying to keep changes at bay, I was now spending additional development time just to make sure that existing features kept working. It crystallized my biggest problem I’d been feeling: WordPress is no longer a stable platform. I don’t need new; I can build new. I need things to keep working once they’re built. WordPress no longer provides that.

And that’s fine! I am not making the argument that Automattic should do anything other than pursue their product strategy. I am not, however, in their target market, so I’m going to stop trying to force it.

It’s probably the most standard Twitter profile text outside of ostensibly nubile 22-year-olds who are “just looking for a guy to treat me right” — “Retweets are not endorsements.” Journalists, who are among the more active Twitternauts, like to pretend they exist outside of normal human functioning like judgment and subjectivity, and thus use this phrase to let everyone know that just because they put something on their personal (or corporate-personal) account, it doesn’t mean THEY actually think that thing. They’re just letting you know. It’s FYI.

It’s bullshit.

This is the ignore-the-obvious-fiscal-advantage argument that’s given whenever people wonder why the media focuses on inane, unimportant or crazy stories that even most journalists are sick of — sometimes even on air. We know that you posted the story about the celebrity because people will click on the link about the celebrity. It’s why the concept of clickbait headlines exist: it’s certainly not for the reader’s benefit. Journalists have ready-made reasons (read: excuses) as to why they post tripe, and the closest they ever get to the truth is “because people will read them.” . They’re just trying to inform people!

With the democratization of communication accelerated by the internet, “major media” no longer holds any meaningful gate-keeping role in deciding what people should know about. You can lament or celebrate this information as you may, but most would not argue with the truth of it. There are simply too many outlets through which you can acquire information, be it personal feeds from social media, websites, TV channels, magazines, etc. If someone wants to get their message out into the world, there are ample ways to do this.

Let’s take, for example, an American neo-Nazi group. Their message is that the white race is superior and other races should be subjugated/deported/killed. They might have a Twitter account, a website, a magazine, whatever. The main point is, none of these mediums have the ability to reach out to people. Sure, they can tweet @ someone and force their way in, but for the most part the way people interact with their message is through (digital or actual) word-of-mouth from those who espouse those beliefs, or by seeking them out directly.

But what happens when, say, a major party presidential candidate retweets some of their views? It by no means indicates that the candidate himself is a white supremacist or in any way sympathetic to those points of view. But it does give the jerks a voice. It lets people who may similarly not be white supremacists or sympathizers be exposed to that person, and provides them a vector to that information. Clicking on the Twitter handle to see the white supremacist’s past tweets opens the door. The person who goes through it is not automatically going to become a skinhead … but perhaps that Twitter user is adept at using misleading rhetoric and subtle innuendo to draw people down the path.

None of this makes it the candidate’s fault (or the candidate a racist [UPDATE: Except when it does, don’t slow-walk that nonsense, Past Me]), but the root cause is undeniable.

So what does this have to do with the media? The sole ability any publication/outlet has is to determine what information they think their readers should know. They cannot make their readers know this information anymore than the presidential candidate or the racist twit can make anyone pay attention to them. All they can do is put the information in front of those who let them. It’s exactly the application of, “You can’t control what other people think, you can only control what you do,” only this time it has nothing to do with telling your child that some people are just mean.

The story is whatever the story is, and by printing a story in the newspaper, airing it on your broadcast network or pushing it to your audience via Facebook, your website, YouTube, etc., the publisher/creator is saying “This is a thing that is worthy of attention.” Especially if you’re not going to put any effort into context (which is what a retweet is), you’re explicitly stating to your audience that this is a thing they should know about. In an “attention economy,” with a surfeit of content and not enough eyeballs, getting someone to look at you goes a big way toward your winning (whatever it is you’re trying to win).

Thus, tweets like this:

Newsrooms insisting, “No, re-tweets ARE endorsements” have really said: we don’t trust our journalists or our users. http://t.co/gX923Ej9rN

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) July 11, 2014

are actively missing the point. No one’s saying you absolutely believe 100% in whatever you retweet. But it’s disingenuous to argue that there’s no value to the original tweet by your retweet. Hell, if there wasn’t, there would be no point in your retweeting it at all.

As a person whose life is consumed by the digital world, this feels an exceptionally strange piece to write. I spend the vast majority of my day on a device, whether that’s a computer for work (I’m a web developer, no escaping it) or a phone/computer/tablet for whatever (likely cat-related) thing I happen to be internetting in my free time.

So you can understand my internal consternation when confronted with a situation that makes me lean toward limiting technology. I’m more than a little worried about technology, both for the reaction it’s drawing as well as its actual impact it’s having on society as a whole — and not just because three out of every four stories on every single news site is about Pokemon Go.

But we’ll get there. First, let’s start with something more mainstream.

Technology (and, more specifically, apps/the internet) are famous for disruption. Tesla’s disrupting the auto industry. So’s Uber. AirBnB “disrupted” the hotel industry by allowing people to rent out rooms (or entire houses) to perfect strangers. The disruption in question (for hotels) was that they no longer were the combination of easiest/cheapest way to stay in a place away from home. But there was also “disruption” in terms of laws/regulation, a fight AirBnB is currently waging in several different locations.

Some of these fights revolve around leases — many landlords do not allow subleasing, which is what some people do on AirBnB: Rent out a space they rent from someone else for a period of time. AirBnB asks that people confirm they have the legal right to rent out the space they’re listing, but there’s no enforcement or verification of any kind on AirBnB’s part. AirBnB thus, at least in some non-small number of cases, is profiting off of at best a breach of contract, if not outright illegality. Then there’s the fact that anyone, be they murderer, sex offender or what have you, can rent out their space and the person renting the room may be none the wiser.

And maybe these things are OK! Maybe it should be caveat emptor, and the people who ultimately lose out (the actual lessees) are the ones primarily being harmed. But that ignores the people who were just trying to rent from AirBnB and had to deal with an irate landowner, or the property owner who has to deal with the fallout/repercussions of the person breaking the lease.

The clichéd technical model of “move fast and break things” should have some limits, and situations where people are dying need more foresight than “we’ll figure it out as we go along.” Otherwise, how do we determine the appropriate death toll for a new tech service before it needs to ask permission rather than forgiveness? And before you dismiss that question as overbearing/hysterical, remember that actual human beings have already died.

But not everything is so doom and gloom! Why, Pokemon Go is bringing nerds outside, causing people to congregate and interact with one another. It’s legitimately fun! Finally my inner 10-year-old can traipse around the park looking for wild Pikachu to capture. Using augmented reality, the game takes your physical location and overlays the game on top of it. As you walk around with your phone, it uses your GPS location to pop up various Pokemon for you to capture. There are also Pokestops, which are preset locations that provide you with in-game items, located in numerous places (usually around monuments and “places of cultural interest”). There are also gyms in similarly “random” places where you can battle your Pokemon to control the gym.

And no deaths! (Yet, probably.) But just because no one is dying doesn’t mean there aren’t still problems. Taste-wise, what about the Pokestop at Ground Zero (or this list of weird stops)? Business-wise, what about the Pokestop near my house that’s in a funeral home parking lot? You legally can’t go there after-hours … but Pokemon Go itself says that some Pokemon only come out at night. What happens during a funeral? There’s no place where businesses can go to ask to be removed as a Pokestop (and frankly, I can imagine places like comic book stores and such that would pay for the privilege). And who has the right to ask that the 9/11 Memorial Pool be removed? Victims’ families? There’s an appropriation of physical space going on that’s not being addressed with the seriousness it should. Just because in the Pokemon game world you can catch Pokemon anywhere doesn’t mean, for example, that you should necessarily allow have them popping up at the Holocaust Museum.

I would like to preempt arguments about “it’s just an algorithm” or “we crowd-sourced” the information by pointing out that those things are useful in their way, but they are not excuses nor are they reasons. If you decide to crowd-source information, you’d better make sure that the information you’re looking for has the right level of impact (such as the names of boats, or in Pokemon Go’s case, the locations of Pokestops). Some of these things can be fixed after the fact, some of them require you to put systems in place to prevent problems from ever occurring.

In this case, you can cast blame on the players for not respecting the law/common sense/decency, and while you’d be right, it shifts the blame away from the companies that are making money off this. What inherent right do companies have to induce people to trespass? Going further, for some reason doing something on “the internet” suddenly cedes rights completely unthinkable in any other context. Remember the “Yelp for people” that was all but an app designed to encourage libel, or the geo-mapping firm that set the default location for any IP address in the US to some Kansan’s front yard. These were not malicious, or even intentional acts. But they had very real affects on people that took far too long to solve, all because the companies in question didn’t bother (or didn’t care) about the real effects of their decisions.

At some point, there’s at the very least a moral — and should be legal, though I’m not necessarily advocating for strict liability — compulsion to consider and fix problems before they happen, rather than waiting until it’s too late. The proper standard probably lies somewhere around where journalists have to consider libel — journalists have a responsibility to only report things they reasonably believe to be accurate. Deadlines and amount of work are not defenses, meaning that the truth must take priority over all. For places where the internet intersects with the real world (which is increasingly becoming “most internet things”), perhaps a similar standard that defers to the reasonably foreseeable potential negative impact should apply.

Technology is only going to grow ever-more entrenched in our lives, and as its function moves closer to an appendage and away from external utility, it’s incumbent upon actors (both governmental and corporate) to consider the very real effects of their products. It (here meaning “life,” “work” or any number of quasi-existential crises) has to be about more than just making money, or the newest thing.

I like technology. I think this is fairly obvious. I like it personally because it removes a lot of friction points in my life (some in ways that other people appreciate as more convenient, some in ways that are convenient only to me). But the downside of technology is that businesses use it as a way of not paying people for things that actually often do require human judgment.

The proper way most systems should be set up for, say, a medical insurance claim is that you fill out everything electronically so the data is in the right place and then an actual human can make an actual human judgment on your case. In practice, however, you fill out the form and the information whisks away to be judged by a computer using a predetermined set of rules.

If you’re very, very lucky, there might be a way for you to appeal the computer’s ruling to a human being (regardless of outcome/reason) — but even then, that person’s power is often limited to saying, “well, the computer said you don’t pass.”

The following story is by no means of any actual consequence, but does serve as a prime example of how to waste your money employing customer service people. I recently switched banks. When I was at the branch doing so, I asked out of curiosity if they allow custom debit cards (my girlfriend has a credit card that looks like a cassette tape, and is always getting compliments on it. I’m petty and jealous, so I want a cool card, too).

Finding out the answer is yes, I waited until my actual debit card came so I can see the pure eye-rending horror that is their color scheme before sitting down and trying to make my own. I wasn’t really looking to lose a good portion of my day to this endeavor, so I used the Designer’s Prerogative to begin.

I wanted something computer-y (see above, re: my opinion on technology), so I started with this (royalty-free) stock image. Their design requirements say the PeoplesBank logo has to be large and colored (dark red for Peoples, gray for Bank), so I swapped the colors on the image and flipped it so the faux-binary wouldn’t be covered by the big VISA logo or hologram (see the image at the top of the post).

It’s not a masterpiece, it’s not like I slaved over it for hours. It’s just a cool design that I thought would work well. Upload, and send!

Three hours later, I got an email: SORRY — your design wasn’t approved!

We regret to inform you that the image you uploaded in our card creator service does not meet the guidelines established for this service, so it has not been accepted for processing. Please take a moment to review our image and upload guidelines at www.peoplesbanknet.com and then feel free to submit another image after doing so.

Huh. Well maybe I ran afoul of the design guidelines. Let’s see, competitive marks/names, provocative material (I don’t think so, but who knows?), branded products … Nope. The only thing that it could possibly even run afoul of is “Phone numbers (e.g. 800 or 900 numbers) and URL addresses (e.g. www.xyz.com)”, but since it’s clearly not either of those things, I figured it would be OK.

So I called up PeoplesBank and explained the situation.

“Hi, I was wondering why my custom card design was rejected.”

“Well, it should have said in the email why it was rejected.”

“Yes, it says ‘it does not meet the guidelines established for the service.’ I’ve read the guidelines and there’s nothing in there that would preclude this. It’s just an abstract image with some binary code, and it’s not even real binary, it’s just random 1s and 0s.”

“Please hold.”

[5 minutes pass]

“OK, it says the copyrighted or trademarked material part is what it ran afoul of.”

“It’s just numbers and an abstract image. How could that be the problem?”

“That’s what it says.”

“OK, well, is there someone somewhere I can talk to who would be able to tell me what I need to alter in order to make it acceptable?”

“Please hold.”

[10 minutes pass]

“OK, you said something about the numbers? Something about by Mary?”

“Yes, it’s binary code. Well, it’s not even really binary, it’s pseudo-binary.”

“Well, that’s it.”

“What’s it? It’s just random 1s and 0s. It’s the equivalent of putting random letters in a row and saying they’re words.”

“Apparently it’s copyrighted.”

“… OK, well, is there someone who can tell me what I need to change? Because I doubt that, even if I changed the numbers around and submitted it, it would still go through. I just need to know why it’s not going through so I can change it so it does go through.”

“Oh, we’ll need to research that. Is there a number I can call you back at?”

My best guess is that somehow this is getting tripped up as an allusion or reference to The Matrix by some content identifier program somewhere, which a) it’s clearly not, b) The Matrix wasn’t actually binary, and c) you can’t copyright the idea of code on a screen. The computer identified as such, and since no one actually knows why it thought that, no one can tell me how to fix it.

And since it’s such an important business case (not getting sued for copyright infringement, even though there’s absolutely no way VISA is getting sued even if someone puts Mickey on their damn credit card), no one is actually empowered to overrule the computer.

What I’ll probably end up doing is just trying another image (I was thinking maybe a motherboard) because at this point I’ve already spent more time than I actually care about the design of my debit card. It’s just frustrating.

I sincerely hope I don’t have to update this post.

Frustration is a natural part of doing … well, anything, really. Especially when you’re picking up something new, there’s almost always a ramp-up period where you’re really bad, followed by gradual progression. You know this. I know this.

It’s kind of obvious to everyone who’s ever played a sport, an instrument or tried anything even remotely skilled. There’s room for natural talent to make things a little easier, of course, but even LeBron James went through a period (much earlier and much shorter than the rest of us) where basketball was something new he had to get good at.

There are various schools of thought on how to approach this: Some believe people should be allowed to develop at their own pace and just enjoy the activity; others believe that screaming things at children that would make drill sergeants blush is the best way to motivate and/or teach them. Personally, I think the right approach falls somewhere in the middle (though toward the non-crazy side), depending on age, experience and what the person in question wants.

**All of which is a long-winded way of saying that a not-insignificant number of people who play videogames online are absolutely terrifying human beings. **

When I get the chance lately, I’ve been picking up and playing Rocket League, a game best described as “soccer with cars that have rockets in them.” From a gameplay perspective, there’s a decent amount of strategy involved that combines soccer with basketball. The single-player AI is pretty easy to defeat, though it does allow for a nice ramp-up of abilities and skills. Then there’s the online portion.

Before this month, there were just random matches you could join (from 1x1 up to 4x4) and play against other people. Some of those people are clearly wizards, because they fly around and use the angles to pass and score from places that I would have trouble even mapping out on paper.

In this initial period, the random matches I joined (which is to say I didn’t join any guilds or teams, just random online play, so there’s some bias there) were mostly fun, occasional blowouts (in both directions) that often involved no more chatter than the preset options (“Great pass,” “Nice shot,” “Thanks,” “Sorry,” etc.).

Then, with an update this month, Rocket League rolled out rankings. Now you can play “competitively” in a division (stratified tiers to ensure that people of like ability play against one another) and receive an overall score of your skill level. And boy do a lot of people seem to think it’s somehow indicative of their worth as human beings.

I play where everyone starts, in the unranked division. You start with 50 points and win/lose between 6-10 points per game you play, depending on the team outcome (important note). I currently bounce around the mid-to-upper part of this unranked tier, which is probably pretty accurate (I’m OK, but have moments where I screw up).

For the first few games I played, it was interesting watching the different skill levels (from brand new or just-out-of-single-player to pretty skilled players) interact with one another fairly frictionlessly. There’d be some frustrating boneheaded moves that might cost you a match, but it generally appeared to just be accepted as part of playing on a randomized team. When I played yesterday, though, things seemed to be getting ugly.

The first two matches went fine — a win, a loss. Then I got a string where I was teamed up with what one can uncharitably describe as spoiled babies.

In unranked play, the first one happened when I came out too far forward on defense and let a goal go by. Unquestionably my fault, which is why I shot off a “Sorry” to my teammates. “Fuck don’t miss the fucking ball,” was what I got in response.

We had another goal scored on us during the vagaries of play, as happens, because the other team was better than us. That’s when my teammate got mad. “God you’re terrible. You must be doing this on purpose.”

Which isn’t bad, as internet rantings go. It just caught me off-guard. He proceeded to score relatively soon after that to tie things up, and I flashed a “Nice shot!” to him. “fuck off, [gamertag].”

Um, OK.

In the very next match, we scored a quick goal to go up 2-1 when someone from the other team asked if they had removed a feature (he used more obscenities than my paraphrase). He then proceeded to rant about the “shit physics implementation” and how “he totally had it 100% locked-in.”

Of course, given that he was typing all this while the game was still going, his team wound up giving up a few more goals, but his point definitely got made.

After an uneventful game following that, the last one involved a (clearly) new player whiffing on defense, and three players from both teams proceeded to disparage the player with accusations of “trolling” — losing on purpose — to the point where he just literally stopped playing. His car just remained motionless on the field.

It’s easy to sit back and wonder about why they take it so seriously — “it’s just a game” — but that’s a simplistic answer. I have no problem with taking games seriously, and there’s no reason to prevent people from getting (appropriately) upset when something bad happens.

It’s that modifier, though. “Appropriately.” I’m not going to take issue with obscenities (or grammar). This is objectively a bad way to play games. Because, of course, you can’t earn points if you don’t win. And regardless of how bad (or new) someone is to the game, it’s almost always better to have an additional player on the field trying to help you win. It’s bad strategy and tactics to just heap abuse on poor players — a fact the game understands, which is why one of the preset communication options is “No problem.”

It all essentially comes down to treating other humans as humans. I’m not casting broad aspersions about gamers, teenagers or even teenage gamers. Just a note that digitizing all interactions seems to have the broad effect of dehumanizing interactions, unless specific tactics are employed.

I don’t know how to educate these people — I’m just someone flying a car around in a videogame. But I made my attempt. After the reprimand for complimenting the guy on his shot, I decided to help the only way I could: I chased down an errant shot by the other team and knocked it in our goal in overtime.

My girlfriend says it was a little petulant — I disagree, but not too strenuously. I broadcasted a message after the shot: “No matter how bad your teammates are, it’s better to have them then not.”

Is the guy going to change his actions? Probably not. But at least there was some negative reinforcement (losing ranking points). Maybe next time he’ll at least keep his frustrations to himself. That, in my books, counts as a win.

I never went to piano lessons as a kid. It wasn’t like I was skipping out on a planned activity or anything — my parents didn’t play the piano, neither more nor my brother showed any interest, so we never had the “traditional” music education.

In fact, until the fifth grade, the sum total of my musical education involved playing the recorder in fourth grade music class. We played simple things, like “Hot Cross Buns” and the like. There were notes on sheet music, sure, but basically we just learned that notes on a specific part of the staff corresponded to a specific fingering.

In fifth grade, though, that’s when band started. A real band, with woodwinds and brass and drums (sorry, percussion). Well, choir started, too, but I didn’t actually know anyone who wanted to be in choir. We all wanted to be in the band.

They held band in the multi-purpose room, it being the only space large enough for anything larger than your average 26-person class. (The multi-purpose room served as cafeteria, assembly hall and general activity room.) We all sat in folding chairs arranged more-or-less like a traditional orchestra and waited for our teacher, Mr. Mash.

Mr. Mash began with the band program in the district where I grew up in 1968 — when I sat down in that chair (in the back, naturally), he was in his 30th year.

30 years of dealing with children — in any capacity, much less teaching — does something to a person. Actually, it’s probably capable of doing several things. He wasn’t beaten down, letting kids walk over him. He wasn’t a disinterested old-timer, coasting until pension. He very much cared about music, and tried to teach children. He was just a little bit … ornery.

Much like the Sorting Hat, one of the things that determined what instrument you played was your choice. Unlike the Sorting Hat, it wasn’t the ultimate determinant. In that respect, choosing an instrument was more like choosing a game piece in Jumanji — you could have a preference, but you were stuck with whatever the game gave you.

Yes, in this metaphor Mr. Mash was a horrifying board game that seemed to strive to kill its participants, unless they somehow survived and grew stronger for the experience. So, pretty apt.

Anyway, since Mr. Mash had absolutely no knowledge of us prior to walking into the “band room” the first day, the way he made his determinations probably amounted to some amount of individual preference, band balance and the Test.

The test was basically the sole knowledge of our musical acumen. It consisted of Mr. Mash taking you into a small room with a tape recorder. With a notepad at his wrist, he’d go through a series of short tests. One tested the student’s ability to determine pitch — which notes were higher or lower. One involved two series of notes, and it was up to the student to determine whether they were faster or slower than the previous sets.

Upon completion of the test, Mr. Mash then would go over what he thought was the best instrument choice.

I sat at the back because I wanted to play the drums (Percussion! Sorry!), so my test came near the end. When Mr. Mash looked over my results, he shook his head.

“You need higher scores to be a percussionist. I don’t think you’re really cut out for it. Maybe you’d like to try the trombone?”

Now I’m sure there were several good reasons: Of our 70-person band, I think something like 12 wanted to be percussionists. And I’m not disputing the scores — they probably were low. In playing the trombone, I had many years of enjoyment and fun all the way through the end of high school. But there was one thing I realized around ninth grade: The test was flawed.

Having exactly zero musical education beforehand, I literally had no concept of things like “higher pitches,” or designating which was faster of eighth notes and triplets. One can argue that knowing those kinds of things were important to playing in the band, but that’s also the point of the class — to learn more.

Basically, a significant portion of my education (and free time, to an extent), was determined by a test that asked questions without ensuring that I even understood the answers.

I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions. I feel like imparting my own takeaway sort of defeats the whole point.

It’s all Henry Ford’s fault. While it’s almost certainly true that if he hadn’t innovated the production line and interchangeable parts, someone else would have, he stands squarely in the gun sights of history when we rail against technology making humans irrelevant.

He saw that robots and automation could produce a more uniform product more efficiently, and we’ve been off to the races ever since. Computers only make it worse. Thanks to Bill Gates, even before the epidemic of big data, computers and the internet have been tried and convicted of killing the middle class, newspapers and, counter-intuitively, porn, via a variety of methods.

But the first one, the middle class, is the one I want to focus on. It’s beyond true at this point that people have lost white-collar jobs to computers. As any 10 minutes of MAD MEN will tell you, there used to be entire departments engaged in activities that today are done by one person or, at most, one team. Things like secretarial pools (for typing), mockup artists and even broad swaths of accounting have been felled by three words: Word, Photoshop and Excel.

But for the most part, that’s actually OK. Computers are designed to and should be used for streamlining everyday tasks, allowing people to work more efficiently and (because all things must have a Legitimate Business Purpose) even saving the company money by consolidating the number of employees to produce a given widget.

These are what we’ll call sensible (though regrettable) redundancies. But the problem with technological innovation is that we think that any problem, with enough sufficient amounts of tech wizardry thrown at it, will disappear.

The flaw with this philosophy is that, much as with medicine and side effects, sometimes the troubles with the cure are worse than the problem it was trying to solve.

It’s 5 p.m. You’ve come home after a long day of work and, according to Amazon’s website, your brandy new Shiny should be at the door. Amazon queried the UPS database, which confirmed that the driver had scanned the barcode on your package as having been dropped off at your home.

Yet, despite looking on the porch, peeking behind the rosebushes and checking with your neighbor, it’s nowhere to be found. Time for the phone tree.

Everyone’s dealt with phone trees. They do make sense, to a point. Why on earth would you route every single call through one (or more, depending on the size of your organization) person, who would then have to manually shift them off to the appropriate extension?

An automated greeting with options to go through for finding the person you want to reach makes perfect sense in a number of scenarios. But right now you’re waiting for a package that says it’s been delivered, even though it’s clearly not. And when you call up UPS, you damn well know that you don’t 1) Want to Ship A Package, 2) Track A Package, 3) Schedule A Pickup, 4) Inquire About Freight Services, or any of the other options the robot gives you.

You could try Tracking The Package. But you’ve already interacted with UPS system. We know that the system is wrong; it thinks the package has been delivered, when the package hasn’t been delivered. The problem is that the system has no conception that it could be wrong. All it’s ever going to be able to tell you is that the package has been delivered.

Naturally, you started mashing 0 the minute the robot asked whether you wanted to converse with it in Spanish (automatonic show-off). 0 is frequently the magic number that tells the system, “Sorry, I need to talk to an actual human being because you’re so arrogant you can’t even admit the possibility that you could be wrong.”

(Of course, the very first thing the helpful representative does is query the computer so she can tell you, “Ma’am, this says the package was delivered,” adding a third layer of the same information confirming itself, but that’s also another rant for another time.)

This is a design flaw, a self-reinforcing feedback. The system tells the website you’re wrong, so when you call to inquire it checks … the same system, and it of course agrees with itself. And the reason this is a problem is because the implementation of this automation actually makes the jobs (and lives) of humans harder. We’ve so completely bought into the superiority of computers that, faced in a real-life situation, we almost always take their word over that of a human being.

Consider how many times someone’s complained about the technology where you work. Is the software you use every day to do your job completely bug-free? Is it even designed to do the things you’re forced to do with it? Know anyone in the food service industry? Ask them about their Point of Sales system.

Think about all the customer service interactions you were involved in from the buying side that included faulty technology. How often has the employee said, “Oh, that’s clearly wrong, let me fix that.”? The best-case scenario in that situation is that someone gets sent to go check that you were not, in fact, lying when you said the shirt was on sale even though the computer didn’t realize it. Or everyone gets to cool their jets while the manager wanders over from the back of the store to enter the special “override” code that forces the computer to accept the input of the human being operating it.

All it boils down to, essentially, is that these companies trust their computers more than their employees. (Which points, frankly, to absolutely terrible HR work.) This makes sense if all you care about is hiring people you can pay a pittance who will do the bare minimum, and rely on the computers to police everything. It falls apart somewhat if you actually care about your customers not hating the experience of going to your store.

To a certain extent, they’re extending Ford’s maxim: Using computers gives them a more reliable outcome. The problem is that they don’t bother to alter course even when that outcome is awful, because they believe that hiring the people to do the task properly would be difficult, expensive or not worth the money.

Thus, homogeneity is prized over efficacy. And that’s their prerogative, I guess. After all, everything must have its Legitimate Business Purpose, and there’s no Business Purpose more Legitimate than “it costs me less money today/this month/this quarter.” And perhaps the giants of various industries (Amazon, UPS, Walmart etc.) are so entrenched — or they’ve devolved everything to the commodity level so that price is the only differentiator — that they’ll never have to worry about the upstart who innovates on service and providing a user experience that’s actually pleasant for the user. Just ask Microsoft.

Rarely is the question asked, “Is our children tweeting?" This question is likely nonexistent in journalism schools, which currently provide the means for 95+ percent of aspiring journalists to so reach said aspirations. Leaving aside the relative “duh” factor (one imagines someone who walks into J101 without a Twitter handle is the same kind of person who scrunches up his nose and furrows his brow at the thought of a “smart … phone?"), simple (slightly old) statistics tell us that 15% of Americans on the Internet use Twitter.

(This is probably an important statistic for newsrooms in general to be aware of vis-a-vis how much time they devote to it, but that’s another matter.)

For most journalism students, Twitter is very likely already a part of life. Every introduction they’re given to Twitter during a class is probably time better spent doing anything else, like learning about reporting. Or actually reporting. Or learning HTML.

I know this idea is not a popular one. The allure and promise of every new CMS or web service that comes out almost always includes a line similar to, “Requires no coding!” or “No design experience necessary!” And they’re right, for the most part. If all you’re looking to do is make words appear on the internet, or be able to embed whatever the latest Storify/NewHive/GeoFeedia widget they came out with, you probably don’t need to know HTML.

Until your embed breaks. Or you get a call from a reader who’s looking at your latest Spundge on an iPad app and can’t read a word. Or someone goes into edit your story and accidentally kills off a closing </p> tag, or adds an open <div>, and everything disappears.

Suddenly it’s “find the three people in the newsroom who know HTML,” or even worse, try to track down someone in IT who’s willing to listen. Not exactly attractive prospects.

Heck, having knowledge of how the web works would probably even help them use these other technologies. Not just in troubleshooting, but in basic setup and implementation. In the same way we expect a basic competence in journalists to produce their stories in Word (complete with whatever styles or code your antiquated pagination system might prescribe), so too should we expect the same on digital.

Especially in a news climate where reporters are expected as a matter of routine to file their own stories to the web, it’s ludicrous that they’re not expected to know that an <img> tag self-closes, or even the basic theory behind open and closed tags. No one ever did their job worse because they knew how to use their tools properly.

I’m not saying everyone needs to be able to code his or her own blog, but everyone should have a basic command of their most prominent platform. It’s time we shifted the expectations for reporters from “not focused entirely on print” to “actually focused on digital.”

The one “published” joke I’ve ever had was when I submitted a joke review for Codekit 3. Proud of it to this day, even more so because mine was the only joke that got through from the beta-testers.

It feels like summer’s finally over. It’s been pretty hot even through the majority of September, and the rains that came were either parts of thunderstorms or hurricane-driven, so they didn’t really feel like “fall” rain. Then yesterday I read about the fall foliage outlook, which makes it feel like fall … and it started raining.

The change in seasons is more than just a semantic difference for me. I always get a bit doleful this time of year because it signifies a pretty dark anniversary for me — the gut-check realization that things don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to. And it always coincides with the first rain of fall.

It was literally my first day at work. The first day of my first job right out of college, and I got a Facebook message from a high school friend I hadn’t spoken to in probably four years, asking for my phone number. He called me later, around 6 p.m.

I remember exactly where I was when I got the call, standing in an empty office, staring at the drops of rain as they rolled down the window. I remember walking home immediately after, lost in thought as I gazed at the trees that had just changed their colors.

My friend called me to tell me a relatively good acquaintance (the technical definition would be “person I was friendly toward who I never happened hang out with”), who I had gone to both high school and college with, had taken her own life. (I wrote an essay about that day some time ago, if you’d like to read it, but it’s much too long to even excerpt here.)

It was the first time I had really dealt with death of someone my own age after high school. Death is unexpected for the young, but at least sometimes it feels like it makes a perverse sort of sense: crazy accidents, car crashes, sudden medical emergencies … none of those really give off the “Well of course it happened that way” vibe, but at least there’s some logic behind it. In those cases, maybe there was a car involved, driving much too fast to stop. Maybe the rope broke when he/she went rock climbing, so nothing could be done.

But this? This felt more like typing something into the computer and having it just freeze up, completely unable to do anything except flash cryptic error messages that don’t actually help you fix the problem. Unexplained error. File not found. Connection unavailable.

It broke my heart, in a somewhat oblique way. I identified with her, as I had known her practically my entire life and even received the same scholarship to the same university 300 miles away from our hometown.

I felt responsible, like there was something, anything, I should have done to help. After it happened, I immediately resolved that I would do better by all the rest of my friends. I promised myself I would do a better job at keeping touch with them on Facebook (which, looking back on it, is like the bare minimum one can do and still be said to be “keeping up”), and making sure to call and visit and … of course it didn’t happen. In my defense, I was still living 300 miles away from the vast majority of them at the time (since increased to nearly 2,700), but the simple truth of the matter is you can’t keep up with everyone you’ve ever met, or even everyone you’ve ever called a friend. It’s just not possible to do that and have any other kind of life (up to and including eating, sleeping and working).

But there are things you can do. Things that I do. Little things. But I think they help — not just to mollify my own guilt, but I think they also might help the people I’m “keeping tabs on.” For example, when I see one of those cryptic depressed Facebook statuses (“Everything is SO HARD lately” or “UGH why can’t it just stop?!”), I don’t immediately dismiss them. I don’t necessarily jump into action right away, but I will keep an eye on things. I make sure there haven’t been a lot of those kinds of posts in a short span of time. If the number starts to worry me, I try to figure out if anyone else has been in touch with them — either through the comments or even something as stupid as the Likes.

If it seems like no one’s been reaching out, I make sure someone does. I try to be discreet about it — if it’s someone I don’t really talk to on a regular basis, I might try to go through a mutual friend or something, but if I can’t find anyone else I will make it awkward and just start chatting them up (via whatever means are available to me).

It may feel weird at first, but it’s completely worth it.

I think about these things all the time, but it gets especially bad around this time of year. When the first rain of fall comes (again, not a calendrical definition, more of an emotional one), I go over the whole thing, again and again. It brings back a little of what I felt that day, walking home from work, leaves crunching underfoot.

Autumn generally has a melancholy feel to it, what with leaves turning brown and falling back to earth. It may have been thematically appropriate from an aesthetic point of view, but it certainly didn’t make the experience any easier to get through. And it makes me all the more resolute to make sure I never have to endure the entirety of that feeling again.

I always try to make sure I write for a purpose, to make sure that I have a point. So let me just leave you with this: Live like you’re responsible for someone else. You don’t have to make sure everyone you know is always happy, you don’t have to be available every time the smallest thing in life goes wrong … but at the same time, make it known that you’re available for people when they truly need help.

In the grand scheme of things, being available for that kind of comfort, advice or help is an incredibly small portion of your time, and will be a minuscule part of your life — but it could be huge for that other person.

I broke my phone. Again.

It’s not all that surprising, really. I’ve lost any number of phones to what I consider “normal use” — and what my father dubs “horrendous neglect” — like dropping it or getting it wet. And for the non-normal usage … Can I really be blamed for a bus running over my phone?

(It was a flip phone; I was in college, I got off the bus with the phone flipped open, ready to text, whereupon it jumped [jumped! mind you] from my hands and flung itself under the bus. Likely out of envy of other, smarter phones, coupled with pity for me, stuck with it. You are missed, phone. Well, not so much missed. Vaguely remembered.)

This time, it again wasn’t my fault, except for the part where it broke as a direct result of my actions. I dropped the phone on my bed (as per usual), whereupon it rebounded onto the floor and struck, screen-first, against the spines of a tall stack of particularly weighty hardback books. When I turned it on, it did not. Well, the buttons lit up, but the screen just flashed blue lightning at me from the visible cracks in the screen. I thought it best to shut the stupid thing down before I Force-lightninged myself.

So I went to Craigslist and eBay, and eventually found an older smartphone Amazon had on sale for about $75. This is actually why I tend to shy away from the newest, most expensive tech — I’m afraid I’ll break it. The phone that fell under a bus was a flip phone back when flip phones weren’t really in style anymore. The phone I broke a few days ago was a creaking Android phone I got for $100. It ran Gingerbread, for cryin' out loud — for you non-techies, it was about as powerful as an original iPhone.

(OBLIGATORY NOTE TO MY EMPLOYERS: Things that are not mine, in the sense that I did not pay for, I am much more respectful of. I have never thrown [nor even lightly dropped] the shiny things I am given to play work with.)

Am I just unusually careless with my things, the broken litany not even a quarter-listed in the previous paragraph? Anecdotal evidence from Facebook would suggest I am, but only just. Think of how many times you’ve seen something to the effect of, “lost/broke my phone, so text me your number and your name so I know who you are.” I doubt most people go through phones quite as quickly as I do, but the churn rate is higher than the 2-year contract upgrade. Heck, even actual evidence suggests that 1/3rd of the populace has lost or damaged a phone, and 20 percent of the people reading this post have dropped one in the john (one being a phone; definitely don’t want an unclear antecedent with that phrasing).

I can’t find hard numbers on it, but I’d be willing to bet that more of those damaged phones are at the hands of the young, in this case meaning my generation and below. Those who are older tend to have a few things we young’uns don’t: patience. Perspective. Oh, yeah, and a healthy fear of technology.

Maybe there’s something to be said for the reverence with which most old people (here defined as anyone over the age of 35) treat their various gadgets, be they smartphones, tablets or even (shudder) feature phones.

Want to see it in action? Hand your mom an iPhone. I almost dare you. My mom rocked an Android for almost 8 months and got nothing but frustrations. When she finally caved into the peer pressure and bought the iProduct — despite having the aforementioned practice on a smartphone — I became the by-phone (my dad’s phone) tech support for two weeks while she figured out things like dialing a number, texting one person at a time (which I was more than happy to help with, given the texts I was getting that were meant for other people) and even figuring out how to shut it off properly.

It’s a truism at this point that a disconnect exists between so-called “digital natives” and the rest of the world (we’ll call them “normal people,” but only until we digital natives have a majority. Then WE can be normal [for once]), and I think it comes down to how technology is viewed.

Forgive the overarching generalizations below: They do not represent absolutely everyone in both cohorts, but I think they draw general outlines that most people match up with fairly well.

People who have seen new technology come into use view the technology only in terms of its functionality, a means to an end. Cellphones (and smartphones) are not their lifeline to life itself, they’re a means of communication. Sure, they’ll learn how to Facebook on the go, post Instagrams to Twitter and message their unruly teen to make sure he gets home before curfew, but if you took it away they’d still survive. They’ve got paper address books, landlines and actual (still digital, usually) cameras that aren’t grafted onto a phone.

I think most younger folks (present company included) treat a phone more as an appendage. Losing it is a lot like amputation, in that we can survive the trauma, but recovery involves actually having to go back and completely relearn how to do things.

Imagine you had to go without a cellphone or a tablet for six months, with no prior warning. How would you communicate with friends? How would you find a restaurant? How would your friends know that “Certain ppl need to lern to respect there bffs and not go behind they’re bak.” Some people wouldn’t even be able to do their jobs properly. (Journalists.)

Paradoxically, this overreliance on technology actually leads some of us treat it as a commodity. It’s certainly true in my case. I don’t really care what computer I’m using as long as it runs. I don’t really care what operating system my phone runs as long as it has Angry Birds. From a physicality standpoint, this non-attachment means I’m probably more wanton in my care than I should be (hence my perpetual progression of buying new phones) but, judging by their Facebook statuses, more of my friends take after me than do resemble my parents.

I don’t treat most gadgets like they’re shiny objects I’m worried might get scuffed. I treat them like books: I’m not going to go out of my way to destroy them, but bending the pages back or throwing it (literally) on a pile or the floor is perfectly acceptable, because I don’t really care if it gets beat up a little.

To me, technology is a tool, in that you use it to create other things — it just happens to quite often be a very expensive tool. But you’re supposed to use tools. Screwdrivers are meant to drive screws … to build a birdhouse. Paintbrushes are meant to brush paint … to make the birdhouse attractive to birds. Similarly, smartphones are meant to phone smarts … well, you know what i mean.

You’re not supposed to take it easy on tools. You’re supposed to use them hard, or at least as hard as you need to. And you just have to live with the fact that sometimes, even though you may be using it properly, a hammer will randomly have its head fly off and see the claw part embed itself in the wall about a foot to the right of your head (true story).

Though I bet a $100 hammer wouldn’t. (grumble)