Category: AOL

Mid-caffeination Mastodon Thoughts

Derek Powazek posted this on Mastodon yesterday: An actual use for machine learning that I’d want: a bot that records all the posts that cause me to block someone, saves them into a db, and then automatically hides posts that match above a certain threshold. Derek on Mastodon I love a good brain exercise, so […]

Looking back: ficlets launching

I was going to just post a quote for today’s NaBloPoMo, but I was looking for old posts and stumbled on this one about ficlets launching. Re-reading it, sixteen and a half years later, a few things jump out: Most of the hundreds of projects I’ve worked on over the years (LOL, decades) blur together […]

The Layoff Line

With yesterday’s layoff at Gusto, I was inevitably thinking about my own history with #layoffs. For my jobs as an adult, I’ve only left by something OTHER than being laid off twice. Here’s the history: Being laid off isn’t a black mark on your job history. If you’re in tech long enough, YOU WILL GET […]

My Friend Cindy Li

I’ve worked with hundreds, if not thousands, of people over the years.  I’ve liked most of them, been friends with a lot of them, and loved many of them.  Cindy was definitely in the last category. Cindy Li and I became fast friends and co-conspirators while we both worked at AOL.  We were on the […]

Coding is a Social Activity

Ficly and Creative Commons: The Power of Open

[hang2column width=”250″][/hang2column] I’ve been a huge fan of Creative Commons pretty much since they launched. If you don’t already know, Creative Commons provides several ways for you to license your work that expressly allow people to use it in certain ways. It’s sort of copyright** – allowing folks to do things with your work that […]

Weird Dreams

I had a weird dream last night (two, actually, but I’m only concerned about writing down the first one). In the dream, I was back at AOL sitting through a horrible product requirements meeting when I lost it and started yelling about how bad the requirements were, how they didn’t do anything original, were a […]

Ficly.com is the place to be

Someone Doesn’t Like the Name “Ficly”

\ (the ficlets bit starts about halfway through)\ Well yeah, when you say it that way. Seriously, I think stories will still be called “ficlets” because calling them anything else would sound silly.\ In other news, Jeremy Kieth and Simon Willison both posted about ficlets’ use of Creative Commons. Why did we do it? Well, […]

The Ficlets Memorial

Finished and installed just in time, the ficlets memorial is up and running. It’s on my Dreamhost account, so it’s not going to be super speedy, but I’ve cached as much as I can, so it shouldn’t be too slow.\ I’m not entirely happy with it, but I didn’t have time to do much other […]