object dot computer

Week note - iv

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:10:49 -0700

This week was the lead up to and start of our road trip. I enjoy road trips a lot. Driving through Oregon and Northern California is a delight. It’s. been just about 7 years since I’e moved here from Connecticut and I will never stop being awed by the natural beauty it has: volcanic mountains, misty rainy forests, the powerful forces of coast, and the starkness of the high desert.

Our trip takes has taken us, first, to the southern Oregon coast. I love it’s small towns and long lonely stretches. I really enjoyed seeing In A Landscape once again.

Since I am working from the van this week, my note is a bit shorter. This counts as my last post for Blaugust.

Things I Liked

From the Culture series novels The Player of Games and Use of Weapons, my favorite ship names

I am reading the Culture series per my brothers recommendation. So far I’ve really enjoyed the books. I’ve just finished Use of Weapons and am starting with the next.

One aspect I’ve enjoyed so far is the names of the ships. Below is a list of my favorites to far:

So Much for Subtlety
Just Read the Instructions
Congenital Optimist
Unfortunate Conflict Of Evidence
What Are The Civilian Applications?
Sweet and Full of Grace
Size Isn’t Everything

Ships in the series are sentient beings with full and equal rights as all other sentients in the Culture. Ships (or at least the Minds, which are their sentient AIs) choose their own names. They seem to have a wry sense of humor.

From the podcast What Went Wrong, “The Lord of the Rings (parts 1-3)”

I think the Lord of the Rings is my favorite film series. They came out between (for me) the ages of 11 - 13 and they were incredibly pivotal piece of art to me. I’ve seen all the extended editions so many times and was lucky, a few years ago, to have experience a marathon viewing where a friend of mine cooked meals from the film.v

Hearing this detailed history of its making only increased my appreciation of the films and how lucky we are to have them. Definitely a good way to spend ~3 hours while driving.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:21:46 -0700

Currently reading: Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks 📚

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:21:20 -0700

Finished reading: The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks 📚

Week note - iii

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 16:26:45 -0700

I love baked ziti. Growing up in Connecticut every event called for a baked ziti. It is the east coast equivalent of the midwestern hot dish. Your neighbors invited you to a backyard barbecue? You can count on a tinfoil tray of ziti next to the burgers. Going to a pot-luck with your coworkers? Phil from accounting got that zeet.¹ Italian-American food is my comfort food and ziti is, among them, uniquely nostalgic for me. It is simple to make and beloved by almost everyone.

Over the past few weeks my partner has been making lasagnas for Lasagna Love, a program where folks volunteer to (as you might imagine) make a lasagna for a neighbor in need. Consequently, I’ve spent a lot of time hovering around the kitchen as she makes delicious found I can’t have. This sparked a conversation about our shared love for baked ziti. Meaghan grew up on Long Island immersed in the same cultural ziti-geist in her childhood.

Driven by nostalgia we decided to make each other a baked ziti, inspired by our experiences back home. She made hers last week and it was fantastic, just what I’d expect from a chef’s daughter. As I write this, my own ziti is baking in the oven. I tried to recreate it the way that my mom made her’s when I was growing up. She was a single parent with limited income and two boys who ate staggering amounts of food, so cheap and simple meals that made a large quantity were a staple in house.

My mom’s approach didn’t have a recipe from grandma or begin with hours prepping a sauce from scratch. Most of the time it started with a jarred sauce she’d zhuzh up with ground beef (or whatever was on sale), pinches of dried spices from the cabinet, and some sautéd garlic & onions. A typical Sunday meant cooking up a huge pot of sauce, and rolling meatballs, eventually assembling a baked ziti and a pile of spaghetti that my brother and I would eat for the rest of the week.²

Sometimes it’s nice to have a taste of the past.

Next week my partner and I start our roadtrip. For the last three years now, at the end of the summer we pack up my old Japanese van and make our way south down to the Sierras. We camp, backpack and stop wherever calls to us and it’s one of my favorite trips each year.

A photo of our van on our inaugural road trip near Bishop, California.

I’d never thought much about the Sierras. A few years back my partner had read The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson.³ She was immediately enamored with the author’s experiences hiking and backpacking through it. So much so she planned our first trip out there just a few months later. After that trip I felt much the same.

This time we’ll begin our trip with a stop in Coos Bay on the Oregon coast to attend In A Landscape. In A Landscape is a traveling music series that features pianist (and creator) Hunter Noack performing on a temporary stage surrounded by the natural world. Attendees are given a pair of headphones, connected to a powerful broadcasting antenna, that enables the audience to wander afar and encouraged to experience nature accompanied by his music. Noack has been staging In A Landscape for a few years combining classical piano performances with the awe inspiring natural environments of the pacific northwest. I’ve been lucky to attend one before and I couldn’t think of a better way to kick off our trip.

Afterwards, we’ll head south to Lassen Volcanic National Park. During our first road trip we had the opportunity to stop at this less frequented National Park for a night and fell in love. This year we’re excited to be able to return and spend more time in the park.

On the next leg we’ll continue south making stops in to visit Lake Tahoe and then backpack near Rush Creek in the Inyo National Forest. Before heading back up north we’ll spend a few days near Mono Lake with day trips to nearby Mammoth Lake, Yosemite or whatever calls to us.

A photo of Meaghan sitting on a rock outcropping in Sequoia National Park during our first trip.

Our final stop takes us back up to Oregon where we’ll stay at Diamond Lake Resort, a stones throw from Crater Lake National Park. Our original plan had us meeting friends here to join Ride the Rim, an annual cycling event that allows folks to bike around the lake’s rim roads. Unfortunately the event was cancelled this year but a few of us (mostly those of us who had already made a non-refundable reservation at the anachronistic resort) are still planning to get together for a few days. It is rare for us, even though we make our home in Portland, to find ourselves out that way and I’m happy for the excuse nonetheless.

Things I Liked

From Terence Eden, On Civic Hygiene

Terence takes the title of this piece from a quote by Bruce Schneier and expands upon it. Written in 2013 I find it prescient now more than ever.

It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. - Bruce Schneier

I think this bears rereading and repeating, especially by those who in far away 2013 scoffed at the idea. It's relevance is widespread. You don't have to work at Palantir to be contributing to workthat will be used for harm. When I've discussed this with friends or colleagues in the past, so often I would hear some version of "it doesn't matter because if I don't do it, someone else will."

But it won’t be me.

We have to be careful that the apparatus we build cannot easily be misused for evil purposes. Sure, even an innocuous toaster can be weaponised if someone is willing enough, but we should not fall into the trap of making systems which can easily be turned against the people.

Folks living in the US might be more afraid of their government now than ever, but remember that Terence was living in a different world in 2013. But the world of today is built on the foundations of the decisions made then. We’d all be wise to reflect on his foresight.

Civic hygiene isn’t about saying we distrust our current government - it’s about not trusting the next government.

From the BBC, Why travellers are obsessed with foreign supermarkets

Monuments reveal how a country remembers its past, but a supermarket shows how it lives today.

Every time I visit a country I stop at a grocery store. I do this primarily because cooking a few meals while you’re on a long trip helps save some money, but also because I really do enjoy the experience.

I am fascinated about the mundane differences in day to day lives of folks abroad. I am particularly interested in grab-and-go or ready-to-eat meal sections. They’re a peek into what is familiar or comforting to the people there.

From Mastodon, the Simple Sabotage Manual bot

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual is a document written by the US Office of Strategic Services in 1944. The manual was declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2008. The manual was distributed to OSS officers in foreign countries in order to help them train "citizen-saboteurs" in German-occupied Europe.Wikipedia

From Jim Mitchell, The IndieWeb is Punk

A blog is a zine with better uptime.

During college in the 2010s I was fascinated with the zines of the 90s. I felt a sadness that I had missed out on a such a raw art that connected people but had fallen out of the cultural zeitgeist. I was, of course, totally wrong.

First, because print zines are a thriving art that continued then and to this day. And also because I was participating then and now in a descendant of that same ethos online, even if I didn’t know it. Whether it’s an online garden that collects the minutia of their niche hobby or a blog that guides folks on how to create resilient connections online, the IndieWeb has the power to communicate ideas and make me feel the same way those old zines did back then.⁴

Editor’s note: Originally I titled this post “Week Note - iv” when this is, in fact, only the third week note. This is because I can’t count.

If you’re lucky there might even be two. ↩︎
If we’re being honest it rarely lasted more than a few days. Sorry mom. ↩︎
I had only known Robison as the author of the Mars trilogy, a favorite of my sci-fi fanatic father. I was happy to learn he was a passionate outdoorsman. My partner was surprised to learn he was known for anything else. ↩︎
And still do. I wish I had been a little more curious about the wonderful zines people were making then as I had been about the 90s. I missed out on a lot of cool stuff. ↩︎

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 09:45:33 -0700

Finished reading: Ravenor Rogue by Dan Abnett 📚 — I think that’s enough Warhammer books for a while.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:06:55 -0700

I think I have to admit defeat again with Orion as a browser as a daily driver. The 1Password extension continues to be unreliable, which is very frustrating. On top of that it seems like I am getting more frozen tabs and poorer performance than my initial go around. Back to Safari for now.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:57:15 -0700

I visited Minneapolis for the first time over the weekend and I have to admit I was jealous of their cycling infrastructure. So many protected bike lanes. My jealousy was tempered by the fact I was constantly drenched in a thin layer of sweat from the humidity though. Jealous perspiration.

Week note - ii

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:28:31 -0700

I flew to Minneapolis for a wedding this weekend and only got back home to Portland last night, so this post is a bit delayed.

This was my first time experiencing Minneapolis and we stayed just a few blocks away from the site of Alex Pretti’s murder. It’s hard to put into words how I feel about what was done to him and the terror that has been inflicted upon the community by the state.

Alex was a nurse whose life focused on helping others. Alex was murdered for doing something righteous. As the horrors continue to build up around us, threatening to extinguish in us the voice that compels us to do what we know to be righteous, it is important that we don’t give into the despair. We owe it to Alex and so many others to continue the work.

"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." - Ursula K. Le Guin, National Book Awards speech, 2014

The wedding was beautiful.

This Week’s Collection

From Wikipedia, “Frederick William Gunn"

Frederick William Gunn (October 4, 1816 – August 16, 1881) was an American educator, abolitionist, and outdoorsman, who in 1850 founded The Frederick Gunn School (formerly known as The Gunnery), an independent school in the small town of Washington, Connecticut, and America’s first summer camp.

I grew up in Connecticut where elite private prep schools are common. In the 20-odd years I spent there, I never heard of The Frederick Gunn School (prev. The Gunnery) or it’s founder.

Gunn was a moral beacon for the wider community accepting girls, African Americans, Native Americans, and international students into his school. Among his first students were the children of abolitionist and author Harriet Beecher Stowe.

He was also referred to as “the founder of leisure camping” in America. He was known to have had his students march 40 miles from Washington to Welch’s Point in the town of Milford, CT where they camped. He believed that a love of nature and physical fitness was core to education.

A brief look at some of its recent notable alumni doesn’t inspire much confidence that his core message is being instilled in its students today.

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation, their art library

All of their art is CC BY 2.0 licensed if you’ve ever needed something to fill out a blog post.

“laptop-spying” by EFF Photos, CC BY 2.0

From TechCrunch, “Historian Jill Lepore says Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy”

She argued that many of Silicon Valley’s “charismatic or not-so-charismatic leaders” — especially Elon Musk — seem to be ushering in a future pulled from misread pulp science fiction and comic books. “But what’s funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs.”

The techno-capitalist class are happy to co-opt the aesthetics of science fiction, without caring for the meaning. They’re of the same mold as self-identified “right-wing punks.” The disconnect exists in companies that draw names from Tolkien’s work like Palantir, Anduril and Mithril Capital.

The underlying message, no matter how clear it is, is irrelevant to them. They only want to emulate power or perceptions of grandeur. At the worst end up the spectrum they revel in the perversion of the thing.

I love science fiction and the ability it has to grapple with possible futures and to give us create better ones. Some people love science fiction for the fantasy of power and war.¹

“I believe that all organizing is science fiction — that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.” - adrienne maree brown

I’m currently reading my way through the Warhammer 40k Inquisitor trilogies, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. ↩︎

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:05:03 -0700

I demand that PDX start selling merch with the absolute banger characters they’ve created. I would fight a person for one of the giant sticky notes featuring these little weirdos they hung during the construction.

Even this serene donut dude on the wifi landing page is great.

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:27:15 -0700

Look I know there’s a lot of bad things happening in the world right now, but what really grinds my goat is email apps in 2026 defaulting to adding a “sent from phone” type line to your signature.

No one receiving it cares and nobody sending it wants it. Stop it. This is crime.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:02:48 -0700

Lately I’ve been enjoying more newsletters. Some favorites include Dense Discovery, Citation Needed, and (rip) Naive Weekly.

I’m always looking for weird and interesting newsletter recommendations if you’ve got any to share.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:40:46 -0700

One change I’ve made is trying to replace my doom scrolling habit with Kagi’s small web tool. It’s a spiritual successor to StumbleUpon that takes you to a random indieweb page. It’s been fun to see so many personal sites I’d otherwise never encounter.

kagi.com/smallweb/

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:36:11 -0700

I pulled the trigger on a Kagi subscription and moved my browsing back into Orion. Orion still has rough edges, but Kagi’s search is a superior product. The biggest hurdle was psychological. My brain’s knee jerk insistence that search should be free.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:25:58 -0700

I’m pleased with the latest design changes I made to my blog. I’ve been collecting inspiration from other small web blogs for a while and finally implemented a few vanity features. My favorite: switching my footnotes to a “marginalia” style.

object.computer/colophon/

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:59:36 -0700

Watched: Over Your Dead Body 🍿 - 3/5

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 17:46:09 -0700

Watched: They Will Kill You 🍿

Week note - i

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 08:57:11 -0700

This past weekend was my birthday. My partner and I celebrated by camping at Cape Lookout on the Oregon coast. We had dinner at Willy’s in Oceanside. Run by a husband and wife team they serve Japanese comfort food in a beach town nestled on a cliffside.

The Oregon coast is a special place for me. It feels otherworldly. It is one of my most unexpected pleasures I discovered since moving to the state. Wide, often empty beaches, shrouds of mists crawling over groves of pine. The chance at glimpses of sea lions or even whales.

My favorite moment was our sunset campfire on the beach. When the sun finally fell beneath the horizon the distant dots of other camp fires were the only indication you weren’t utterly alone in the emptiness.

Things I liked this week

From Things to Click, “Ghost Words, Part 6."

A list of haunted words. My favorite:

Ghost Newspapers: “Most towns still have a local newspaper, but they don’t cover their communities any more.”

From Tent, “how do you tell the difference between a jetty, pier, quay and wharf?"

I understood this list of words at best as “descriptors of areas near the water” and have dutifully avoided using them without having been prompted by someone else’s usage. This post cleverly lays them our in a memorable way.

From the Port of Hood River (email received), “EMERGENCY BRIDGE CLOSURE”

From Behind the Bastards, “The Origins of Terror in Palestine” (parts 1 and 2)

Robert Evans' podcast is usually focused on a single bastard. This two parter, where he is joined by Palestinian political scientist and author Dr. Dana al-Kurd, instead explores the origins of terror in Palestine.

On finding purpose in customer support

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:21:12 -0700

I wrote this post as my submission to the August edition of the IndieWeb Carnival, which each month invites folks to write something on their blog based on a topic proposed by a rotating host. August’s carnival topic is “purpose” and the host is Chris Shaw. I am also double dipping and counting this as my first post of Blaugust 2026 - a community celebration of blogging.

For the last 15 years or so my job¹ has been (more or less) to think about and build the mechanisms to deliver customer support for companies who (more or less) make software on the internet that (more or less) helps other businesses do something more efficiently. In that time I’ve said a lot of things about what the purpose of that labor is. Support as the face of your product. Support as your connection to your customer’s needs. Support as a viable, valuable and under-appreciated career. My understanding of the purpose of the work has shifted and grown alongside me.

A photo of myself and the early Zapier support team, taken in August 2015 at our retreat in Traverse City. Zapier was one of my first start up jobs and immensely influential on my philosophy around customer support.

The latest evolution of this opinion has less to do with changes in my own view of the work and more to do with changes in the macroeconomic landscape. While the death of support has been confidently decried many times in the past, I believe a time of transformation is really at hand - even if there is life still in the profession. I’m certainly not the first to say that AI - and more precisely LLMs - are dramatically changing both the support customers receive and the daily lives of the people giving it. At no time in the past has it been so easy for a company to give somewhat acceptable answers at such low costs and, debatably, quality.

Every recent YC batch is packed to the gills with companies offering the next greatest AI support tool (whose founders largely have never done customer support.) Much ink has been spilled about the death of legacy service leviathans like Zendesk and the ascendant rise of the AI-natives, Decagon or Pylon or whoever. Some of these tools are even good. They leverage sophisticated workflows and data connectors that dutifully and (more or less) accurately answer customer’s endless inquiries.

The purpose of a customer support team (or at least the good teams) has never been answering basic customer questions. Those questions are only the most easily quantifiable and measurable expression of customer support. They’re only the shadow on the cave wall of your customer’s experience.

The AI tools are built by product managers to automate away the lowly and tedious work of support. They cheerfully deliver answers to these questions, instantly and endlessly, at a quality we’ve never seen before. But designing for this is fundamentally flawed. They mistake the shadow for the underlying truth. They are not replacing the real value of your team.

The purpose of your support team, framed in capitalistic purity, is enabling your customers to realize the value of the widget you’re selling. The questions asked are a manifestation of the friction your product adds to this process. Modern software is the monstrous result of groups of people with narrow targets and Quixotic goals competing across the surface of your product. This amalgamation rarely represents what is good or useful for your customers.

The purpose of a support team is to know the thing itself and not the shadow. They are tasked to understand customers. Through regular observation and interaction they become the best source on the customer’s actual goals and needs. An understanding not contaminated by a product group’s incentives by way of their myopic metrics. They must understand so that they can communicate and advocate on behalf of the customer’s true needs and experience.

My hope is that great teams and products will use the time they gain back from AI handling the rote and rhythmic questions to give their support team’s more time to focus on this higher purpose. Time to write up product findings that reduce customer confusion. Time to sit in on product meetings to offer guidance that steers new developments away from pitfalls.

My fear is that most teams will just become smaller teams, still burdened with the reactive work of answering a harder set of questions.

If you want to know more about my work history, you can check out the horror show that is LinkedIn ↩︎

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:08:50 -0700

I’ve never watched any Star Trek. Not the shows or the movies. Maybe it’s time to dive in? What’s the best entry point?

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:11:25 -0700

Has anyone found an app (ideally available on iOS) that allows you to easily consume your Bluesky and Mastodon feeds in one place that they really enjoy?

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:38:36 -0700

I think some of these potential new Euro banknote designs are fantastic.

www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/bank…

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:51:13 -0700

Wholeheartedly support the em dash. psychotechnology.substack.com/p/em-dash…

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 10:48:36 -0700

Apologies to Salem, OR who did not deserve to be left off that list.

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:38:28 -0700

Oregon is the absolute leader in America’s city flag game. The newest addition is Oregon’s City municipal elevator inspired update.

It joins the ranks of OG great Portland and recently redesigned Hillsboro who all buck the trend of crappy seal based city flag.

#oregon #flags

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 20:52:38 -0700

A tiny version of my van fits in the oddly shaped cubby in its dashboard perfectly.