What I looked like when the squirrel attacked. (Demi-Felicia Vares/Unsplash)
Squirrel Story 🐿 In which, on the eve of my 40th birthday, I explain how I was attacked by a squirrel while working a college maintenance job, and why this moment brought joy to the team of people I was managing at the time. I can’t think of a better take-the-piss-out-of-myself moment than this.
Miss Cleo and Me 🔮 How Miss Cleo—or at least the very sketchy company managing her business—managed to rack up $400 in charges on my credit card. Mind you, I was 19 at the time.
Pretending I Saw the MacBooks Yesterday 💻 I was out of town appreciating nature when the latest MacBooks were released to the world, so how did I play that? Well, I wrote a post speculating as if I was there to see it. I think this is weird Ernie at his best. And I wasn’t terribly far off.
A Letter to My Robot Namesake 🤖 After I heard Amazon had a robot in its warehouses named Ernie, I decided to honor him by writing him a letter. “More people will know who you and your Muppet-named friends are than the workers who packed laptops and toaster ovens into containers to be shipped to homes and offices anywhere in the world,” I wrote in the letter.
It Could Be Anyone 😶 In which I ponder the weirdness of getting a profile view from “Business Owner in the Internet industry” on LinkedIn. Because that’s not specific at all.
The Lone Coder 💿 Probably the big hit among MidRange pieces, this was a nice bit of honoring of the work of Cameron Kaiser, the programmer who developed a web browser for PowerPC when nobody else would.
The thing about many of these pieces is that they’re generally not news-of-the-day pieces, but rather they’re slightly askew slices of life.
Sometimes when I write these, I’m looking for angles related to the news of the day. But often the best pieces, in my view, come when I write things that take weird paths that are more than just information regurgitation.
This process of moving the old site to the new one is a great reminder of that.