Eclecticism

• ♿️ The work week was pretty standard, with the most excitement coming either from the continued work on remodeling an old meeting room into office space, which we keep peeking through the windows at, or when an unusual summer storm system came through the Seattle area, when five or six of the people in the office gathered on the balcony outside my office to watch for lightning and listen to the peals of thunder that kept rolling over our heads.

• ✈️ Most of the week at home was also pretty low-key, but Sunday (“today” if I was actually posting this on Sunday evening, rather than posting on Tuesday morning and backdating it) was a travel day for us, as this next week I’m in Providence, Rhode Island for the 2026 AHEAD conference. This turned into a bit of adventure (originally posted to Facebook, then to this Mastodon thread, so some of you may have seen this already)…

  • Today’s adventures in travel:

    Flight scheduled for 8:20, so we get up at 3:30 and are out the door heading to the airport at 5.

    Flight delayed until 10, which goofs our connecting flight, so everything is rescheduled, and we will now have a 4-hour layover instead of a 1-hour layover, and won’t get to our destination until around midnight. Whee!

    I don’t have the American Airlines app on my phone yet, so we print physical boarding passes and go to the gate (S4). At the gate, I get the AA app installed, get logged in…and the electronic version of the boarding pass shows a different gate (S2). I go check the big reader board on the wall…and it shows a third gate (D26).

    There are no AA employees anywhere in sight. I wander through gate after gate (from the S gates to the D gates, which is a two-shuttle-train journey) until I find a couple employees standing at an AA-marked gate, and go to see if they can confirm what gate we should be at. Only they’re Alaska employees, not AA, and they’re trying to get the monitor updated to show the correct flight info. They point me towards more gates that might have AA employees.

    I head that way, and eventually find some AA people who look up our flight (…on Google…) and say that S2 is the right gate.

    I go back to my wife at S4, and we move over to S2 and settle in. My wife heads off to stand in line at a coffee shop to get us hot chocolates.

    Half an hour later, I get an update on the AA app saying that the gate has been changed…

    …to D26.

    Right.

    I text my wife. She’s just made it to the front of the line, so she bails out just before ordering, thoroughly befuddling everyone behind her. We grab our stuff and make the two-shuttle-train and a lot of walking journey to D26.

    We’re now settled in at D26, which isn’t actually a get-you-on-the-plane gate, but a get-you-on-a-bus-to-get-you-to-the-plane gate.

    It’s an adventure!

  • And our flight just got delayed by another hour. At least that four-hour layover gives us some cushion for things on this end.

  • The sign showing our departure time was showing 11 a.m., but about ten minutes ago it switched to 8:20 a.m. – the original departure time, now an hour and a half in the past. Happily, it just flipped back to 11 a.m. as I started to write this comment. There may be hope of leaving Seattle yet!

    Or we just live at gate D26 now. We’ll send out change of address forms once we’re sure.

  • Announcement: They found the part, it seems to be working, they just need to screw in the eight screws and find the flight crew, who might be over in the other D concourse. Still expecting an 11 a.m. departure.

  • Apparently the part had to be flown in from Dallas.

  • We’re supposed to take off in 30 minutes, and they haven’t yet started bussing us all out to the plane.

    What I’ve learned from this is that American Airlines really needs to get its shit together.

  • It’s the scheduled departure time, and the busses have just started moving people to the plane.

  • (We finally took off at slightly after noon, an hour after the delayed departure time, and three and a half hours after the original departure time.)

  • Landed! Right in line with everything else, there was an announcement shortly after we took off that the in-flight WiFi was down.

    I never bother, so it didn’t affect me, but it did make me laugh.

  • And the adventures continue!

    Landed in Philadelphia at gate C28. Immediately after deboarding, checked the AA app and the airport reader board; both said our next flight was at B15. So we work our way to that gate, pausing at one of the many options to grab Philly cheesesteaks (what else would you get for dinner when in the Philly airport for a layover?).

    We get to B15, sit down, check the app…and while we were going from one gate to the other, they changed our outgoing gate to C21.

    Right.

    We ate our cheesesteaks (which were quite tasty) as we listened to several other travelers make the same realization we just had, and then strolled back to the C concourse and sat at C21. Where we are now waiting for our flight or for the next gate change, whichever comes first.

  • Smaller plane for this leg, with limited overhead bin space, so they asked us to check our carryons. Sure, no problem.

    The bag tag printer broke.

  • Made it (about midnight; hours later than originally scheduled, but we’re here)! We’re in Providence, Rhode Island for the week. I’m here for a work conference, and my wife’s tagging along to enjoy a week poking around Providence. Now for the sleep!

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

I read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, which was excellent, my favorite of what I’ve read from him so far, and the first volume of the Star Trek Enterprise Logs, collections of the 1970s Gold Key Star Trek comics, which are not good by any objective measure, but are entertaining, if in a rather cringy way.

📺 Watching

We finished the first (and so far only) season of Widow’s Bay, and I finished the fifth and latest season of For All Mankind, both of which are excellent.

🎧 Listening

I realized this week that Gangstagrass had recently released a new album, The Blackest Thing on the Menu, so their blend of bluegrass and hip-hop has been in high rotation.

🔗 Linking

• Marcin Wichary at Unsung: “If HEIC has no haters I’m dead.”: Fun little roundup of answers to a Bluesky thread on favorite and least favorite file types. For me? Favorite: .txt, specifically .md (Markdown formatted text…or even more specifically, a mix of Markdown and HTML tags to ensure proper semantic tagging) for simplicity, portability, compatibility, and convertibility. Least favorite: .pdf, as for someone who works in the accessibility field, PDFs are the bane of my existence, serving both as a regular source of headaches and job security.

• LGBTQ+ Legislation Tracking Project: “Two decades of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, documented bill by bill. […] In the 2026 session, lawmakers introduced 787 anti-LGBTQ+ bills — 55% of them targeting transgender people.”

• Jerry Cornfield at the Washington State Standard: It’s official: WA voters will get to weigh in on new income tax: I’d have phrased that headline somewhat differently, but the Standard leans quite a bit more conservative than I do. The initiative is being pushed by Brian Heywood of “Let’s Go Washington”, who, if you can’t tell by the name of his organization, exists somewhere in the general right-wing/libertarian “all taxes and Democrats are bad” political space, and has taken up Tim Eyman’s mantle as the local “exploit populist approaches to tear everything down” ringleader. Vote “no” on Initiative 645 and keep the high-earnings income tax in place.

• Phil Gyford: Flickr iOS and iPadOS app version 5: “So here’s a list of all the things that are worse about the new version, compiled from my own usage and all the recent bad reviews on the App Store.” This is discouraging. I’ve been using Flickr for over two decades, and still (mostly) like them, but if this is a sign of where they’re heading, it doesn’t bode well.

• Connor Nash at the South Seattle Emerald: Inside One of 18 Data Centers Operating in Tukwila Industrial Park: “According to the website Data Center Map, there are at least a dozen data centers in Seattle, mainly downtown. But the site’s map also shows 18 data centers in one industrial park in Tukwila, 17 of which publicly report their power capacity. Collectively, those data centers reported that they could draw 80 to 113 megawatts at maximum capacity. If these data centers sustained that demand for a month, they would consume about 57,600 to 81,360 megawatt-hours of electricity — equivalent to the monthly electricity use of 94,000 to 133,000 Seattle-area homes.”

• Louie Mantia at Parakeet Blog: The Shape of Apps: “Because app icons from the Mac OS X era are so beloved, it’s very understandable—relatable even—how mandating rounded square app icons is downright heartbreaking to long-time Mac OS X users. ¶ What happened? Why did this happen? And what should we do?” While I’m still not a fan of the mandated squircle and really wish Apple would relax things so icons could be more distinctive again, this is an interesting and more measured look at the possible thinking behind the change.

• Zack Zwiezen at Kotaku: Jimothy Isn’t A Cryptid, But Instead The Internet’s Favorite Racoon: “Earlier this month, some people in the Seattle, Washington area began spotting a strange little creature scuttling about. Was it a new cryptid? A new mysterious creature like Bigfoot or Nessie? Nope. Instead, what people were spotting was a raccoon with a deformed spine that locals have started referring to as Jimothy. And unlike those other cryptids, he’s real and cool.” If you somehow haven’t heard of Jimothy yet, here you go.

• Abhijith M B at Windows Latest: Microsoft admits Windows 11 has a GDID tracker with no off switch, first documented publicly in an FBI hacker complaint: Windows has a Global Device ID (GDID), “a permanent, unique digital fingerprint that Microsoft automatically assigns to your computer when you install Windows or sign into a Microsoft account.” This allows Microsoft to track what you do and where you are, which information can then be given to law enforcement. The GDID survives Windows updates. A clean reinstall can generate a new one, but when combined with other identifying markers, multiple GDIDs can be tied together as belonging to the same person.

• Keyana Sapp at Worse on Purpose: Your Appliances Got Worse On Purpose: “Nowhere is the illusion of choice more potent than in the appliance showroom. Dozens of brands fan out across the price tiers, a wall of brushed steel under the lights, and behind all of it sit five or six companies. The labels compete. The machines mostly don’t.”