Notes

I’m listening to tonight’s men’s basketball game between Northwestern and Nebrasketball on WGN while I make dinner. I don’t listen to a lot of commercial radio, but one thing that stands out to me is how radio ads don’t feel like they’ve changed at all in at least the last 25 years. They sound the same — that slightly frantic, fake conversational tone — and it feels like they’re selling the same things too.

Why is that? It’s not something inherent to audio, since podcast ads have a very different flavor. Is it audio plus time limits? User research around listening habits for people in cars? Or are the demographics of commercial radio skewed toward people whose tastes and buying habits haven’t changed since 1998?

In reply to: Radio Diaries, “The real-life refugees of 'Casablanca' make it so much more than a love story”

I was surprised by how much I was moved by this, especially since I don’t have any particularly strong attachment to Casablanca. It’s worth a listen.

We had solar panels installed on our home in July, and they were finally activated on November 2 (long, frustrating story). That means we have just about a month’s worth of data to see the impact of our solar setup.

For context: For net metering, we’re capped by our utility to produce on an annual basis no more than 100% of the energy we consumed the previous year. There’s still a lot of solar panel real estate available on our roof, but we’re just about at the maximum of what we’re allowed to generate under these rules.

Since it’s calculated based on annual consumption/production estimates, the expectation is that we’ll generate a lot of surplus energy in the summer when we get lots of direct sunlight — but we’ll draw a lot of power from the grid in the winter when the days are shorter and Chicago is grayer.

Per the chart on this maybe-questionable website that came up in search results, November is the second-least sunny month of the year in Chicago on average. So I would expect to mostly be drawing from the grid for our first month of production.

Instead, we did pretty well! 58 percent of our energy consumption was from our solar panels, and just 42 percent from the grid. We even had three particularly sunny days where we generated more power than we used and were net exporters.

That’s pretty cool, folks. There are lots better reasons to get solar panels than energy use gamification but I think I’m going to really enjoy tracking these numbers.

I like that Sam and Dave Dig a Hole by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen and ”Tower of Babylon” by Ted Chiang tell essentially the same story.

Emily, describing Santa to the kiddo: “He’s one of the main Christmas guys.”

Perfect explanation, no additional details required.

On work Slack people shared two blog posts that are outside my normal wheelhouse but I found really interesting: The Inside Story of Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by Paul Lukas, and The Death of the Key Change by Chris Dalla Riva.

These are very different stories but I feel like they complement each other. They’re both stories of technology shaping artistic expression in ways that make perfect sense but would have been hard to predict.

I don’t know why these resonated with me so much this week, but I enjoyed them both!

We just finished rewatching the first season of People of Earth, and folks, that TV show was absolutely perfect in every way. Under-appreciated gem.

This is definitely one of those things I would have tweeted and gotten zero replies or likes. My timing and tastes are maybe not always calibrated to the moment.

I’m a few days late sharing this, but here are some results from the precinct where I was Election Coordinator on Tuesday:

We averaged one voter every two minutes, and actually kept a pretty consistent pace most of the day. It was the smoothest-running precinct I’ve ever worked.

That pace was good for about 32% turnout on Election Day. When you add early voting and vote by mail, our precinct had about 53% turnout — not the best in our ward, but above average.

While there were some minor hiccups, everything worked as expected. Everyone who came to our voting location intending to vote either voted or received instructions on where they needed to go instead.

I’m so grateful for the folks who volunteered to work with me for this election, and to everyone who came in to participate in our democracy.

The kiddo has been learning about lighthouses and libraries lately, and just referred to librarians as library-keepers.

… which will obviously be the correct term moving forward.

In reply to: @gerardkcohen on Twitter

Part of what made me finally give up on Twitter is this thread from Gerard K. Cohen.

I don’t know Gerard or any of the other former members of Twitter accessibility team. But I do know that they’ve done great work on a challenging platform and with a lot of eyes on them.

I don’t like the way Twitter functions to radicalize people. I don’t like the way it tolerates racism, and sexism, and homophobia, and transphobia. I don’t like that powerful people were permitted to use it to broadcast hate. I really don’t like that the new ownership seems eager to allow that kind of content.

But I also recognize that content moderation is hard to do at this scale, and people have different opinions. I can say “just ban all the Nazis” but I’m not the one who has to figure out how that works on a global policy level.

But eliminating the entire accessibility team is different.

Obviously one reason it hits hard is because this is my field, and it’s easy to see myself in the people who just lost their jobs.

But it’s also because eliminating that team is a statement about the new owner’s values. The whole point of a platform like Twitter is that anyone and everyone can log on and participate in uncountable conversations. With no accessibility team, you’re making a choice to exclude a lot of people from “anyone and everyone.”

Accessibility is about a baseline respect for the people you serve. For a company like Twitter, there’s no excuse that justifies not having an accessibility team. These are the kinds of core values that inform every other decision.

So that’s the last straw. Time to let go of Twitter, whose good mostly outweighed the bad for me. I don’t know what will replace it (or if anything should), but for now I’m here.