professed

For better or for worse, Teams is available on Linux, too, so my university feels justified foisting it on everyone regardless of which OS we’re using.

Thanks! Yeah, students do pretty well in the course overall. It’s for non-devs and is oriented toward exposure to different technologies rather than mastery of them — basically demystifying how web apps work.

Indeed! I teach an introductory web design class for undergraduates and despite my best efforts it takes a lot of students the whole semester to figure out file paths. If I had more time in the term, I think I’d dedicate a unit to it, just to get everyone up to speed — and I may have to do it anyway. In fairness to the kids, even Mac and Windows machines these days do a lot to minimize users’ exposure to file structures in the name of usability. Meanwhile, the phones and school Chromebooks they’ve grown up using completely obfuscate this information.

Yes! I recently went to a professional conference for the first time since the Twitter debacle and found that while most of the participants were still tweeting, Mastodon felt like a fun secret society within the meeting. We recognized one another, said hello in the hallways, had conversations that felt like secret handshakes. It emphasized for me the difference between having a community and shouting into the void.

Now, if only I could follow you on Lemmy. lol

For me the benefit of the various mismanagement crises at Twitter and now reddit is that they push enough people to alternatives to create a critical mass there. Mastodon will likely never be what Twitter was, but enough interesting people and enough of my professional network now have a presence on the latter that it’s become a viable alternative for me. Same thing here. Whether or not Lemmy ever reaches reddit’s proportions, there are enough interesting links and discussions here to keep me occupied. And if not, I could probably stand to spend a bit less time on social media anyhow.

I recently finished Black Rock and the rest of the Eddie Dougherty mystery series by John McFetridge and thought they were really well done. The books have the attention to detail of Michael Connelly police procedurals, but are set in Montreal in the 1970s, starting with the events leading up to the October Crisis, which provide a really fascinating backdrop. The city really becomes its own character.

I had a hard time getting into McFetridge’s earlier books, but these are very different and have become some of my favorite mystery novels. I read an interview with him saying that it was a conscious shift in tone.