I got an odd compliment last week: I learned that a few of my colleagues and I are considered “unnaturally collaborative.”

I won’t go into a lot of detail about the surrounding context, but it came down to, “we identified a potential source of conflict, one of us called a meeting, the other two showed up, we took turns talking, we arrived at rough consensus, and we trusted the convener to type up the notes (which they shared in advance) and send them upstairs.”

1. I think there’s a philosophical notion that anything that exists in time in space is in nature, and is therefore natural. Including, my philosophy instructor said with a wry grin for probably the 113th time in his career, purple unicorns, which must exist because time and space are infinite and therefore must contain virtually anything we could conceive. Including three directors who bias toward positive collaboration.
2. If there are any moral defects to be found here, they are in the imaginations of people who think three collaborative directors are the equivalent of purple unicorns.

Anyhow, I am honestly on the fence about whether it was a compliment or not. I once had a performance review downgraded because, my boss’s boss explained, my “how” dimension was so good that it was actually a liability, and he demanded it be lowered from a “5” to a “4” to reflect the dangers it posed to me and others.

But I do have a second story from this week that has caused me to feel a little less smug about it all.

There is a process at work that everybody hates. It involves multiple layers of functional and administrative staff, a bad mix of people who are conditioned to be process-oriented close readers and people who are understandably determined to cut any corners they can. There are also three warring tools ecosystems.

I hate it because it involves things I have been involved with and fixed in my past, but I am too new and don’t have enough standing or juice to get out and push, so while nobody is challenging my right to weigh in or make adjustments within my remit, I’m in the territory of “the little attitude thrusters you use in Lunar Lander” vs. “the warp nacelles of the Enterprise.”

So I’ve been making little adjustments here and there, identifying the places my own patch of process goes wrong most often, and making little adjustments. Including a few based on things I’ve observed but haven’t introspected, that I thought were helpful to the people who own that leg of the process.

Until today, when one of them did something slightly different from another one of them that seemed to be an utter refutation of all my proactive consideration for their needs.

So I broke down and asked what I was missing and they took a paragraph to expose me to a whole set of things that go wrong for them that aren’t exacerbated by what I was doing, but that what I was doing wasn’t helping; and how in other ways I was possibly slowing down another thing. Because I was being curious and helpful, but possibly not curious enough and maybe too helpful, at least in the wrong proportions at the wrong stages.

I’m giving myself a 4/5.

My heart was in the right place, but that’s table stakes.

Chrome profile launchers revisited

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post sharing how to create GNOME launcher items for individual Chrome profiles. It’s a kind of cool thing to do if you want to just get straight to a given profile, and it works well with browser pickers like Junction or Browsers.

At some point, I noticed that one Chrome profile was ignoring my 1Password extension’s preference to stay in sync with the 1Password desktop app, so I kept having to log in to 1Password over and over: Every time you close your last Chrome window (as with any Linux desktop app and unlike on a Mac), an unsynced 1Password extension decides (wisely, sanely) that your auth’d session is over.

Years of Mac use have made it essentially impossible for me to leave a window open if I’m not using it. Why would I? It’s just visual clutter, and the app itself is sitting there on warm standby. So I kept geting logged out of 1Password and had to keep re-authing and it was unpleasant.

1Password has some guidance on how to get the extension to sync with the desktop again, and while I don’t want to sound churlish it amounts to “turn it off then turn it on again.” As an IT person, I respect that, but it didn’t do me any good. Removing and reinstalling didn’t help either, and I didn’t have a lot of confidence in that because the 1Password extension leaves some data behind when you remove it: Instead of needing your complete credentials (address, password, and the secret key), you just need the password when you reinstall.

So my last-ditch “avoid filing a ticket at all costs” play was to create a fresh Chrome profile and reinstall the plugin there, reasoning that the new profile’s sandbox wouldn’t have any legacy data in the form of cached stuff, or maybe a config file that changed between plugin versions and creates edge cases despite “mostly working.”

I turned off sync for the new profile, set up 1Password, then turned sync on. It worked as expected, even when all my other stuff got pulled in.

I flipped back over to the original Chrome instance giving me the problems and it was still stuck.

So, do I want to log back in to 1Password upwards of three dozen times a day, retrain myself to never close the last Chrome window, or just call it a day on getting fancy with profile launchers? Maybe another option is to point the launcher at the directory for the new, working profile, but as I sat here at 6 in the morning screwing around with Chrome profiles I re-remembered that over-optimization is a thing:

I wanted to save a few keystrokes here and there so I over-optimized a collection of things that I’ve observed in the past are individually complex and inconsistent, only a few of which are built with even one of the other components in mind. Something is eventually going to get weird in all that. And I don’t even like Chrome. I use it for work because we’re a Google shop and I don’t care if the data Google is harvesting reveals that I spend an ungodly amount of time in an invoicing system, a contract management system, and JIRA. There is no use case for using Chrome with a personal Google account. Firefox is fine for that.

So, lesson learned. Chrome is just “the work browser,” and I don’t have any other profiles. Done and done.

Storm stuff

We got off pretty light with the recent ice storm unpleasantness: Overnight without power, then a few downed branches and the death knell for a fence we’d hoped would hold out until spring, or at least fall onto our side of the yard. But it didn’t. It fell into the neighbor’s yard so we hauled away the part that couldn’t be propped back up and went looking for contractors.

I don’t know if there’s a secret to Angie’s List, but I’ve never cracked it. I put in a request, try to specify that email is going to be the best way to reach me, get hammered with phone calls (many of which are just hangups), and never feel like I end up with much choice.

This time around I got steered onto Yelp by a search engine, which then steered me into its contractor finder. Wow. Vastly different experience: A half-dozen emails before the morning was over, incredibly high responsiveness, and offers to come out and do estimates within the next day or two. I thought the project would be sitting until February or March, but it looks like today is New Fence Day.

To deal with the branches I ended up getting a Ryobi pruning saw to go with all my other 18v Ryobi stuff. I eyed larger chainsaws, but that just wasn’t the job at hand, storage is at a premium, and there’s not a foreseeable need given what’s on the property.

The pruning saw is great. I don’t see using it a ton, but it shares a battery with several other things, it’s very quiet, light, and compact, and it strikes a nice balance between “still obviously a dangerous tool” and “accessible.” Meaning, it’s easy to use and handle, but you’re still very clear after looking at it that it could fuck you up.

As I slapped the battery in and put on my eye protection, I remembered to pause and tell myself the micro-fiction I tell myself whenever I’m around power tools:

He approached the saw with the confidence of a middle-aged man who once took a shop class in junior high.

That’s not a completely accurate statement of the situation.

I did once take a shop class in junior high, but my bone-deep caution around tools was learned on the floor of an RV factory where there was no grumpy shop teacher yelling if you even looked distracted. Ask me to share my “the guy with the sheet of fiberglass, a table saw, no push stick, and no guard” story. But even that experience was a long time ago. Better to just pretend like I know a bit more than my fictional character, and way less than I actually do.

Ed complaining about GNOME weather’s terrible UI for city names (no mention of state or any other regional indicator, so you’re out of luck if you live in one of two Portlands or Grand Rapidses, for instance) reminded me of my own GNOME weather issue, which is that the GNOME Weather app accepts that I am in Portland, Oregon, but the GNOME shell weather widget does not. Until today it believed I am in Everett, WA, which is 180 miles north of me.

This is one of those classic desktop Linux issues that is miserably complicated by the usual questions of distro, underlying service, etc. etc. and there is a phenomenally broad set of remedies depending on how you phrase your search query.

So, for anyone stumbling across this some day: This is for GNOME 45 running on Fedora Workstation 39. I don’t know what to tell you if you’re having this problem with any other distro or desktop environment, my “solution” is only partial, and my “fix” is probably just fine but will make completists furious.

After a lot of poking around and blind alleys, I came across a reddit post titled “Fedora 37 insists that I live in a place called Hutchinson and I can’t change it.”

The two-comment thread reveals that Fedora is using the Geoclue system service, which offers a host of ways to guess your location but seems to mostly rely on Mozilla Location Services (MLS), a service that has been defunct for three years next month. MLS built its database by harvesting location data from Android Firefox and Mozilla Stumbler, which consumed phone location data and nearby Wi-Fi hotspots.

So, two things, I guess:

First, I remember the first time I came across location-via-nearby-hotspots, and I am not going to lie: I thought, “oh, sure, clever.”

And I also remember the first time I got a weird outcome from one of those databases, because I couldn’t unstick a device from my old address across town and it dawned on me that hotspots are one of those things that do, indeed, move around at about the same rate as the general population (with some qualifications about the influence of the demographics of hotspot owners, which have surely shifted over the decades). I thought, “too clever by half, I guess.”

And that brings us to today: It was too clever by half to begin with, and now the underlying service isn’t even getting updated, so the database is so much limburger in the heat ducts.

The Google geolocation API fix

But it’s cool! You can “solve” the problem by getting an API key for Google’s geolocation services and using that as a fallback for Geoclue’s WiFi location source. It takes about two minutes, you uncomment a URL and add your API key to the end, restart the service (with Fedora it’s sudo systemctl restart geoclue.service), and … your system location might be as correct as possible given the rickety underpinnings of WiFi-based geolocation (but honestly, if one of the world’s richest surveillance companies trusts it, it must be viable) but the GNOME shell weather widget will still be screwy.

The hard-coded locaton fix

So I complained to Ed that the weather widget was reporting that my location had shifted from Everett, WA to Accra, Ghana, and how I wish I could just hard-code my system location and leave it at that. I so seldom actually care and so often end up just telling my laptop where I am anyhow that it’d just be easier.

With Fedora, and Geoclue 2.7, you can do that. You just have to create /etc/geolocation and make it look like this:

39.971210     # latitude
-78.957570    # longitude
708           # elevation (m)
1             # accuracy (m)

(I used LatLong.net’s address converter to get my coordinates, and because I was feeling extra precise I used PortlandMaps to get my altitude. No, those are not my coordinates.)

But still with the Ghana thing in the widget! But when you click the widget, it opens the Portland location in GNOME Weather.

The “fuckit” fix

So I turned off location services in my settings, and suddenly the weather widget said Portland, OR and the GNOME Weather app said Portland, OR.

However, GNOME Maps doesn’t go to my current location when I open it with location services turned off. If I toggle them back on to use it, it goes “home.”

In conclusion

“This is terrible”?

I mean, I have no idea how much meaningful stuff gets done by these services and how much is “it saves you typing your zip code into the weather widget.” And I guess if location really matters you’re doing something else to get it onto the machine.

But the whole “we just default to using this defunct service that was always a compromise on its best day, and if you don’t like it you can just use Google” thing – ugh.

Footnote

I messed with this on two separate machines, both of which were completely consistent with each other. I picked this entry back up on a third machine – also Fedora 39, also GNOME 45, and I have changed nothing on it – and wondered if it also thought I am in Everett, so I opened the weather widget.

Nope.

It thinks I’m in Portland.

Chop wood, carry water

Al went to her temple this afternoon to meet with the people who all work together to keep the temple running. They face a very prosaic set of organizing tasks. She told me a few of them and said “sounds dumb, doesn’t it?”

No. It sounded very satisfying.

“It’s interesting to me,” I said, “that we know what people do when there is not an economic gun to their heads, and it’s pretty similar. They go to their temple or synagogue or church or club or gaming group and do sort of prosaic things that serve their little communities they’ve figured out for themselves. Sometimes, yeah, they’re dickheads to each other, but the thing it’s all about is that they have these associations they tend to, and what they’re doing can be pretty simple, but it’s satisfying and they’re deciding some simple things …”

“But there’s trust,” she said.

“But when there’s an economic gun to your head, you don’t get to choose those associations. And you’re probably acting unnaturally in some way. The obvious path isn’t the one that’s most economically advantageous to your employer. Or there’s some reason you have to be stupid about things. Because the institution demands it. And you do it because there’s an economic gun to your head.”

So we shared our discontents about work for the day. I recounted in minor detail two particularly squandered hours, and she talked about having to do something the wrong way because, she was told, the right way was “a four course meal,” whereas the organization is content to “serve a hamburger” to the mentally ill, the indigent, and the addicted.

We talked about what we wish we could do, then talked about what we probably ought to do. Then we talked about how to be as we do it.

I said, “I’m just saying to myself what I say to you when I feel boxed in and the real answer is about waiting …”

“Chop wood, carry water,” she said.

I don’t want a ton of taskbar icons, but there are a few I wouldn’t mind, like for 1Password, my clipboard manager, and a TailScale monitor. GNOME has an unfavorable opinion about that, so it’s on extension developers to restore the lost functionality. App Icons Taskbar is the best one I’ve found so far under Wayland. A few observations about it:

Out of the box, the icons are huge and on the left of the taskbar. You can fix that in the preferences. I turned off the panel height setting and set the icon height to 15 and it looks pretty normal. It does show running apps as well as iconified ones, and there’s an “unpin” option in the context menu for each if you don’t like that, but it doesn’t work predictably.

Assigning MIME types to xdg-open

macOS has the open command, and Linux has xdg-open. They do pretty much the same thing, which is open files from the command line. My Hugo posting script, for instance, runs open at the end to plop the Markdown it just generated into an editor.

With a Mac and open it’s pretty easy to manage file associations: You just right-click the icon of a file you want to associate with an app and pick the app you want to open that file type.

With Linux, it’s a little more fraught. GNOME offers a Default Apps setting, but it only offers a few options: web, mail, calendar, music, video, and photos. What about Markdown, YAML, ruby, etc.? For that, you want the xdg-mime command:

xdg-mime default sublime_text.desktop text/markdown

The sublime_text.desktop part (or whatever you want to use) may take a little finding. I used locate to figure out what the file was called on my system.

Once you’ve run it, you can find it configured in ~/.config/mimeapps.list.

Once assigned, xdg-open foo.md will open the file in the correct app.

Now that I am running Xorg instead of Wayland on this desktop machine, I am into it. For a while I wasn’t willing to spend much of the workday on Linux because I never knew when I’d need to share my screen on Zoom, and I spend too much time on calls to want to flip back and forth. I can spend all day with Linux now, because Zoom works fine.

Weirdly, in fact, this machine is working better than my Mac in that regard. My Jabra Engage 75 “just works” in a way it didn’t with my Mac, and the AirPods I adopted because my expensive Jabra headset stopped working with my Mac had stopped working smoothly with Zoom on Mac, too. I had to do this thing where I opened the audio preferences and did a sound test before every call, or the audio out only worked about half the time.

Slack, Emacs, Chrome, Firefox, my terminal app … now that I’ve moved all the SF fonts over from the Mac it is not easy to tell which machine I am on from just looking because I hide docks and toolbars on both, have similar wallpaper, and all the apps look and act pretty much alike.

Tactile for simple GNOME window tiling

I miss Rectangles on the Mac a lot. I am not sure there’s anything quite like it in Linux, but the Tactile extension gets me close enough to my main use case, which is getting editors and browsers into a “takes up 90% of the vertical and 40% of the horizontal, but centered” state.

It lets you set up four layout maps, so it’s possible to do combos. Terminal windows, for instance, don’t need that kind of room, so I mapped layout 2 in such a way that I can hit Super-T to invoke the tile map, then tap 2 to activate the second map, then the specific key to place the terminal in the right tile for that map.

We’ll see how it goes. For now it’s a way to quickly get unruly windows into the right state when they appear.

Race wordplay is a bad idea

Today someone on my team asked me how to interpret a comment made to them:

“I’m as racist as any white American, but I’m not racist.”

Which … please no.

The person this was said to is not a native English speaker and isn’t white, and what probably seemed like a sort of self-deprecating but amusingly paradoxical thing to the person saying that didn’t land that way with the person hearing it: It was confusing and seemed a little nonsensical.

Since the person identifying as a non-racist racist is a fellow Gen-Xer, it wasn’t hard to untangle the whole thing and make it make sense: People of a certain age remember when “racist” was more synonymous with “bigot,” “klan adjacent,” etc. It meant “possessed of prejudiced thinking and racial hostility.” Well, it doesn’t anymore, and whatever we think of that, it is a more … I dunno … theoretical word, redolent of institutions, systems, power relationships, and unconscious bias. From the perspective of someone who has been around for a while, it’s just a different word now.

Personally, when I encounter people who are bigots or prejudiced, I just think of them as “bigots” and that’s the word I’d use if put on the stand. I’m on board, with reservations, with the newer usage and try to save it for when I’m describing a racist policy, a racist law, a racist belief, or racist behavior.

I don’t do the whole “I’m racist” thing because the memo on this particular usage has not distributed evenly, and that person on my team reminded me that people don’t uniformly agree on or understand “racist” as a people label, or how to handle it when someone deploys it on themselves or another person.

“Is this some kind of weird white people thing?” they asked, legitimately unsure of whether they were being fucked with or if perhaps this person was telling them something deeply unsettling about themselves.

“No,” I said, “it’s someone who remembers a different time and they’re trying to navigate this split usage and tell you something about themselves, but honestly they shouldn’t have done it that way and you’re right to find it confusing. They just wanted you to know that they understand they were raised in a racist society and have some racist ideas, but don’t consider themselves personally possessed of racial hostility or what we’d maybe better call bigotry.”

“Well, it embarrassed me because I had no idea what it meant and I was afraid to ask because it sounded like they were telling me they were, like, racist.”

When it comes to something as charged, uncomfortable, and frankly fucked up and backwards as race in this country, maybe save the wordplay and speak plainly.

Inhibitor Phase

I’ve always been fond of most of Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space stuff. The first one in the series left an impression, but Chasm City is my favorite. I’d seen a few mentions of Inhibitor Phase here and there, but the descriptions didn’t work for me. Last night it popped up again so I decided to read a few actual reviews, and now I’m several chapters in and really liking it. It helped to know there was some continuity with previous Revelation Space characters.

Reynolds has gotten smoother and better over time. I was a working editor when I first read Revelation Space, so it was my job to see all the mechanics, and I couldn’t unsee some of his. Once I understood that the book evolved out of his earliest fiction writing and had started life as a short fiction contest entry I felt a little more forgiving and quit comparing him to Iain M. Banks.

Anyhow, I’ve been casting about for some fiction after digesting that giant book about the MCU, and I’m glad to have this.

How’s the job going?

Okay.

It’s good, on the days I feel frustrated about pre-IPO tech company life, to remember that I gave myself a lot of time and space to choose, and this is what I chose. Again. With ten years of previous experience to guide the decision. It’s not a hard place to be useful, and the frustrations are easy to keep in context. It remains hard, some days, to be back toward the bottom of the hill building trust with new people.

But today was also an interesting day for feedback:

• “Susan was right. You do look like Christian Bale’s older brother. And your voice is mesmerizing.”
• “I have forgotten there was ever a time you weren’t here.”
• “I’m glad you hired Mike. It’s great to have another adult.”