My job on a distributed team necessitates that I spend 1–6 hours meeting with folks via videoconference. Google Hangouts, Zoom, Appear.in, and GoToMeeting intermediate my professional interactions with co-workers, vendors, and clients. Initially, I joined these using my Macbook’s standard camera and iPhone earbuds, but spending so much time on the phone, I needed to make some changes. In the intervening six …
Category Archives: General
I want you to become a government tech vendor.
Hey, competent tech folks: your country needs you. Your knowledge, your experience, and your connections can improve the United States for everybody. I’m not asking you to go work for the federal government. I’m not asking you to go work for a non-profit. I’m asking you to become a government technology vendor. I want you to sign up at …
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How I built a chicken coop.
I am not a carpenter. My occasional effort to build something, no matter how mundane, ends badly. That’s because carpentry is hard. There are a hundred ways to screw up, and ninety of them are only obvious in retrospect. I took shop class in middle school, so I’m generally comfortable with the tools of the …
Modern tools of business.
The last time I started a business was over a decade ago. Good news: it’s gotten a lot easier. There was a lot of overhead in startup costs that have been reduced to little or nothing, due to the rise of internet-based tools. I had to do some research and try a lot of tools …
UVA hijinx.
My blogging for the past three weeks has all been over on cvillenews.com, entirely on the topic of the University of Virginia’s unsuccessful ouster of President Teresa Sullivan. That imbroglio has largely wrapped up, but you might be interested in reading through my coverage. (If you read just one thing there, make it my translation …
Our new ladies.
Late this winter, our poultry was massacred by a single fox, leaving us with a lone—male—duck. My wife and I were too busy with our newborn son, her mother’s aneurysm, and my work for the White House to launch a proper defense and counter-assault on the fox. (Though I did start a few mornings by …
Blogging at State Decoded.
By way of reminder, The State Decoded is now my full-time job, courtesy of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and I’m writing there regularly about state codes and legal structures. (Only now do I notice that it’s been nearly a month since my last blog entry there. I’ve been working simultaneously on …
Reliability is the most important professional trait that you can cultivate.
When I accepted the position developing Ethics.gov for the White House late last summer, I wondered what sort of people I’d be working with. The conclusion that I arrived at was that the kind of folks who get hired by the White House are probably among the nation’s best at what they do, and that …
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Warren Olney is emblematic of what’s wrong with modern journalism.
Warren Olney’s “To the Point,” the PRI show carried by NPR affiliates across the country, has long struck me as a bit of a parody of NPR. The name, for starters. I can’t remember the names of any of the faux NPR stations in “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” but they’re all names exactly like …
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On the impracticality of a cheeseburger.
If you came here having been told that this is an article about how the cheeseburger was “impossible” until recently, please note that it is not. It is about how the cheeseburger as we know it today was an impractical food until relatively recently. (Ref: the title.) A time-traveler with unlimited resources could probably pull …