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Sunday. London. Rain. Bar on the street level. Sitting at a table next to the window, with hot tea in front of me. Looking outside to people walking. Next to me, Cambridge Theater, with a big billboard presenting Chicago – The Musical. Music in the bar: John Lennon – Imagine.

I feel like I am in a movie. What’s next?

2021 update: I wrote the text above in 2008 to the day (Apr 27th, 2008). It was my first time in London and, since then, I visited the city often enough to develop a love/hate relationship with it. But in 2008 it genuinely felt like I was in a movie and that big things were waiting to happen. And they were. I was there for my training with Yahoo!, the company that employed me as their representative for Romania for a year. And it was my first job in a corporation, so I genuinely didn;t know what to expect.

I miss that feeling. One of the places I always felt like being in a movie and waiting for things to happen was a hotel pub in Dublin. Ireland. I went there often during my MavenHut years and I loved the feeling I had in the afternoon or evening when I could relax and enjoy a soup or a hot tea and people watch. And think of the big things that were to come.

Why I miss it? Of course, I miss travel. I miss seeing different people and hearing different languages. And I also miss thinking about the big things to happen, in a bar, at the street level, with a hot tea in front of me.

Oh, and the hotel in Dublin? Grand Canal. The pub: Gasworks Bar. Nothing amazing. But it didn’t matter for me. And their soup with soda bread was amazing.

photo credit, under licence, with no modifications

Basecamp changed some rules about workplace politics discussions, forbidding specific subjects in their main channel in the company. Here’s a quote from Jason Fried’s blog post:

1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well. And we’re done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore.

DHH also follows with the message they sent internally, to try to explain the decision even more. Here’s New York Times’s take on it, as well.

Truth is every company gets to a point where some things need to be removed. I remember during the MavenHut days that we had a saying: “That’s why we can’t have nice things!”. There’s always someone trying to game the system and triggering a more strict rule, spoiling the fun for everyone. I assume this is what happened there, as well. Someone kept pushing politics, activism and the likes to everyone in the company and kept doing it even after being asked not to.

What makes Basecamp different is that they were always a champion of the people, of their epmployees. They were seen as the solution to the corporation machine. And I still think they are. But Twitter disagrees.

Other than that, have you seen the subscription form on their HEY World blogs? It’s only slightly skewed, not straight, to drive you crazy and get you to focus on the form. And, possibly, subscribe.

I didn’t know, but apparently the Formula 1 teams create posters for different Grand Prix races and, since this weekend is the Portuguese one, here are some of them.

Alfa Romeo:

Mercedes:

Ferrari:

via reddit

I was an early user on Twitter, on Facebook and a host of other early social networks. I still remember how fun it was in 2008-2009 on Twitter, how many fun conversation I had there.

But Twitter was never meant to stay like that. Once they started to get bigger, problems came along.

Almost every platform that attempts to be a safe place for a certain type of person falls flat on their face with this problem of scale. You can promise to be moderation free, or simply not have the time to do it, but the fact is it’s impossible to run a platform that doesn’t have to do moderation.

Start with the spam you’ll inevitably get once there are enough users. Then the things you legally have to take down — abuse, copyright material etc. Once you reach a critical mass of users, then comes the algorithmic feed decisions due to lack of engagement and inability for users to keep up. This too is an inevitability as users can’t decide if their posts will be seen or not and start to post less if action isn’t taken.

All platforms that need engagement or show adverts will devolve into the same state eventually. Nothing will ever ‘fix’ social media. Scale kills almost everything, there is a huge benifit to not being where everyone is. Stay small.

Quote from Greg Morris and you should read the rest of the article, to get the context.

This is one of the reasons I still have a personal blog, 17 years after starting one. Because it’s my own small space.

During the past week I watched a NoClip documentary (6 parts) about the development and launch of Hades, the video game created by Supergiant Games.

I don’t normally play roguelike type games (Spelunky, FTL, Hollow Knight and the likes), but I really got interested in this roguelike game with a story behind it.

And I downloaded the game on Switch (I don’t really play on PC and it was the only console where it was available). It also sounded like it made a lot of sense for the Switch, since this type of games have, potentially, unlimited replayability, so a console like a Switch, that you can play anywhere, makes more sense.

That was at 10am in the morning on Saturday. I stopped playing at 6pm. I forced myself to stop, basically, because it was already 2-3 hours since I was saying: “OK, just one ore time”.

It’a really great experience and, if you didn’t play it and look for something that you can come back again and again, Hades is the game. For the moment it’s available on Steam, Epic and Switch.

Here’s the trailer:

Image from Supergiant games.

P.S.: I’m writing this late at night and I’m gonna play “one more time”. See you in the morning, for sure! :)

I love my iPad. I have an iPad Pro 10.5, the last one before the new design of the iPad Pro. I didn’t buy the new one since I didn’t feel like I need it, but I have to say the new M1 iPad Pro sounds really, really good.

But the problem I have with my iPad as a pro machine is the same as previously: even if the new iPad Pro has the same M1 processor in the MacBook Air I’m using now to write this article, the app I use to write (MarsEdit) isn’t available for iPad.

And this is a small issue. Apps like Photoshop or similar on iPad don’t have the full set of features the one on the desktop has. My fiancée owns an iPad Pro 12.9″ (the first that came with the new design) and she still needs to use her MacBOok Pro. Will this change with the new M1 iPad?

Is the future of iPad a problem of software and not of hardware anymore?

The difference in hardware between the 2020 iPad Pro and the 2021 iPad Pro isn’t a small jump, it’s a large leap over the chasm between the Mac and the iPad. That said, I can’t help but wonder what about the software?

These latest iPad Pros aren’t looking to be an improvement in the user experience for the next version of iPadOS 14, but instead it is looking at iPadOS 15 and beyond.

It is almost a given that Apple has another trick or two up its sleeve for the iPad this year. They showed their hand for the hardware in the new iPad Pros but they have yet to flourish what iPadOS 15 will bring.

From here: The iPad needs the software to catch up with its hardware – Tablet Habit.

I’ve been adding some design elements to this site and I always forget what they were. I put them here just so I don’t always go back to research.

It’s nothing in particular, just the size of the post title font, the blockquote design and the shadow for the images on the site.

.entry-title {text-transform: none; font-size: 40px;}

blockquote {
margin: 20px;
padding: 20px;
background: #ffeeee;
font-weight: 500;
font-size: medium;
font-family: inherit;
font-style: inherit;
border-left:5px solid red;
}

cite {
font-style: italic;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: small;
}

.post img {
border:2px solid #C0C0C0;
box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #ccc;
-moz-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #ccc;
-webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #ccc;
-khtml-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #ccc;
}

Featured photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash

This hits really close to home, unfortunately.

“It might sound crazy, but I’d rather go to Twitter and check out a few people I trust than take guidance from the CDC, or WHO, or Fauci,” Baca, the Colorado truck driver, told me. Other no-vaxxers offered similar appraisals of various Democrats and liberals, but they were typically less printable.

From here: What Are No-Vaxxers Thinking? – The Atlantic.

And these are the people they follow on Twitter or Facebook:

Berenson’s TV appearances are more misdirection than outright fiction, and his Twitter feed blends internet-y irony and scientific jargon in a way that may obscure what he’s actually saying.
[…]
The current score in the competition between non-senior pandemic deaths and conclusive vaccine deaths is 100,000–0.

One hundred thousand to zero. That might be the most important statistic in this whole mess. Berenson doesn’t tweet blatantly falsifiable statements about the vaccines every day. For the most part, he peddles doubt, laced with confusing and expert-sounding jargon, which may seem compelling at first but can’t survive contact with expert opinion.

From here: Alex Berenson: The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man – The Atlantic.

Featured photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

I was just walking today through Lisbon. I was talking (in Romanian) to my fiancé, when someone stopped next to us and said “Hey, Bobby, is that you?”. In Romanian.

I looked at the guy asking me and it took me about 10 seconds to understand who was looking at me from behind the mask. Not because I didn’t know who he was, but because he wasn’t supposed to be in a random – touristy enough – place in Portugal.

After recognizing him and finding out he just moved here a week before, we took the time to have a drink together.

At some point he asked: “What do you think this serendipitous moment is telling us?”

An interesting question, but such an unexpected meeting nevertheless.

Featured photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

If you’re ever in Lisbon and you want to enjoy a good coffee, in a nice environment, go to Nicolau. We went there at the recommendation of a friend (“good food!”), but also because it is dog friendly, so our Westie was welcome, as well.

And how could it not be, when Nicolau is the dog of the owner apparently, and he has his portrait on the wall in the middle of the café? Even more, he has an entire family: Amélia (his girlfriend/wife) and Basílio (his cousin). Of course, Amélia has a café, Basílio has one as well. And they’re all in walking distance of each other, so you can visit all of them.

If you find yourself at Nicolau, try the Banoffee Lovers Pancakes (see above). You’ll thank me later.

Photos from Nicolau’s website