Flickr was down for about 30 minutes. I think I might be the only person on social media who noticed. I spoke too soon. It’s down again, or was mostly down the whole time. flickr was a social media site for sharing photos before Instagram and before facebook; they never really embraced mobile photography, and […]
Author Archives: cafedave
high school reloaded
One of the familiar science fiction (and even Harry Potter) tropes is for a scene to play out, and then the same scene plays through again from another character’s point of view. This week, it was starting high school, but this time I was the parent. What did I remember about my interactions with my […]
fundraising lessons learned
It’s been a long time since I have participated in any formal event, or fundraiser, but we had the opportunity to go along to the Sydney “walk to d’feet MND”; my sister and I decided to frame our fundraising as a competition, rather than a collaborative effort, and that seemed to resonate with some of […]
lessons in balance from law and ethics
I’m studying a subject on law and ethics at the moment, and we’re trying to work out answers to complicated questions. What does it take to keep people doing the right thing? What consequences can be built in to a system so that people are motivated to do the right thing? We build giant, unaccountable […]
near end
There is much to be grateful for in the palliative care ward, which makes those moments that deviate from this path the more noteworthy. Take, for example, this interface decision that was taken on the display of this morphine pump: essentially, a device that pushes down very carefully and consistently on a syringe until the […]
13 unnamed movies
In response to a recent FB challenge, here are some movies with no titles, that have been significant to me in some way.
missing the obvious
I’ve been burning the candle at both ends a little at the moment even after listening through to the excellent audio book of Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. The lessons of “the sleep book” were that sleep is been more important than I thought it was, and is linked to better and worse health […]
Create an account
In what was fast becoming a meta-conversation, I found myself explaining to the (by the voice) older gentleman on the phone what he needed to tell another person they’d need to do to use a particular website. I told him he would need to “create an account”, a term I was sure everyone would know. […]
What Jesus said about money
When we think about what Jesus said about money, there are a lot of words in the New Testament that overlap with the idea of money. Here’s a quick graph from a Logos search on “money”. You can see a bunch of Greek words in the pie chart, some from the gospels, some from elsewhere […]
Ploughman’s Lunch
One of my favourite things to order from an eating establishment is a ploughman’s lunch. It sounds like an ancient meal, something from a simpler, agricultural time. I remember buying a book that collected a series of sermons from Charles Spurgeon from the 1800s – the John Plowman talks – there was a whole group of […]