things I wrote down

Writing

Four blogs, 345 posts, written between 2006 and 2018. The two general ones are here; the climate and campaign writing has a page of its own, and is listed at the foot of this one.

These link out rather than reproduce. The posts are where they were written, with the original URLs intact — that is part of what they are. Every one is also archived in this site's repository, because Google will retire Blogger eventually and twenty years of writing should not depend on it.

2009 — 201810 posts

Moo Moo Moose

A working notebook: problems hit, problems solved, written down so the next person does not lose the same afternoon.

Ten posts over nine years, which tells you what it was for. Not a publication — a place to put the fix once I had found it, on the theory that anyone searching the same error message deserved better than the silence I had just worked through.

Mostly macOS and development infrastructure: Subversion breaking on a case-insensitive filesystem, an SSL handshake hanging on a local hostname, IMAP over a port the office firewall had closed. The last post is about cryptocurrency, which dates it precisely to January 2018.

Worth reading

Local machine, hostname, ssl / https would hangThe shape of all of them: a symptom with no obvious cause, chased to the end.
Subversion and case-insensitive file systemsA class of bug that still catches people out on macOS.
Connecting to my Hover IMAP email from work which blocks portsWorking around a corporate firewall, documented without embarrassment.

Read it on Blogspot

2006 — 200843 posts

National Enquirer

The general blog — environment, politics, music, turning thirty-six — before the climate writing took over and moved house.

Forty-three posts, thirty-three of them in 2006. It reads like someone working out what they actually wanted to write about: a Pixies side project at the Arena, a birthday, notes from a coaching course, and then steadily more about forests, whaling and the economics of running a planet past its limits.

By 2007 the environmental posts had outgrown it and moved to Climate Action Brisbane, and this one wound down. Worth reading as the place the argument started rather than where it was made.

Worth reading

The probability of global bankruptcyWhere the environmental writing starts getting serious.
GUNNSTasmanian forestry, and a company that sued its critics.
Musical IntelligenceThe other half of the blog, kept for honesty.

Read it on Blogspot

There is more, and more of it: another 292 posts of climate and campaign writing, on the activism page.