dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

thoughts Articles




COVID-19: day 3 of working from home

We live in interesting times. Countries are in a situation they have not been for multiple decades, if at all. Lots of people will not even remember the last time a situation like this happened. Our prime minister had a historic speech on television (a good one, in my opinion …

Battling tiredness with drugs

It might be the time of the year, with its short days and long, dark nights, it might be kids causing us to pull our hair out, taking their emotional toll and sipping energy, and work is also a big energy sink (thankfully mostly a gratifying one), but I have …
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Watch yourself some Mr. Robot

I finished watching Mr. Robot yesterday and it was amazing. If you like to watch an intriguing TV series, with good use of technology for once (ohai Hollywood, yes you suck at portraying real tech) and an unusual protagonist, treat yourself to the four seasons (45 episodes) of this mighty …

Sweet Sixteen

Today this little web corner has existed for sixteen years. Funny thing is that 'sixteen years' does not even sound that long anymore in my ears, while it is enough for a newborn to grow into a person nearing maturity. While I would not say this weblog is really mature …
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Head full of work

Do you know that cozy feeling of having thoughts of your work almost never leave your head? Waking up in the night and having your mind stray to unfinished tasks? Yeah? It sucks. (I need a vacation, and some more milestones behind me).

Help hunt bugs, do not just report them

Today I came across the forum post Don’t report bugs, contribute to bugs hunting about more directly helping (open source) developers help you. Developers really try to write working solutions and like Aurélien Pierre notes: We are the developers. That means we can guarantee you that the software works …

Emerging from work

It's over half a year ago that I switched jobs, coming from a big media company and now leading a new, young team at basically a startup. It switched me on again, giving me an energy for work stuff I had not felt for a while somehow, and made me …

'Social gardens', or 'More reasons to dammIT'

Lately I've been making some changes in how I interact with social media, and also how I consume its news and blurps. I started using Mastodon and basically moved my interest there (I tend to double post to both Mastodon and Twitter, as Twitter is still where most of my …

I remember writing

I remember writing (yes, writing) short weblog updates in the train on my Sony Clie running PalmOS, using the fast glyphs of Graffiti, in 2004. I want to go back to that, realising that my weblog had turned into a collection of longer articles as of late, spaced quite far …

Limited braincycles

Do you know that feeling that halfway through the day you start to be less 'fresh'? Myself, I have the experience of getting a bit slower over the course of the day: in the morning, I can fix the problem I was struggling with the last afternoon in a few …
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The end of 2017

The end is near. Well, at least the end of 2017, as this roller-coaster of a year is counting its last days. In less than two days, it will be Christmas, and these days mean a general slowing down of life and making time to enjoy each other for us …
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Computer Ethics quotes

"I have said that this new development has unbound possibilities for good and for evil. For one thing, it makes the metaphorical dominance of the machines, as imagined by Samual Butler, a most immediate and non-metaphorical problem. It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical …

Short story time

The ants didn't know what they had coming. I almost pitied the little critters. Almost. Finishing my whisky I went to bed, chuckling softly.

Meeting budgets: an idea to keep meetings useful

You need meetings. No really, you do. Your team has to line up, get and stay on target and decisions have to be made. The same goes with your stakeholders. However, everyone knows about those meetings that seem to go on forever, have too many participants and/or seem to …


Work mail on (private) phone: a good thing?

Work mail, every working person has it. I have it. Thankfully not lots and lots of messages per day, but it's still a part of my everyday routine. We each got a company-provided laptop with email (and Lync - the old Microsoft Communicator - for phone and instant messaging), which I installed …

Planet mobile

Sixteen years ago I had a pda. Not one of those nifty Palm devices or expensive Psion's. No, a regular organizer; a little electronic device with a whopping 128KB of storage which you could fold shut like a litte book. Opened, it provided a nice little qwerty-keyboard and about 4 …