More than 30 years ago, I used a Mac for the first time in high school and was instantly hooked. I finally saved up enough money to purchase my first Mac my sophomore year in college. A Power Mac 7500 that I used for a very long time until I bought an iMac. Happy birthday, Macintosh.

So I’m working my full-time job, taking a class and teaching a lecture class this semester. I’ve got a pretty good plan for managing my time, but every so often, I wake up at 1:30 with an idea in my head and end up working for a couple of hours in the middle of the night.

Seth Godin on Variety and the Long Tail:

It’s easy to miss the feeling of a monoculture if you grew up with it. Hits gave us something to talk about, adhere to or even work against. There are so many pockets of culture, it can’t help but feel a bit more lonely from a certain angle.

I might also add: It’s easy to miss the feeling of the early web if you grew up with it.

The Atlantic: If There Are No Stupid Questions, Then How Do You Explain Quora?

Provocative content started to take over, perhaps because it led to more engagement and then, in turn, to more advertising revenue.

Also available on Apple News+ for those of you with the Apple One bundle.

The user experience for setting up a kid’s account on most services is terrible… I understand why people just set up normal accounts for their kids and type in fake birthdates. It’s frustrating.

Over the holiday, I had to search on Google for some obituaries and I’ve learned there are tons of sites that scrap obituaries, funeral home sites and social media and then flood Google results with AI-generated, ad-covered garbage.

Both of the textbooks I need for the class I’m taking this semester are available as ebooks, but my options are Kindle or a proprietary publisher owned system. Of course, I can read them on my computer, but now I’m pondering buying a Kindle.

Got word a couple of days ago that a coworker of mine passed away unexpectedly. She’s got two young kids. Just devastated for the family.

It’s Christmas Eve and two of the presents we ordered haven’t arrived. One is scheduled to arrive Dec. 26. The other one hasn’t shipped.

How to fix American democracy, from ranked-choice voting to open primaries - The Washington Post

There are some interesting ideas for reform in this article. I was especially interested in the idea that maybe the House of Representatives needs to be significantly larger.