Today marks the end of the Obama presidency, and in some ways, it seems to mark the end of an era - or perhaps more pessimistically, the respite from the decline of an era that effectively ended with the events of September 11th, 2001. Perhaps we’d been to unwilling to admit it over the last 8 years, but since 2001, the United States of America turned from being a leader for the multicultural, involve-everyone-everywhere sentiment to the navel-gazing self-interested country that its enemies had always accused it of being; where George W. Bush led the country into misadventures and tipping the delicate balance that had held for the 90s in the Middle East into the dumpster-fire, basket-case of a region it seems right now. ...

This collection of photos from Sony’s design history is beautiful and demonstrative of some amazing stuff that came out of Sony over the years. Always loved their gear. So much seemingly definitional and advanced stuff they made, and it all seemed to end with Howard Stringer’s time at the helm. (partly also thinking of the story of how Steve Jobs appreciated Sony’s designs, and how that talks about the relationship ending with Stringer’s time as CEO, and how with Apple’s increasingly consumer-neglectful design changes, I don’t have Sony’s designs to fall back on…) ...

Since Time is Money - money representing a token of value for the time you spend doing something - in theory you should be able to substitute either one for the other, right? Like, if you had all the time in the world, you could in theory make the thing you’re buying instead of paying someone else to have made it. We can apply that to thinking about housing prices. After all, the price of a house should be proportional to how much it costs to build, right? ...

Wow, wait, I’ve been writing on this blog for nearly 11 years now… The thought came to me while fiddling with the sidebar images. If you’ve not noticed, there’s a rotating roster of images that changes with each refresh. Some are more readable than others. Some are my own images, some are from Unsplash, which is a pretty neat resource for royalty-free imagery that also happens to contain some amazing photos to boot. ...

And so at long last, we reach US Election Day 2016, when a reckoning has finally come for the American political system - the candidates perfectly set up as the establishment facing the insurgents, the know-nothing Donald Trump squaring off against the know-it-all Hillary Clinton. How did we get like this? How did we get from the point where once upon a time, a candidate that was even threatened with being revealed to be cheating on his wife, would step back, stand down, or resign altogether than face the music, to the point where we’re seeing a candidate standing despite those accusations and worse being thrown around, and still he appears to be as close as a 3% gap? ...