Perhaps They Read the marmot?

18:29 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 71.8°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 9.01mph
Words: 194

Somewhat to my amazement, the porch and deck company just fired us as clients.

By email.

I responded to two emails. In the first I pushed back that the changes were not tweaks, and I looked forward to discussing them on a call.

In the second, I said we would not do this by email and that I looked forward to a call next week.

That, apparently, suggested that, "at the end of the day, this relationship needs to work for everyone involved and it doesn’t seem to be right now."

And then they fired us. They're returning our money.

Which, well... Good.

I don't think they read the marmot, but I thought it was an odd coincidence that just before he fired us he apologized for "replying by email again."

The episode seems pretty revealing to me. Yes, relationships need to work for everyone involved. So have some respect for your customer and communicate important information in a way that is transparent and allows you to give your full attention to your client. So he's correct, this relationship would never work because I don't think they understand any of that.

Good to know.

✍️ Reply by email

Further to the Foregoing

17:28 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 73.29°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 73% Wind: 10.09mph
Words: 79

I don't subscribe to this YouTube channel, but this caught my attention today. Skipping around on the usefully named chapters, I came upon this:

You may wish to watch other parts, or the whole thing.

✍️ Reply by email

Root Cause

15:21 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 76.46°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 58% Wind: 10.92mph
Words: 522

I don't follow a lot of the trends and thoughts of the larger information technology culture cum economy. (A deliberate construction that harkens back to Doc's pernicious aphorism that, "Markets are conversations." Culture being a social construct that often frames "conversations," while economies and markets are systems of transactions. We can discuss culture as an element of a "social system," but they remain fundamentally, orthogonally different.)

Having digressed, I'll spare you "the weave," and try to get back on point.

Back in the day, when I was a young and foolish, I used to think that technology was great. That changes in technology represented progress. That the future was going to be better. And I used to follow all the discussions, the debates, the competing ideas. It seemed as though there were solutions to the eventual conundrums that arose when technology empowered people to do things that were in tension with economic interests. (Napster? "Rip. Mix. Burn."?)

The whole thrust of The Cluetrain Manifesto was that technology empowered people to transcend traditional "marketing." Oh, how I long for the days of "traditional" marketing.

What we had there was the delusion, or illusion if we're being charitable, that there were technological fixes for systemic problems. Undesirable elements or consequences of the economic system we'd enmeshed ourselves within.

Of course, there were no technological solutions. At least none that the average Joe or Jill could avail themselves of. Instead, we got embedded DRM. We got ebooks that we "buy" but never "own." We never "owned" software, we just bought a "license." Today we just rent software with a "subscription."

Doc's MyTerms is yet another tilting-at-windmills, technological band-aid that tries to assert human dignity, agency and privacy in an economic system that has devalued them to less than commodity levels.

You can't fix what's wrong with this system with technology.

It's not a technological problem.

It's a philosophical one. It's a values problem.

The foundation of our society is rotten. Competition as the central organizing principle of, well, everything; and capitalism, in which "them that has, gets" and where the rich get richer and the poor grow more numerous, are the core foundational beliefs that undergird everything in this society. They are treated as religious dogma, and questioning them is akin to heresy and merits being burned at the stake.

You are not going to fix anything, until we find some other core principles to build on. Like cooperation and collaboration rather than competition. Like community rather than individualism. We are all in this together, and none of us is getting out of here alive; but some billionaires are going to get to live in a bunker on an island, or maybe on Mars, when the whole rotten edifice collapses under the weight of its falsehoods and misapprehensions.

This can't go on. The system will collapse. Perhaps in my lifetime.

I don't know what to tell people like Doc. You'd think he'd know better by now. I'm not cynical. I just know that these aren't problems you can fix. They're not bugs, they're features.

But the beat goes on.

Until it doesn't.

✍️ Reply by email

Email Circles of Hell

14:50 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 76.95°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 60% Wind: 10.74mph
Words: 562

I'm old enough to remember when email seemed like the future.

Likewise with texting.

Many days find me looking forward to the apocalypse, and the disappearance of the apparatus of modernity.

I subscribe to Doc Searls' blog, though I seldom find anything to agree with in his writing or his work. His heart is in the right place, at least now, but I don't think he understands the problem. But he blogs about other things, like radio, and that's interesting to me.

This morning though, I genuinely felt for Doc and his ordeal trying to get Apple Mail to talk to Fastmail. No human should have to go through that.

My email problem today isn't strictly an email problem so much as a reading comprehension problem.

We received an email last night from the company that we've contracted to do our deck and porch on the new house. In it, the guy we've been dealing with wrote that the designer, "refined the original schematic design with a few tweaks."

Nope. He emphatically did not. He changed the original "schematic" design significantly.

Then he tells us he's on the road until next week and will be able to discuss this with us when he returns sometime mid-week.

There are several problems here, suffice to say that email makes each of them worse.

I replied that these were not "a few tweaks" and that we would have to discuss when he returned. Mitzi made me delete several paragraphs of advice on customer service.

Perhaps suspecting something was amiss, the designer then emailed me with some vaguely worded explanation, with some hand-waving that we could of course "go back" to the original design.

I replied that we were not going to do this over email, and that I looked forward to having a call next week to figure this out.

To which the designer replied with yet another email saying essentially, "I take it all back."

Now, I'm pissed about the change. I'm pissed about the way they chose to notify me of the change (email). I'm pissed that they bullshitted me about the scope of the change. I'm pissed that they offered no explanation for the change. (I am certain there is a reason why they did this.) And I'm even more pissed that they don't seem to understand what "We're not going to do this by email," means.

I should also note that we have a signed contract and that they have a significant deposit.

I use text and email to communicate because I have to. It's often convenient, but I don't enjoy it. I wish I could rely on the phone, but I have my phone basically screening all my calls, and not everyone who needs to call me is on the "whitelist." But then, the original email was sent at 9:49 PM last night, when I wouldn't have welcomed a phone call anyway. I get ceaseless calls about loans I didn't apply for, which has made my phone far less useful for receiving calls.

But you don't drop something like this on a customer in passing, as you're heading off to another state for a another project, try to pass it off as "a few tweaks," and then offer to discuss it when it's convenient for you.

The beat goes on.

I feel like the beatings should too.

✍️ Reply by email

Investigation

10:08 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 69.03°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 9.84mph
Words: 142

So there's even more excitement and mystery! I was trying to edit the times in the preceding post, and MacOS data detectors kept firing on the time text, inserting that little dotted window around the, with a downward pointing triangle that invites a click.

I didn't want to do anything other than edit the time, but the Data Detector wouldn't let me insert the edit cursor. (Now, I didn't try to arrow over the text, I was using the trackpad. Having just thought of this, I just tried arrowing into the time and that does work.)

So I filed a Feedback using the Feedback Assistant. It may simply be that I don't know how data detectors are supposed to work, and that I don't know if, or how, data detectors are enabled in TextEdit.

The beat goes on... (At 10:08 AM.)

✍️ Reply by email

What Time Is It?

09:29 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 68.05°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 84% Wind: 6.46mph
Words: 144

This is a test post that may or may not be published. As currently displayed in the Displayed Attributes, $PublicationDate is 9:29 AM (correct).

The preceding post was written at 6:51 AM ($Created attribute). The $PublicationDate in the exported html file now hosted on the server shows 18:51 (6:51 PM), which is 12 hours ahead of the $Created time.

I did not observe the change. I noticed this yesterday on another post when the sort order wasn't observed and a newer post wasn't at the top of the list. That made me look at $PublicationDate, and I noted the 12-hour discrepancy. I manually edited it, and subsequent posts and exports reflected the correct date and time.

This is flakey, but now I know to look for it.

(Edit: This export overwrote the previous page with the 18:51 time.)

✍️ Reply by email

Visualizer Works

06:51 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 59.86°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 97% Wind: 5.93mph
Words: 35

I'm pleased to report that beta 2 of MacOS 27 has restored Visualizer to the Music app, even in Stage Manager.

I wonder if the Music app in TVOS has the Visualizer?

I must investigate.

✍️ Reply by email