Mitch's Blog

🦍 Mitchellaneous #195: Memes and other found media

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 22:53:41 -0700

Good advice, though Julie and I have made it work.

Three dog house

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 18:14:37 -0700

While walking the dog I passed a neighbor’s house with three very loud and energetic dogs. I almost never see any of these dogs, because they are in a fenced backyard, and I usually don’t hear all three at once, but the full orchestra was out then two barking loudly in different keys and tempos and one heartily going BAROO BAROO BAROO. It was like a modern jazz concert.

I stopped to record it and an older man came out of the house across the street from the Three Dog House. He was behind me. “I’m enjoying the music,” I said, and then I thought about hearing that every day. “Probably you don’t enjoy it.”

Because I was interrupted, I did not record the concert.

The man looked at Minnie and exclaimed, “The cone of shame!” Yes, Minnie is still wearing the cone. It’s been a month. We have an appointment at an eye specialist and are planning to switch vets.

A few minutes later I passed a parked car with a license plate frame that read something like, “CALIFORNIA — WHERE AMERICA’S DAY STARTS.” At least I think that’s what it said. But that does not make sense. As a longtime tech trade journalist, I am aware in my bones that the rest of America wakes up well before California does; when I hit my desk on a workday morning my Teams messages and emails are already full.

That sent me a down an Internet rabbit hole to find out where America’s day REALLY starts — in other words, what’s the furthest point east in either the continental US or territories. There are two possible answers, one of them a technicality.

The common-sense answer is a point in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I always forget the U.S. Virgin Islands exists.

The other answer, which will be great to know for a pub trivia quiz: A point on the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, which goes so far west that it crosses the 180th Meridian and becomes east.

I did not research this point, but I expect that this means the point in the US that is furthest west and the point that is furthest east are a single footstep apart from each other.

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 13:24:47 -0700

Wikipedia’s Pyrrhic Victory A “city built by Asperger’s”: Julian Lucas’s in-depth review of the book “The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia.” (The New Yorker)

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 11:06:51 -0700

r/opensource just banned AI, non-English speakers, and more (The Verge / Terrence O’Brien)

Do they simply hate AI? Or are they overwhelmed by the flood of AI slop?

How important is this subreddit in the broader open source community?

Banning non-English speakers makes this subreddit seem unimportant and parochial.

We should not be asking whether code — or any creative work — is generated by AI. We should instead ask whether it’s good.

🦍 Mitchellaneous #194: Memes and other found media

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 23:02:36 -0700

—-

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 14:39:48 -0700

Obama was deeply flawed as a president, and if I found out that by some magic trick he had become eligible to run again and had decided to run, I would be grinning from ear to ear for a week.

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 13:37:47 -0700

“I think Congress made a mistake not protesting turning the Rose Garden into what looks like the entrance to Liberace’s bathroom.” — Bill Clinton

🦍 Mitchellaneous #194: Memes and other found media

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 22:10:43 -0700

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 10:15:00 -0700

For Halloween this year we will give out paper clamps, Post-It notes and other useful office supplies. Surely the children will be grateful.

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 09:45:30 -0700

I ran out of coffee.

Light rain started as soon as I left the house to walk the dog this morning. Because rain was not in the forecast I was not wearing rain gear and assumed the waterworks would stop momentarily. Instead, the rain turned heavy and after the dog and I were thoroughly soaked, I cut the walk short and returned...
mitchwagner.com
Mitch Wagner https://mitchwagner.com/2026/10/23/light-rain-started-as-soon.html

🦍 Mitchellaneous #193: Memes and other found media

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 08:55:00 -0700

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 07:58:57 -0700

Light rain started as soon as I left the house to walk the dog this morning. Because rain was not in the forecast I was not wearing rain gear and assumed the waterworks would stop momentarily. Instead, the rain turned heavy and after the dog and I were thoroughly soaked, I cut the walk short and returned home. At which point the rain immediately stopped. Is this how my day is going to go?

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 22:48:55 -0700

Apple Intelligence is better than Siri used to be, but it is now more annoying, because “almost good” is more annoying than “bad.”

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:01:17 -0700

I’m trying to decide if I can throw a mention of Y2K into a report without explaining it. Millennials were in their teens during the remediation and Gen Z were in preschool.

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 11:43:44 -0700

ServiceNow cuts network incidents 90% with HPE Mist AI

ServiceNow’s network team used to spend 2,000 to 3,000 hours a year patching the network. Now it’s fewer than 60. After moving its network operations to Juniper Networks Mist AI, now part of HPE ServiceNow cut incident volume 90%, and the network team didn’t grow even as the company did.

Coming up: a 100% autonomous network by 2028. ServiceNow’s Sajeev Nair says the way to get there is to hand control to the AI a step at a time.

My latest on Fierce Network from Nair’s fireside chat with HPE’s Rami Rahim at HPE’s Networking Investor Day.

🦍 Mitchellaneous #192: Memes and other found media

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 08:55:00 -0700

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 10:13:00 -0700

I got this in email.

🦍 Mitchellaneous #191: Memes and other found media

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:55:00 -0700

Unreliable narrator

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 10:19:00 -0700

P.J. Vogt, host of the Search Engine podcast, interviews writer Meghan O’Gieblyn, “who started lying to herself about her relationship to alcohol and God. And afterwards wondered: when did it start? Why did it happen? How do you make peace with the part of yourself that wants something that could destroy you?”

“There’s this ideal state of wholeness that I think is the motivation for so many religious disciplines or spiritual disciplines. This idea that, oh, if I can finally let go of my ego, I’ll finally be at peace with myself, and I won’t be arguing with myself.”

O’Gieblyn talks about surrendering to addiction as ecstatic experience.

I am not an alcoholic or an addict (other than caffeine, which I don’t think counts for this type of discussion). I was a heavy smoker and compulsive eater at one time. I am very familiar with having a constant, self-critical voice in my head and I can absolutely understand the temptation to do a thing that shuts that voice down, even if doing that thing burns your life down in the process.

I think I will read her book next. It’s “Will and Attention.”

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:27:02 -0700

Huawei’s secret weapon wasn’t the CCP. It was IBM

How did Huawei become one of the world’s most formidable tech companies? Washington blames the CCP. But Huawei’s rotating chairman, Eric Xu, credits IBM.

Huawei paid IBM nearly $600 million between 1997 and 2006 to build a product development system that put customers first. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley bet that money could create markets, then watched the dot-com and optical bubbles burst.

My colleague Steve Saunders argues America is repeating the mistake with debt-fueled AI data centers, while Huawei builds the integrated stack for AI in the physical world.

China builds industry to serve customers and the interests of China. The U.S. builds businesses to enrich billionaires.

Why is Meta building pervert glasses? It’s not because people want to replace their phones – people love their phones. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the phone is an obstacle to him becoming a trillionaire.

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:12:48 -0700

HPE won’t merge Aruba Central and Mist, but the platforms will share AI, applications and hardware

My latest on Fierce Network: Merging Aruba Central and Juniper Mist is unnecessary, HPE networking chief Rami Rahim says.

Instead, HPE is converging what’s underneath, sharing its Marvis AI engine and new access points and switches across both platforms.

HPE trails Cisco, the campus networking big dog, and Cisco is growing nearly four times faster, according to analyst reports. HPE says it’s integrating faster than Cisco did with Meraki, but the market numbers don’t show it yet.

🦍 Mitchellaneous #190: Memes and other found media

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 08:55:00 -0700

And it was absolutely an effective use of my time.

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:24:09 -0700

I always take a photo of every El Camino I see. I don’t know why. I just do.

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 18:21:28 -0700

A brief history of classroom overhead projectors — much more interesting than you’d expect. (Version History / The Verge)

Overhead projectors were one leg of the multimedia trinity for 1970s classrooms. The other two legs were the filmstrip and the 16-mm film projector, the latter used to project educational films from the 1950s that looked old-fashioned and ridiculous in ways that I don’t think educational videos from the 2000s would look to kids today.

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 18:13:10 -0700

“You think my goal is to win — only? That’s not my goal. My goal is to govern well. We treat getting elected as if that’s some sort of achievement. That’s when the thing starts.” — Abdul El-Sayed