On this day, twenty five years ago, I wrote my first journal entry on this website.
Twenty five years! A quarter of a century! That’s a significant portion of the lifetime of the World Wide Web itself.
Actually, this site did exist before September 30th, 2001 but it was ve...
If you’re anything like me, you’re sick of hearing about so-called “AI”. We are not a fringe. The majority consensus amongst actual regular people is that this is being forced down our throats and stuffed into our eyes and ears.
That’s why it pains me that I’m about to add ...
It was the autumnal equinox a few days ago. For a moment our planet was balanced perfectly, with everyone experience twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness. Here in the northern hemisphere, the days will get shorter and the nights will get longer until the win...
This is Ian McEwan’s second foray into science fiction after his alternative history novel, Machines Like Me. I enjoyed that book but it was far too eager to show off its worldbuilding—at one point a character practically looks at the camera like Tim in The Office.
There’s ...
I’ve mentioned the ritual that concludes the week at Clearleft:
At the end of every Thursday afternoon at Clearleft, we wrap up the working week with an all-hands (video) meeting. Yes, I know that the week finishes on Friday, but Fridays have been declared the no-meeting...
I’m an invited expert at the World Wide Web Consortium.
That sounds impressive, but it isn’t. Anyone can become an invited expert. The fact that I am now one proves it. You apply to be an invited expert and once that application is approved, you’re in. So you too could and ...
Looking for something to do in Brighton this weekend? I’ve got ya covered.
Come to the excellent Prince Albert pub on Trafalger Street at 8pm on Saturday, September 5th. Head upstairs with your ticket. There you will be treated to an excellent triple bill.
First up is Figu...
I try to see my friends Dan and Sue as often as I can. The problem is that I live in Brighton and they live in Baltimore (that’s Baltimore, Maryland not Baltimore, West Cork).
We sometimes make it work though. Like crossing the Atlantic together.
Dan and Sue were in Italy ...
Remember when I wrote about a session I was at in Belfast where I was sitting next to a fiddler who it turned out had written a book and then I ended up reading the book? Quite an unusual occurrence, right? Definitely not the kind of thing that’s likely to happen twice (you ...
I went to plenty of great sessions when I was in Belfast. One of the best was during Belfast Tradfest, out at The Hatfield with Bríd Harper, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, and Michael Rooney.
I ended up sitting next a lovely local fiddler named John. I saw him again the next d...
Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey comes at just at the right time for me. I spent the last two years reading the Robert Fagles translation, finishing it just a few months ago.
When I heard that Christopher Nolan was adapting Homer’s poem, I thought it made perfe...
When I was immersed in the Irish language for a week in Donegal last month, I made plenty of mistakes. But there’s one mistake that I’m actually quite pleased I made.
The emphasis at Oideas Gael is on conversational Irish, so our teacher would often put us into groups of ar...
I spent the last three weeks in the north of Ireland.
Myself and Jessica flew to Belfast where we spent the first night. We managed to get to a session that evening where we were warmly welcomed.
The next day we travelled to Donegal. A train from Belfast to Derry. A bus fr...
I really liked Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls so when I saw a copy of Girls In Their Married Bliss for £1 in a local charity shop, I snapped it up even though it had the worst cover you could possibly imagine.
This is the second and final sequel to The Country Girls which...
I absolutely loved Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, particularly the first book, Ancillary Justice which blew me away when I first read it.
Since then I’ve enjoyed the other books she’s written in the same universe, dealing with the fallout of the events in the original...
At The Web You Want event in Amsterdam last month, Léonie gave an absolutely fantastic talk. You can now read the whole thing: Accessibility is resistance!
She makes the very good point that generative tools are a necessary accessibility recourse when humans have failed to ...
In preparation for my jaunt to a Greek island, I figured it would be good to have some Greek-adjacent reading material with me to peruse on the beach. So I scoured the shelves of my local library to find a modern retelling of a Greek myth that I hadn’t already read. That’s where I found Medea by Rosie Hewlett.
The book attempts to rehabilitate—or at least give context to—one of the women of Greek legends who has been cast as a villain. See also Clytemnestra, Elektra, and more.
On the face of it, the book succeeds. We get to see how Medea’s actions were driven by her circumstances. But while it’s entirely believable that that Medea was manipulated by a conniving Jason, this framing takes away her agency somewhat.
The writing is perfectly fine if a little bodice-rippy at times. It was a perfectly good beach read.
Exactly one year from now, UX London 2027 will be wrapping up.
Mark your calendar: July 6th, 7th, and 8th, 2027. If you really want to be ahead of the curve, you can grab a very limited super early-bird ticket now before the price goes up.
I’m about to start putting the 20...
“Radharc álainn” I said. Beautiful view.
“Nach ea!” he replied. Isn’t it?
He sounded surprised to be addressed in Irish. We were, after all, very far from Erin’s shores. The beautiful view in question was of the bay of Loggos on the Greek island of Paxos. But I knew that t...
The Vaster Wilds is a remarkable book. It somehow manages to be both harrowing and uplifting at the same time.
I had read one of Lauren Groff’s previous books, Matrix, and liked it well enough. But The Vaster Wilds is in a different league. It starts with urgency, suffering...
It started in Dublin. Myself and Jessica got there in the afternoon and I went straight to The Cobblestone in Smithfield for some tunes.
Then I went up the street to the headquarters of Na Píobairí Uilleann, a beautiful Georgian building on Henrietta Street.
I was there to...
This is a collection of short stories by one of Ireland’s best playwrights.
I think you can tell that these stories were written by someone who’s at home with the stage. The dialogue really shines. And some of the stories feel like scenes in a play.
But that’s no bad thing. If most short stories are like mini-novels, why not have short stories that are like mini-plays?
Some of the stories are very short indeed, just long enough to convey the mood of the piece. That mood is often wistful, melancholy, or nostalgiac.
This collection comes with an equally brief introduction by the brilliant Louise Kennedy.
This slim volume makes for a great travel read. Slip it into your pocket and you’ll have an instant portal to a bygone time and place in the west of Ireland.
CSS Grid Lanes has started to ship in browsers. It’s in Safari and behind a flag in Chrome and Edge.
It enables masonry layouts, where items get packed together in the most efficient way possible.
Unsurprisingly, I’m a fan of a layout tool where the browser does all the ha...
I’m giving a talk this week.
Usually this wouldn’t be a big deal. I’ve been giving talks for over twenty years now. But this one is different.
I’m going to speaking at Na Píobairí Uilleann, the Society of Uilleann Pipers, in Dublin. They have a monthly series of lectures c...
I give Apple a hard time. That’s mostly due to how they treat the web on their own mobile devices.
Though iOS ostensibly supports the ability for websites to be added to the homescreen, they make it so difficult for users to do, the functionality is practically worthless. I...
Sarah Canary is an odd book, in the best possible way.
On the one hand, it’s a relatively straightforward narrative. An adventure story set in the Pacific northwest in the late 19th century. The viewpoint shifts from character to character, with one exception. The inscrutable title character is a living macguffin that everyone and everything else revolves around.
That all seems straightforward enough, but if you squint at the story just right maybe it’s a story from a very different genre altogether.
So you can enjoy it on both levels; a well-told series of historical adventures, and a clever subversion of genre expectations. Whichever way you take it, there’s a running thread throughout the book exploring racism, sexism, and colonialism.
I’m heading to Amsterdam for CSS Day. It’s one of those events I try my best to get to every single year. I have no doubt that this year will be brilliant as usual.
There’ll be workshops and talks, all absolutely free.
I’ll be giving a talk. It’s supposed to be about the web I want, but I’m going to do my usual shtick of looking back at the history of the web to see what kind of things we wanted in the past. It’s called The Web You Wanted.
The Session existed in a very basic form since the late 1990s. It was just me posting a different tune every week.
But The Session as it is today—a community website where everyone can add tunes—first went online on June 3rd, 2001. That’s 25 years ago today.
Considering the typical lifespan of a web page, I’m proud of having a website still online and thriving a quarter of a century after launching it.
At this point it’s fair to say that thesession.org is my life’s work. Though, really, I’m just the curator; the site would literally be nothing without all the contributions that people have made to it.
It’s been a great 25 years so far, and I’m looking forward to the next 25.
I few weeks back, I got an email with the subject line, Screenshot in an Exhibition:
I am currently developing an exhibition celebrating the thriving folk musics of these islands for the Royal College of Music Museum and one of the showcases looks at the Sharing of folk ...
Bhí me i Londain an deireadh seachtaine seo caite mar gheall ar an Gaeltacht cois Tamaise. Cúpla lá iontach ba ea iad!
Bhí na ranganna ar siúl Dé Sathairn agus Dé Domhnaigh, ceithre huaire an chloig gach lá, i gColáiste na Rí. Bhí ceithre leibhéal ann—tosathóiri, meanleibhé...
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