Barry Hess
Barry Hess
I run the blogging service, Pika, and I have been blogging since 2004. My blog is mostly personal in nature, touching on technical, pop culture, and other things along the way.
August 2026
October 2026
Top Words
- week
- past
- better
- sleep
All posts (40)
Ava is traveling and shared this from the Victoria and Albert Museum: A lengthy, imperfect article on how much Minnesota mattered this winter. (archive) The challenge of this work week has been trying to figure out a way to streamline the moderating Pika blog posts. With only two of us on the team, it’s impractical...
I learned about Johnny.Decimal from Pika blogger Michael Borland. The last post on his blog clued me in. Sadly he has since passed away. RIP Michael. ❤ I’ve dipped in and out of Getting Things Done (GTD) many times over the years. The most organized I’ve felt in life is when I was truly adhering to the process,...
I’ve been sick for half of this past week, so not much drivel to share this Friday. The core of my love for reading grew through affordable mass market paperbacks. While it’s not new news, it’s a little sad to see them leaving. Still, I really would prefer not to read that tiny, cramped print these days. I saw this...
A couple months ago I put together a fairly lengthy post about getting an old MacBook set up to be a writing machine. It was pretty encouraging, the idea of having a machine that would just be for one thing. At the time of writing that post I was diving pretty deep into my work and I realized I was not in a “writing...
I really enjoyed Justin Duke’s thoughts in “The death of software, the A24 of software”. A24 didn't succeed despite the streaming era — they succeeded because of it. The explosion of mediocre content created a vacuum for taste, for curation, for a brand that stood for something. When everything is abundant and most...
It’s snowing and I’m doing taxes. I’ve mentioned the photographs of Ragnar Axelsson (Rax) a couple of times here in the past. I recently discovered the availability of the short BBC documentary featuring him: Last Days of the Arctic. Having studied hundreds of his pictures by this point, it was fascinating to see...
We mourn our craft: The worst fact about these tools is that they work. They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months. This point stuck out to me. I’m going to take it completely out of context to make my own point. I haven’t yet found an LLM that is writing code better...
I haven’t done one of these in a bit. It’s time to take on the blog question challenge from Alexandra. Why did you make a blog in the first place? If I’m to believe my own writing from 2004: [T]he goal I have is just to keep honing those all important writing and communication skills. Additionally, I think this...
One day after posting “Better Sleep in Ten Days” I ate junk food, had a beer, watched Olympics until 10:15, got a good length of sleep, but it was not restful. All of these things together were probably not good choices. 😆 Searching for a hotel. Yay or nay? I was finally able to see Brandi Carlile in person (review...
Excellent Bugonia Easter egg, Letterboxd. (I’m not sure what I thought of the movie, but I like the font!) I’ve got Peacock for the month (go Olympics!), and now I realize it just might have all of the Yorgos Lanthimos movies. Can one brain handle catching up on Bugonia, Kinds of Kindness, The Favourite, and The...
I’ve certainly said it before: I haven’t slept well for years. I believe it’s been five or six or seven years, but it’s all blurry now to the point that I could also be convinced my poor sleep has existed for all the years. My cycle in recent history has been to distract myself away from sleep with YouTube or...
Weekly Thing 341 brings up AI fatigue: With that though our ability to do more fills with more things that we wished we could do. No matter what, there is still only so much time and energy in the day. The fact that Claude is there at 2am while you cannot sleep can be a problem. The fact that you can have five...
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