A Funkaoshi Production

The next day, my sorrow for the loss of this thing dominated my thinking. I was surprised by how deeply sad it made me to lose this game that I hadn’t picked up in months. Part of me wants to feel embarassed about that, but no. WoW was always more about the people than it was about the game. It was the impetus and the sustenance of many of the most important relationships in my life. I refuse to diminish those relationships by saying that WoW was ‘just a game.’ I couldn’t help but log back in the next day to see the server one final time. To be there for the final hours.

Blizzard shut down the (popular) private World of Warcraft server Nostalrius a month ago.

Amazing that Sarah Palin has managed to get and sound even dumber.

Update: Should have waited for tech or security blogs to chime in. This is likely a hoax?

In their quest to find new things to tax and new services to cut, they have settled on taxing books and closing 54 of the province’s 95 libraries—despite the province having the highest illiteracy rates in Canada.

On a sun-dappled summer afternoon, a member of the Pocket Facebook group posted photos of black teenagers biking on a residential street as a warning, saying that she had seem them “snooping” into private laneways and pegging them as potential suspects for a recent bike theft. As I read the comments below the pictures, I was alarmed to find that a majority of Facebook group members appreciated her alert.

Again, the assumptions about the membership of the Facebook group were evident. The poster and her supporters were not concerned about the potential consequences of uploading photos of teenagers without parental consent. Implicitly, the move pre-supposed that the parents couldn’t possibly have been members of the group. These youth were black and allegedly up to no good. Never mind that the teenagers were not guilty of doing anything but being teenagers. What was worse, the Pocket Facebook group membership included a local community police officer, who now had access to images of these targeted teens.

A fascinating look at people being creepy on social media.

What a sub-heading: “Toronto’s cops are overpaid, underworked, deeply entrenched and all too powerful. When they ask for more money, they tend to get it. Inside the problems plaguing the TPS”

(And Nina is what happens when they don’t.)

This song is bonkers.

This isn’t a film about the KKK.

Portraits of people matched to the Pantone colour of their skin tones.

It’s crazy Uber can operate in Toronto more or less outside of the law.

The perfect storm for a bad Uber story.

Crazy.

I normally roll my eyes at posts like this, but this one is really on point.

I thank the Canadian government for internationally chiding the Iranian regime. Not because of its purported threat to Israel or its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons, but for its well-documented and insidious assault on its own people for the past 34 years.

Fascinating look at the lives of Internet moderators.

I love obsessive stationary shops.

My path to a career in software engineering should have been simple. I grew up in Silicon Valley, the child of two software engineers with computer science PhDs. I went to high school in Mountain View—the land of Google. Later, I went to college at Stanford University, where our university president was a computer scientist who had made a fortune in microprocessors. During the summers, I interned at Facebook and Google.

But even though I was completely immersed in tech culture, I had trouble envisioning a career in software engineering for myself. The issue wasn’t a lack of interest or ability. It was that the sexism I encountered, both in school and in the workplace, had me convinced that I wasn’t just good enough to make it in tech.

The Globe’s headline is polite: the studies are about Indian immigrants.