If you’re in a web development job where you find yourself occasionally writing HTML, CSS and Javascript in the style of what may be disparagingly called spaghetti code — code that presumably works on production but is atrocious to read — congratulations: you may actually be invaluable to your clients or organization.

Hear me out. I hope that 90+% of code anyone anywhere writes is contextualized and normalized within some sort of framework or best practices that makes sense to your team. Ideally, your code gets reviewed by peers and is easy to understand and build upon if you for some reason were severed from your current role. I think most programmers would be happy to know their old code is still regarded as maintainable at the minimum. This is the code that should be driving most of your professional value.

But… sometimes… shit just has to get done. Fast. I found myself producing a website that turned out to be a little browser-based PDF viewer with a floaty movie background, pre-rendered. Despite being annoyed by the sudden urgency of this request, I was able to cobble together a single index.html file full of HTML, CSS, Javascript, with the only 3rd party dependency being Mozilla’s PDF.js library (because WHOMST wants to even think about browser-based PDF manipulation more than they have to?!). I pushed this to a fresh project on Render.com. I made some changes based on feedback and all my commits were redeployed instantly.

4 hours^* of annoying kludge actually turned out to be exactly what my colleagues needed. I felt dirty putting together a single file monster after years of mentoring and managing a dozen or so Vue-based projects, but as the tired saying goes: the right tool for the right job.

I can’t help but think that anyone brought up in the Modern School of Web Development would scoff at not using React or some component library as a basis of this project. Can you believe I didn’t even use a CSS reset?

But going close to the web browser metal in this case let me work fast, and communicate clearly with actual produced work. It felt freeing in a way limiting yourself to a few powerchords and basic rhythms is all you need for punk rock. That, and a lot of learned expertise to make a limited toolset shine.

^* there was quite a bit of debugging to gain parity between desktop/mobile, mostly around events and what turned out to be a memory issue with our PDF and what an iOS device would allow a web worker to take care of in the background.

Did you never tell your phone, “Hey Siri, scan a document,” and then watch it pull up the document scanning UI? You didn’t buy an app, you weren’t marketed to or tracked, you didn’t do anything except say “Phone Do Scanner Now.”

After scanning, did you fail to use your voice to dictate the filename “ThatKid’s Important Document?”

When you uploaded the thing to the place, did you notice how you didn’t have to search anywhere for that file? That it was in the right place already?

Did you ask it if David Cronenberg is Canadian, only to get a perfect sentence with attribution from a reputable source showing that yes, the D-Man is indeed Canadian?

Did you forget we live in an age of miracles?

Is perfection the only acceptable outcome?

Behold the Apple Vision Pro. The first new product category from Apple that I haven’t immediately bought into on Day One in many, many years.

I see the potential. I really do. It may not be for everyone for everything like the iPhone, but I’d love to watch a movie on a giantass floating screen in my comfortable living room every once in a while. Sure.

I’m just not convinced yet. I don’t think she looks convinced either:

It’s an oddly blank expression. I don’t remember ever feeling so “nothing” in response to a promotional photo. An uncanny valley effect on my emotional response system.

On the other hand, that same company released their most groundbreaking product in a decade or more with advertisements that looked like this:

The iPod is for dancing. For listening to music. For enjoying oneself through sound in a novel portable device.

Vision Pro is for blank stillness. For starched button-up shirts. For an isolated existence.

The journey of time and sentiment around technology between these two promotional campaigns is profound.

There’s more here than I really want to write about at this time. I’ll be paying attention to how the device is received, but the unease I feel about it all… I wasn’t expecting that from an Apple product.

DISCLAIMER: This is not advice. Don’t do dumb shit on the internet like I do from time to time.

Sometimes I buy things on the internet that need to be discreet. Sending things too. I’ve done it both ways a few times. NBD. I know the risks. I’m as careful as I can be.

And I’ve been burned! Once!

And I’ve accidentally been the burn-er — by mistakenly sending damaged goods which I promptly refunded upon photographic proof.

And I’ve taken corporate cybersecurity “training” and should know better, but some people out there have really good Telegram game! So I was surprised when this source, one that I’ve used before for small discreet mailings multiple times with great success, outright conned me when the purchase was slightly larger.

A day or two after the purchase, once I got my tracking, I knew I’d been had:

Sender: info@worldrankingshipment.com
Subject: Package on hold for a payment of a refundable insurance fee
Body:

Worldrankingshipment:

DEAR CLIENT, Mr Troy Gravitt



 Your package registered with us Discreet bearing the tracking number : WPC00466979043804-CARGO has met formal terms and subsequent custom request but having your package under custody while it was scheduled for a 2 days Transit - Delivery quote.To ensure your package keeps it's proper transport and arrival in good state, the package must be INSURED.



REASONS FOR THE INSURANCE SCHEME:

Customized Packages being transported Within the US STATES  Countries and across any country in the European Union and African continent and the world in general would have to be registered into the US Insurance scheme.



According to Section 7, Article 11 ( EU-07/11  039746/95) of 13th July 1999, the insurance scheme is 100% refundable and the cost of the refundable insurance would be paid according to the weight of the package in question.



Cash Usage Details Below;



Insurance Fee (REFUNDABLE)...........................$410

Stamps Fee (REFUNDABLE)..............................$100 00

Signatures (NON REFUNDABLE)........................$50



Total.............................................................$560



Kindly meet up to the aligned fee to help save time as your package is scheduled to be kicking off as your Medical Certificate gets through with Authentification.







Tracking Details: [ REDACTED ]





Track here: [worldrankingshipment.com](https://worldrankingshipment.com/)





RECEIVED 



EMAIL:

Info@worldrankingshipment.com



WEBPAGE: [worldrankingshipment.com](https://worldrankingshipment.com/)


CONFIDENTIALITY NOTE:



THIS ELECTRONIC MESSAGE CONTAINS A CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION SUBJECT TO PROTECTION UNDER THE ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGE AND/OR THE ATTORNEY WORK- PRODUCT DOCTRINE. THIS MESSAGE IS INTENDED SOLELY FOR THE USE OF THE 
INDIVIDUAL OR ENTITY TO WHICH IT IS ADDRESSED AND SHOULD NOT BE READ BY ANYONE OTHER THAN THE INTENDED RECIPIENT. IN THE EVENT OF A TRANSMISSION ERROR, PLEASE NOTIFY US IMMEDIATELY BY RETURN AND PROCEED WITH ITS DELETION.

There’s 8 million red flags in this email. And I’m posting it so hopefully its easily searchable for someone else in the future.

The redacted “tracking” number does indeed “work,” but that’s because this website is a Wordpress site that they’ve built to support a post type where they can put in all the data I already gave them. It looks like a real shipping service. But there’s so many sloppy mistakes, if this was where I was told to place my order I would have ran away a few dollars richer.

From the vantage point of a mobile phone web browser, it looks legit, but no way am I paying more money for something I already paid for, including “shipping,” even if it is REFUNDABLE.

I ask a couple questions, I get a couple responses, but the grammar and syntax is bad of the responder. I ask how the refund process works. He mentions trusting the process. He says he has my package. I ask for proof. The photo he sends me has the box label covered, and it’s grainy like a jpeg that’s been passed around a few times. He asks if I can hurry up because it’s cold here (Baltimore, Maryland, it is indeed currently cold). I ask him why he has a car with no heat. Back and forth. I call him out on how scammy this all feels and he has no convincing arguments other than “this is the way it works.”

Whatever — I have a secure day job and can work from anywhere and I know how to use Photoshop. I have time if he has time.

So I “pay” the insurance. I pay $3.00 through cashapp and make the receipt look like $303.00. Pixels, man… they’re easy. I send the screenshot.

He’s surprisingly is fine with that, and reminds me I still have the other package and that one is going to be $280 in semi-refundable insurance. OK. $2.80 later gives me another timestamped transaction.

I’ve spent almost $6 extra dollars on my own lols. He says he’s close to my address with the package. There’s one more checkpoint.

“Checkpoint,” a completely normal thing normal courier services say when they’re driving a package to you.

“How much?”

“Has to be bitcoin. $180 now because you’ve wasted my time.”

At which point I go ahead and doctor up a BTC transaction. Which are fairly instant, so I’m assuming he’s waiting for a wallet notification. Its a different wallet address than the other day, so I ask him if this is his wallet and he responds with an answer that makes no sense. Then he eventually replies with a screenshot showing the transaction did not go through.

46 emails later, I’m done with my games. I try to tell him so. I send him screenshots of my photoshop files. When I first called him out in the morning, I told him that he needs to level up his game. 6 hours later, I think I’m still right.

They’re now ready to take it in Zelle.

“Get the Zelle done so I’ll be on my way.”

Anyway, there’s better ways to buy things that are hard to buy, even on the internet. If you really want something that’s hard to get, it’s hard to get for a reason, and while there are always plenty of workarounds, they require some work to establish. Links that fall in your lap, even from trusted sources should be heavily, heavily scrutinized. Ask your sketchiest friend if it looks legit. (IRL friend invited me to the Telegram. We both have made successful purchases from their web presence before).

As always, if it’s too good to be true, it is. ALWAYS.

Time was you got to the end of the internet.

Not the wholee internet of course, but the blogs, sites, feeds and newsletters you cared about. For white collar workers of a certain age in the beginning decades of the 21st century, this is what we did for breaks instead of smoking. This was pre-iPhone, so you did it at your desk where you couldn’t smoke anyway.

It was also probably the last great time to be a smoker in the US. Thankfully, smoking rates have gone down.(Unfortunately, nicotine vaping has gone up.). The normies had given up smoking and the people you’d meet smoking outside the front steps of downtown Boston were generally great conversationalists. You had something to break up a night of drinking. You’d find unexpected camaraderie at weddings.

But who needs chemical inhalation when you have the universe in your pocket in the form of a smartphone? The internet became not just stories on a screen at your desk, but your friends’ camera rolls, YouTubes, memes and tweets. Podcasts.

The variety of media to consume exploded. Meanwhile, the thing that made the internet the internet — servers hosting webpages about niche subject matter that people cared enough about to craft entire disciplines like “web design” — became less important.

Tech exploded. Tech jobs were high paying and plentiful. Influencer and gig economies took off. The new entrants all got to work using the foundational protocols of the internet to figure out how to process it all into an endless slurry of Content and Ad Units (sometimes indistinguishable).

We know what happened next. Publishing suffered. Local news disintegrated. Quality declined. Engagement skyrocketed, but it’s easy to engage humans when you play to their fears, weaknesses, angers and resentments. Websites, blogs, posts… whatever I used to check at my desk throughout the day started to consolidate, atrophy or completely shutter.

Today, a few link aggregators remain that I check a couple times per day, but I click through on posts a lot less. The comments have long since been useless — we know what trolls live there. I have some newsletter subscriptions now, but they are mostly about the goings on in tech and media. Did you know that AI will certainly “change everything?”

I don’t smoke cigarettes anymore, and I’ve seen everything I need to see online by lunch.

This blog I’m writing on auto-posts to Mastodon and Bluesky, which I don’t log into so I won’t see how few people actually read and/or respond to it.

There’s no moral here, but the observation that the place you built your career upon doesn’t look or feel right anymore is a heavy one to sit with.

People are clearly still getting a lot of value from the internet and having meaningful experiences, but I’ll never appreciate what they’re doing the same way that they can’t appreciate a banger tweet from 2012. I know I’ve aged and tastes change with time and I’ve grown and that’s all fine, but still I catch myself mindlessly, reflexively trying to use the internet from 15 years ago in the middle of a slow afternoon, and I don’t like that habit.

When I knew I was done with smoking, I’d still hold an unlit cigarette between my lips for a beat. Felt great to attend to that oral fixation for a minute. I look so good with a cigarette. (In my mind, of course, I am Jeremy Allen White). Then it felt silly, and eventually I’d toss the rest of the pack.

These days I’ll similarly feel a brief but flaccid hit of dopamine when I click the bookmark, then a moment later I’ll sigh and close the browser tab.

My yearly digital tidy and email hygiene reset

• everything in the inbox(es) as of Jan. 2: mark as read
• create folder(s) for previous year (2023), if you haven’t already made one¹
• inbox contents go to year folder
• you’re now at inbox zero; don’t celebrate anything²
• in settings, give your inbox list view a good body length, maybe 2-4 lines depending on your needs, so you can skim the email without having to open it. do you need to respond? really?
• every time you check mail
  • unsubscribe. you know how to resubscribe if you really want it.
  • select all, mark as read

Eventually I lose momentum with this practice. But I don’t sweat email that much anymore. There are easy ways to bubble up important messages if you need to, but skimming a few times a day and only digging into the obvious ones that need my attention is a good balance for me. I don’t bother archiving until it gets out of control. Or i’ll just make the 2024 folder.

Red badges drive you crazy? Just disable them. You’ll still have email. How does that badge serve you? Make email work on your time.