One of my past colleague is now a system administrator of a few IBM Z Series mainframes1. He is 58 and is the youngest of the team managing this stuff, the other team members are 62 and 72(!). It’s very hard to find people who knows about CICS, IDMS, Ctrl-M, all running on mainframes these days. I started my IT career on an IBM TN3270 connected to a mainframe running MVS. Good memories.


  1. Yep, the world still runs mainframes. ↩︎

Use Disable Delete - Bye

I tend to disable my accounts instead of deleting them permanently. It’s the case with Facebook and Twitter. This weekend, I’m going to say goodbye to Twitter for real by deleting it. I imported my tweets archive a long time ago, thanks to Micro.blog’s import capabilities. I’m not sure why I kept it for so long… because when I see someone who’s sharing something on X, I simply ignore that. Oh well. Time to move on for real this time.

The popular RSS feeds consolidator and reader, Inoreader, released version 6 of their browser extension, available on Chrome, Edge, Firefox… but not on Safari. Grrr. Another reason to use the ARC Browser.

Or, Instead of All This—

No one will ever control our own identities on third-party platforms. You relinquish control over your identity when you choose to present yourself on one of these platforms. You can be rate-limited for posting too much. You can be suspended by a bot that determines your behavior is bot-like. The platform can pivot at any time from one thing to another. The entire platform could shut down. You have no control, and jumping from one to another will only mean that you have to do it all again later.

Or, instead of all this, you could learn how to make a damn website.

But, asking for my wife here1, once you’ve got your little HTML island right in the middle of the digital ocean, how do you get noticed? How do you build a business, even the smallest one, from this island?


  1. For real, i had a serious debate about all this today with her. ↩︎

I initially thought Micro.one would be a suitable platform for my new French blog, but after spending the entire weekend experimenting with it, I’ve already realized that I miss two essential features from the full Micro.blog experience: personal notes and support for newsletters. 🤦🏻‍♂️