Fathom this!

These are the archives of Fathom this, my personal weblog of piqued interests and tickled fancies. It’s 21-year mission: to make note of the strange new phenomenon that is the Web, to document my life and thoughts, and attempt to organize these findings in serendipitous and surprising ways.

When my web host (a company that over the years has itself been acquired many times) notified me that it was not going to be offering a comparable service nor migrating the servers, I decided that it was time to archive this site.

The blog got its start on Blogger in September 2000, originally as a blog called Too Many Things Undone, a more personal, English language complement to my first blog, Suodatin. Shuttering it in September 2021, twenty-one years later, seems both a lifetime ago and somehow fitting.

In any case, I had been blogging increasingly infrequently, with Evernote supplanting my self-built tool to take notes. But reading through a selection of my old posts, I can see I’ve also changed in how willing I was to share my thoughts publicly; I’m amazed at how open to learning in public I used to be.

Fathom this was published using a system that I built for myself (PHP/MySQL). It was for many years an active experiment in collecting, organizing and attempting to interconnect my notes and observations in interesting ways. I’ve added to it and changed it over the years. In the early years it mirrored my development as a software engineer. Reflecting on it now, I’m kind of amazed that it is still running after all those years.

In fact, up until last year, when my web host enforced a major upgrade of the version of PHP that they ran, I had to make very few changes. For the most part it just kept chugging along.

I archived this site by crawling every post, category and month and saving the pages as static HTML files. This meant making some decisions on how to simplify the layout and jettisoning all the dynamic features, such as search and filtering preferences. Losing those felt kind of bad, but I’m still pretty pleased with how well I was able to keep the site running in a much simpler form and not break most of the URLs.

I’m endeavouring to still write, but now in more long form pieces over at tulv.io.

That Thing’s portfolio write-up of their I’d Echo that campaign for Echo.

I can never remember if noon is 12pm or 12am. I’ve always ascribed this to having grown up in Finland, where we use 24-hour clock. But it’s actually not that unreasonable to be confused, as this brilliant StackExchange answer explains.

I came across this while re-reading Zach Holman’s UTC is enough for everyone, right?.

HBR: How to persuade people to change their behavior.

1. Highlight a gap — point out where someone might have inconsistencies in “their thoughts and actions, or between what they might recommend for others versus do themselves”
2. Pose questions — rather than statements (“junk food makes you fat”), pose a question: “do you think junk food is good for you?”
3. Ask for less
— gradual changes are easier to tolerate

Evening Standard: Meet the health tech apps supporting the NHS during Covid-19.