I spent last night in San Francisco on my way from Tucson to Seoul. This morning as I headed to the airport, I caught the end of a shouted conversation between a down-and-out and a couple of middle school-aged girls, who ran away back to the Asian Art museum as the conversation ended. A security guard told the man that he needed him to go away. The wealth divide so visible here just isn’t something you really see around Tucson.

I’m working on a new module for Propellor that’s complicated enough that I need to think carefully about the Haskell in order to write produce a flexible and maintainable module. I’ve only been doing an hour or so of work on it per day, but the past few days I wake up each day with an idea for restructuring yesterday’s code. These ideas aren’t anything new to me: I think I’m just dredging up the understanding of Haskell I developed last year when I was studying it more actively. Hopefully this summer I can learn some new things about Haskell.

Riding on the “Bay Area Rapid Transit” (BART) feels like stepping back in time to the years of Microsoft’s ascendency, before we had a tech world dominated by Google and Facebook: the platform announcements are in a computerised voice that sounds like it was developed in the nineties. They’ll eventually replace the old trains—apparently some new ones are coming in 2017—so I feel privileged to have been able to ride the older ones. I feel the same about the Tube in London.

I really appreciate old but supremely reliable and effective public transport. It reminds me of the Debian toolchain: a bit creaky, but maintained over a sufficiently long period that it serves everyone a lot better than newer offerings, which tend to be produced with ulterior corporate motives.