People are often surprised by the fact that I spent most of my childhood decidedly low-tech and didn't take a serious interest in computers until I was well into my teens. This factoid, however, is not completely accurate. In elementary school, when I was nine or ten, we had a room with some Apple IIGS machines. On those machines, we could run LogoWriter, which, like everything else in that elementary school, was in French.

The exposure we had to those computers was decidedly limited, ostensibly a reward for good behaviour. Indeed, LogoWriter was presented as being no different, conceptually, from the limited repertoire of games that were on hand, such as Fraction Munchers or Cross Country Canada. I thought it was fun to make things, which mostly consisted of minor alterations to boilerplate programs from a pile of laminated cards. I don't remember much else about the experience, except for this:

In LogoWriter, there is a main canvas where your graphical creations are displayed. And then—at least in French—there is the verso, where you type in your program. With this arrangement, you could, much like you can with contemporary tools today, make changes to your code, then quickly tuck the code out of the way so you can observe the results in real time.

Since starting this website back in 2008, I have found myself straining to satisfy two audiences: those who are deeply interested in the ultra-fine-grained minutiae of how things work, and those who flee from it. Heretofore the policy has been something like, try not to pollute the stream with technical mumbo-jumbo. After all, nobody can miss what they never knew existed in the first place. But there is a need going unmet.

I solve problems for a living, and in that process I figure out how to do things. Concrete, practical, materially-useful things. Many of the things I figure out how to do, involve the computer. I am not capturing nearly enough of this material in prose, even for my own benefit. Then it inevitably spills out in places like Twitter, which is an even worse place for it.

The answer I have settled upon is to create a flip-side—a second stream purely dedicated to how to do technical things and why to do them, which can be out of the way enough not to bother anybody who isn't interested. In honour of my French LogoWriter experience, I am calling it the Verso.

This also represents the first major thematic bifurcation on a website that was explicitly forbidden from having any sections. Starting out won't be much different than current, although Verso content will go out on a different feed. Then I will begin to change it, and use the Verso to document its own changes.

I have added a link to the contents, and once again here is the feed, if that's a thing you still do. See you soon.